Egan Frantz
Hell Gette
Stefan Müller

March 20 – April 10, 2021
Opening Reception: March 20, 2021 | 3 PM

Each Modern is pleased to announce “Cyberpunk,” a group exhibition presenting new works by three artists who showed in Taiwan for the first time last year and brought a great sensation to the 2020 edition of Art Taipei.

The term “Cyberpunk” first appeared in the American author Bruce Bethke’s story in 1980. Since then, the term has been widely used in literature, movies, video games, music, and even architecture. A cyberpunk world is usually an extremely technological and capitalist society. Cultures, memories, bodies, and ideas have become like digital codes, controlled and distributed by a megacorporation or the government. They constructed sprawling urban worlds of the distant future, often built with glittering technology and cultural hegemony, yet teaming with masses living in derelict conditions. A stark disparity and inequality serve as a basis of these fantasies. As such, a cyberpunk world is an inevitable confrontation with the working and middle classes against omnipotent elites.

Like many once-lofty dreams born from science fiction, the world of cyberpunk has gradually become our reality (if not in actuality, then in appearance at the very least). We are drawn by this conceptual mirage and illusion— whether it’s a utopian vision of a technologically advanced world, or the dystopian vista of broken order. Perhaps the proliferation of cyberpunk, and its simulations and products, has already foreshadowed our near future.

Born in the illumination of Cyberpunk, Egan Frantz, Hell Gette, and Stefan Müller grew up in a culturally and emotionally postmodernist environment. The three artists do not create typical cyberpunk landscapes, but express their desire for cultural experience, semiotics, and metaphysics in different ways — all of these guide us towards a kind of future and visualize a possible liberation of a diverse, complex, and progressive society.

Egan Frantz(born in Norwalk, USA in 1986) is an artist connected in multiple ways to contemporary music. In Egan Frantz's paintings, he encodes music, literature, and theology into indecipherable symbols. In the 2021paintings, Frantz makes the digital sketch on the computer before he actually paints. From there, the digital code generates the appearance of the painting, similar to how code creates cultural content in the world of cyberpunk. We could probably guess what these