The group exhibition Non-Everyday: Hidden Force Fields, currently on display at Hong Gah Museum (鳳甲美術館), may at first glance seem a bit carelessly thrown together: The opening scene of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (侯孝賢) Cafe Lumiere is played in loop near the entrance, next to which stands an installation piece composed of animal specimens and elementary school desks and chairs by contemporary artist Su Meng-hung’s (蘇孟鴻).
But a closer reading of the gallery literature shows that this is not the case. Curator Wang Pin-hua (王品驊) has selected works by three artists born before 1960 and four artists in their 30s in an ambitious attempt to examine how Asian artists deal with history and social issues in an increasingly globalized world, and how different generations approach these issues in different ways.
“Global exchanges have increased significantly since 2000. In the contemporary art scene, the influence of this can be seen in the emergence of international art shows such as biennials, where artists are prompted to find what’s unique in their own cultures when engaging in a dialogue with others. And history is always the main thing that’s unique about each locale,” said Wang Pin-hua.
In Wang Pin-hua’s curatorial context, Hou’s Cafe Lumiere, which will be shown in its entirety at the museum on Sunday, can be seen an insightful look at the complicated relationship between Taiwan and Japan filmed in a realist style with a stationary camera, long takes and natural performances.
Chen Chieh-jen’s (陳界仁) 2006 film The Route (路徑圖), commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial, was inspired by the Neptune Jade incident in 1997, when picket lines were set up at ports in Canada, Japan and the US to protest against the cargo ship Neptune Jade in solidarity with more than 500 longshoremen in Liverpool who had recently been fired. The ship and its cargo were eventually auctioned off at Kaohsiung harbor, where local dockworkers were unaware of the strikes. In The Route Chen creates an alternative reality, one in which Kaohsiung longshoremen participated in the 1997 strike.
Wong Hoy Cheong’s Oh Sulukule, Darling Sulukule, made for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, was a joint project between the Malaysia-born, US-educated artist and the residents of Sulukule, a settlement for Roma people in Turkey. Interviews with cheerful children who talk about their lives and homes give clues to the past and present state of one of Europe’s most oppressed minority groups.
The three artists listed above, who were all born before the 1960s, tend tackle historical and social issues head on and in a critical manner. The four 30-something artists, on the other hand, turn to personal, everyday-life experiences to make lighthearted, playful and sometimes dream-like works.
Wang Ya-hui’s (王雅慧) Moon Rabbit is a video that shows what appears to be a nighttime scene of a forest teeming with nocturnal insects. Two white balloons painted with images of an owl and a rabbit float between the trees. Then the camera pans to reveal that what previously looked like a lush forest is in fact a tiny field next to a busy highway. Shot in Linkou (林口), Taipei County, the work is an imaginative contemplation on the rapid urbanization seen in many towns and villages in Taiwan.
More desolate in tone, Hou I-ting’s (侯怡亭) digitally manipulated video work Agency of Reality-Desert shows the artist standing on a dry riverbed in front of a mirror. In the background stands the Siluo Bridge (西螺大橋), a thoroughfare for north-south traffic in Yunlin County. The image in the mirror is a digital tableau comprised of a mosque, the tower of Babel, a stone dragon from a Taoist temple and the artist’s reflection. The juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made creates a surrealistic landscape in which the human/artist appears as nothing more than a medium for channeling hybrid icons and images.
Su Meng-hung found inspiration for his installation piece No Poem Before It in childhood memories of cleaning up a science classroom filled with animal specimens. The eerie image of dead animals in an old classroom built during the Japanese colonial posits Taiwanese history as something distant and unfamiliar.
The contribution of Yuki Okumura, the only Japanese artist in the group, is more lighthearted. His A Day in the Life of Spitting, the Way I Kill ’Em video series shows the artist collecting his saliva in a plastic bottle at various art festivals around the world and then cooking the spit when he arrives at his next destination. The artist’s mouth is, to use Wang Pin-hua’s words, a portal that connects the inner and outer worlds as his body wanders across the globe.
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