In the information age, it's all too easy to sit at one's computer screen all day and night, clicking from one link to another, going with the flow, surrendering oneself to the overwhelming deluge of facts and opinion -- taking leave of one's physical existence in the here and now.
So as to remind people of their physical existence, 37-year-old artist Tao Ya-lun (
PHOTO COURTESY OF IT PARK
The title has paradoxical meanings for Tao. "Consciousness in Vacuum is the letting go of your [information-absorbing] brain and taking a look at your body and the things around it. It also means the continual taking in of rapid streams of information, which propels the brain to function so fervently that it breaks down altogether."
PHOTO COURTESY OF IT PARK
With this paradoxical concept in mind, Tao takes an ambivalent attitude in showing his installations. The piece that greets viewers in the gallery is a video projection of a series of changing images from a "sticky" 1m2 space on the floor. From the opening of the exhibition to the third day, the images have turned from small bubbles on a white background to amorphous dots on a grey background. Few visitors, Tao said, knew that the images they stepped across on the sticky floor were the miscellaneous bits of dirt which their shoes had just left behind on the glued floor. By fixing a microscope lens on the camera directed at the glued floor and projecting the image onto it, Tao has created images of a constellation of dirt against the background of real accumulated dirt.
Having provided a minimal introduction to his piece at the gallery, most have mistaken it for pre-recorded images.
"[Dirt on one's shoes] is something that is always present, and yet always eludes one's consciousness because it's infinitesimal," Tao said.
Although the way Tao's camera and projector are set up gave viewers no clues as to what they were looking at, if they found out they were said to be baffled at first, and then struck by the realization that there are some physical existences around them they never noticed before.
"Optic fiber and the illusion of distance made possible by the technology, particularly regarding images, have gradually obliterated our awareness of concrete objects and of our body. It's like the invention of perspective in painting replaced our tangible sense of vision during the Renaissance. There has been a gap between the brain and the body," Tao said.
The other piece may not as inspiring but is just as intriguing. Using a similar imaging device, an image of a glue-tipped needle moving to and fro inside a pinhole is magnified and projected onto the pin-holed wall. Complete with sensors, the projection appears only when the viewer has walked up to the pinhole on the wall.
Well-known for his mechanical petroleum pool installation, which simulates the circle of life and death in nature, Tao in Consciousness Vacuum is making another attempt at "ascertaining the spiritual through coming face to face with the physical." This looking at the physical requires viewers to slow down their habitually frantic pace, as Tao's works are rarely active and vivacious and offer the least possible amount of information in terms of images. They require a lot of feeling and the letting go of the thirst for information.
Consciousness Vacuum:
Tao Ya-lun's Solo Exhibition" runs until Aug. 2 at IT Park, 41, 2/3F I-Tong Street Taipei (
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless