Kuo I-chen (郭奕臣) was dazzled by the glamor of Manhattan when he first arrived in 2012. Then he met those without a home living on the street below the New York City’s magnificent skyline. The unbridgeable gap between the luxury enjoyed by the rich and powerful and life at the bottom of society brought with it feelings of anxiety. It reminded him, he says, of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which the artist visited before arriving.
financial crisis
“The financial crisis [in 2008] and Occupy Wall Street [are] like an atomic bomb blast. It’s a global problem that erupted in New York and radiated out from there. I feel like I am returning to the center of the storm, looking for ruins and debris,” Kuo says.
Photo courtesy of Aki Gallery
Kuo decided, during his two artist-in-residence visits to the city — one at the International Studio & Curatorial Program and the other at the Chinese American Arts Council between 2012 and 2014 — to examine this often overlooked aspect of New York. The result is Manhattan Project — Kuo I-chen Solo Exhibition (曼哈頓計畫 — 郭奕臣個展), a series of video installations and photos, currently on display at Taipei’s Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊). It is named after the Manhattan Project, the name of a US government research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs during World War II.
PROBING NEW YORK’S DEPTHS
Kuo’s work offers insight into the human lives shaped by what he believes to be runaway capitalism.
Photo courtesy of Aki Gallery
Home-Less is More is a video installation depicting 24 cardboard signs made by and bought from homeless people and a King Kong figure climbing on top of a worn crutch salvaged from the street near his studio as if it was the Empire State Building.
A mirror at the center of the piece reflects whomever stands in front of it.
The video shows Kuo bargaining for the 24 signs. One sign belonged to an Iraq veteran looking for a job; another reveals that its previous owner ended up on the street after being laid off. Others request a miracle and money to buy Viagra.
Photo courtesy of Aki Gallery
Rather than exploring each person’s life story in a compassionate or exploitative manner, Kuo chose a financial transaction similar to the way one buys a piece of clothing.
“For most, these signs are just cardboard, worthless. But for the homeless, they are everything they have. They are their means of production,” the 35-year-old artist says.
IMMIGRANT WORKFORCE
The Face of Time, a series of photographs, reveals the faces, mostly immigrants from South America, masked by the Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty and Super Mario costumes they wear to make tips from tourists in Times Square.
Kuo took full-frontal photographs of some of the street performers with their masks off and asked them to draw self-portraits, which are amateurish but cute.
“They can’t use their true identities to earn a living. They have to adopt a sweet image. It is a distorted image of one’s self and also a familiar face of our time,” Kuo says.
Soul Out literally probes deep beneath the city’s streets. Shot with a camera that was mounted on a large pliers-like device, getting the footage required Kuo to dangerously lean over the subway tracks, use the device to pick up trash, place the detritus in a miniature shopping cart and, when full, dispose it into nearby trash cans.
Kuo, working alone on the project, says it was somewhat dangerous because he had to keep an eye out for oncoming trains and suspicious-looking people.
“I was told beforehand that New York’s subway is filthy and smelly. I was still shocked. Rats and trash were everywhere,” Kuo says.
He added that he was inspired by the items displayed by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum that were given by victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a record of their grief and anger. In its own small way, Kuo’s exhibition does the same for those who live a life on the streets.
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
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
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s