Mia Liu’s (劉文瑄) first performance art piece took place at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Well, kind of. Liu, 31, had been working at the museum as a ticket taker while doing an MFA at Hunter College when she came up with the idea of printing the title of her own show on the museum’s tickets. Fearful of losing her job, however, she only handed out a few. She then came up with another plan — to display her work in the museum’s staff room.
“Then I could put on my resume that I’d had a solo show at the Guggenheim,” Liu said. She approached her boss with the idea, “and he looked at me like I was crazy,” she said.
It’s unfortunate Liu didn’t take either action to any kind of conclusion because it would have subverted the museum’s curatorial policies, raised interesting questions as to how artists exhibit at major art museums and offered a reconsideration of what constitutes museum space (should we consider a staff room part of Guggenheim’s exhibition area?).
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Though an official Guggenheim show has yet to materialize for Liu, she did convince the museum to sell her 200,000 of its tickets, 60,000 of which she has used in Guggen’ Dizzy, a large-scale trompe l’oeil sculptural triptych currently on view at IT Park. The sculpture is part of I Can’t Tell You, but You Feel It (我無法告訴你), a solo show of her work that includes photography and installation. This review focuses on the sculpture.
Guggen’ Dizzy appeals because its simple elements combine in a way to create complex visual illusions reminiscent of optical art. Liu began the work with a series of doodles, sketches and drawings of basic geometric objects, scanned the bits into a computer and pieced them together to form a template of the sculpture’s overall design.
With the help of assistants, she attached, one by one, 20,000 tickets to one of three circular boards, each made up of six concentric circles. Colored masking tape was stuck to the edges of the tickets, that when combined form the original patterns. The boards were then mounted onto metal brackets and clamped onto a motor, which when switched on rotates slowly. The three-panel sculpture took three years to complete.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Watching the sculptures rotate is a thing to behold because the colors and shapes constantly shift depending on how light is refracted off their surfaces. Are they a kind of mandala, meant as a prompt to contemplate the flux and impermanence of existence? Or perhaps their constantly changing appearance is a metaphor for the contingency of human perception.
Liu offered a more mundane explanation.
“It’s just about mixing different colors with light [based] on patterns that I draw on a daily basis,” she said.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Reflecting on the exhibit’s title, Liu’s meaning becomes clear. We aren’t supposed to use our reason to look for any deeper meaning, but feel and experience the sculpture’s aesthetic beauty.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
This month the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced a new policy ostensibly aimed at influencing the upcoming presidential election. A top-notch Voice of America (VOA) report observed “China launched a series of influence campaigns against Taiwan last week, unveiling a plan to promote integrated development across the Taiwan Strait.” The plan, a “demonstration zone,” offers incentives for Taiwanese to live, work and invest in Fujian Province, across the Strait from Taiwan, along with supplies of water, electricity and gas. Using cooperative zones to poach technology and influence Taiwanese is an old plan that has appeared in various
Si Mateneng of the Tao indigenous community felt like he had reunited with a lost friend. While visiting Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, he encountered a boat that had been in the US since the 1970s, first hanging in a restaurant then languishing in a warehouse before being purchased by a collector and donated to the museum. Si Mateneng could tell from the crosses on the vessel, known as a tatala, that it was built on his homeland of Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) after the introduction of Christianity in 1959. He could hardly contain his excitement. Si Mateneng
If the world is to avert climate catastrophe without causing immense suffering, humanity must put the global economy into reverse gear, and begin serious and truly democratic discussions about resources and priorities, says Lu Chien-yi (盧倩儀), a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS). Lu is a proponent of degrowth, a movement that seeks to knock GDP as the standard metric off its pedestal, save the planet’s ecosystems and create a more just society. She and other degrowth thinkers contend that the eco-economic decoupling promised by supporters of green growth will not happen fast enough to
What will become of the royal family? That is a question people have been asking since the regime change of last year. What sort of a state has that family got itself into? Can it survive in this form? The Queen Mother must be spinning in her grave, people think. The late Queen must have already been spinning as she was lowered into hers. All the moldering bones of their hundreds of dead relatives, clustered at Westminster and Windsor but also dotted all over the place — Gloucester, Worcester, Reading, various places in Normandy, that car park in Leicester —
RSS