Putting SARS into a box

Danish exports to Asia more than doubled over the past three decades. In recognition of the close trade relations with Asia, the Danish Center for Culture and Development has organized the "Images of Asia" cultural festival to help Danes approach the distant continent from angles other than toys, cars and microchips.

Starting Aug. 8, the large scale festival will tour Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Randers, Skive, Vordingborg, Roskilde, Esbjerg and many other cities in Denmark until Sept. 26. More than 450 Asian artists and cultural personalities will take part in 600 performances, exhibitions, conferences and other events.

Taiwan will be part of the Black Box Project of the "Asia in School" section of the program. Two thousand five hundred seven- and eighth-grade Danish children have each created their ideas about Asia in 30cm cubic black wooden boxes which will be on display during the festival. The other part of the project consists of works using black boxes by people from 10 Asian areas and countries such as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Macau and Beijing.

The black box project originated in Hong Kong, set up by Danny Yung, Artistic Director for the Center for the Arts, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in the early 1990s to provoke creative thinking among school children. Apart from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the project has been taken to China, Japan and Germany.

To commemorate the four months of the SARS threat in Taiwan, the Council of Cultural Affairs (行政院文化建設委員會) and Taipei Arts International Association (台北藝術推廣協會), organizers of the project in Taiwan, named the Taiwan part of the project "Putting SARS into Pandora's Box" (把 SARS裝進潘朵拉的盒子). Recruiting volunteers from various fields to make black boxes over the last month, the organizations have selected 20 works from the many submissions.

Half of the 20 works are by artists in different fields, while others are by a spectrum of people from government officials, housewives, to kindergarten students. Their impressions of SARS, as presented by their boxes, are also diverse. Shi Wen-yi (施文儀), vice chief of the Center for Disease Control (疾病管制局), made a Jack-in-the-box figure in a protective suit and clinical mask to demonstrate proper prevention against SARS. Hsu Kuo-liang (許國良), CEO of the Hsiao Hsi Yuan Puppet Theater (小西園掌中戲團), symbolized Taiwan's victory over SARS with a Taiwanese folklore hero cutting off the head of the SARS virus.

"In these works we see love and cooperation among Taiwanese people. We also see boundless creativity and free thinking. We can look at SARS in the positive light and show other countries how we succeeded in fighting the disease," said Tchen Yu-chiou (陳郁秀), chairwoman of the CCA.

Taiwan will be one of the four areas, which include Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand, in the "SARS in Asia" section of the exhibition to be on show in Copenhagen and Aarhus.