Sculpture is one of humanity’s oldest ways of shaping form. However, its true revolution did not stem from innovations in form, but from a fundamental shift in thinking. In 1920, the Russian Constructivist artists Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner published the “Realistic Manifesto”, declaring that sculpture was no longer merely the manipulation of materials and technique, but a method of creating for articulating space—including time as a fourth dimension. Since then, developments such as the site-based practices of Mono-ha, Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, Robert Smithson’s engagement with entropy and gravity, and Gilbert & George’s “Living Sculptures” have extended this insight across diverse contexts: sculpture is a methodology, not a category.

This exhibition takes “Invariant Form” as its central concept, a term drawn directly from the mathematical field of topology. Topology asks: When a form is stretched, bent, or compressed, which structural relationships remain unchanged? From a topological perspective, a circle and an ellipse are considered “the same shape,” because they can be transformed into one another without losing their essential structure. This property—what remains constant during transformation—is called an invariant and the Chinese title “恆形” (Invariant Form) reflects this idea. “恆” denotes constancy, while “形” refers to structural relationships themselves rather than outward appearance.

“Invariant Form,” therefore, is not a visual style but a way of thinking. It seeks to identify the relationships that persist as forms evolve and media shift. The works in this exhibition are conceived as fields of form that can be stretched and reconfigured; their meaning lies not in their outward appearance, but in the internal logic that remains recognizable through transformation. The viewer’s movement, viewing distance, and rhythm of perception thus become integral components of each work’s form.

In 1968, Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine’s Phase—Mother Earth—a work created by excavating a cylindrical volume of earth and re-presenting it upright in its original location—marked a concrete moment in what may be called a “topological turn” in contemporary art. In the following decades, topological terms such as boundary, inside and outside, continuity, and rupture have spread widely across the fields of art, philosophy, architecture, and performance, becoming a shared language for describing spatial relations and structures of perception.

The exhibition also addresses the viewer’s bodily perception. The “topological space” unfolded by sculpture is not an abstract mathematical diagram, but something perceived through multiple senses—sight, hearing, body, and even thought. “Invariant Form” thus points to a cross-perceptual stability of structure: when encountering a work from different perspectives and at different moments, does its core relational structure remain recognizable?

Invariant Form: Sculpture as Method presents the diverse landscape of contemporary Taiwanese sculpture and reconsiders, through a topological lens, the questions of what defines the boundaries of sculpture and what constitutes a method of understanding art. In a present where form is in constant flux, those structures that remain “invariant” may offer a renewed starting point for understanding art.