Dian hué, On-gu, Ti-kang, Po Ge-hué

The artist LEE Yung-Chih transplanted the texture of the back of the paint that is about to peel off like Ganoderma lucidum to create a fictional Zhishanstone in a cheap and hands-on way. Superficially, it is a response to the long- last history behind Zhishan and Zhishanyan. In fact, it is still some kind of the daily journey that artist is used to: walking in the streets, imagining and showing off the wastes that no one cares about.

The artist can disguise the roadside stones as stones bringing luck, or cooperate with the stores around Digital Art Center, Taipei; claiming that it is a lucky stone that can bring wealth, thus it may draw the audience to go to spend money in those stores and the art may somehow be useful for the neighborhood. So let it be that, a stone drawing curiosity and a sense of mystery as an object with no name reflects the unimaginable sorrow of those with big names.

The Other Shore is a project to evoke consciousness and a sense of missing through sounds. ”Is there a song that you want to give to someone who isnot around?”; The artists start with songs and emotional memories, draw the unforgettable stories from each participant’s life experience, and open up the contextual fields related to those sounds. This project highlights two spatial forms. The first one is the sound field space: the local residents will beinvited to record their own singing voices. As the artists capture the vocal sounds, they will also record the sea waves as the background sound in the natural environment, and mix both to create a scene as if singing in the sea. The second one is the installation in physical space: an immersive theater environment will be created to be a virtual sailing ship, so that the viewers will be engaged in the ocean of singing and consciousness of the singers, and capture a sense of imaginations of the other side of memories of The Other Shore.

A few parts of Pigeon: Seven People Crossing the Sea are exhibited this time. This work was inspired by the life story of a vendor of Pang-Jai, Ho-Ying, and the campaign he initiated against ejectment of Pang-Jai by the government. ”Pang-Jai” has been organically developed into a systematic fabric market since the vendors stood in solidarity in 1978. In the early years, the supplies for the fabric vendors of Pang-Jai usually came from the scattered cloths left by manufacturers with funds from Hong Kong. The cloths were commonly called ”stock cloth”. The cloths for sale stacked one after another over four decades, compressing the rise and fall of the garment industry in Hong Kong and Asia. Because of the urban renewal plan, Pang-Jai has been faced with the fate of ejectment by the Hong Kong government in the recent years. The situation attracts discussions upon the legal issues around the vendors, basic living space for grassroots, and so forth.

The invisible in religions are across people’s ”spirits”and”supernatural phenomenon”that are not received by the naked eye. Religion then becomes a channel between the visible and the invisible to interfere with the events in our living space through various rituals, or in the name of gods. The artist LIN Jia-Yi consider gods in religions ”objects”that people rely on. These objects are the products from the act of a group of people visualizing the invisible. As time passes, the objects have their natural images. When they are added doctrines and supported by people, they become beliefs. For this work, LIN went to Shilin District to conduct a street interview, asking some residents about their impressions of gods and to draw them in lines on papers in the most straightforward way. Attracting a certain amount of the drawings, LIN used ”wax” to carve out the gods drawn by the residents and gathered them, so that the audience can compare the imaginations of ”gods” by themselves with others’. The work aims to present re-interpretations about religions and reflect that gatherings of consciousness verify beliefs.

Initially, to explore the cultural characteristics of Taiwanese grassroots, the artist TANG Tang-Fa focused on living environments and humanistic landscapes. After exploring and searching, TANG gradually moved to the traditional markets, hoping to combine arts and life and expand art space to have arts connected to public living space. Through 12 years observing markets, TANG feels that the strong vitality of traditional markets comes from “competition”. Vendors compete with each other for survival; customers compete for good prices and good quality. Traditional markets can be seen as arenas for living to the grassroots. Perhaps, the senses of competing for survival have been internalized in their minds and displayed in life.

The world has been hit by natural and man-made disasters coming thick and fast in 2020. People around the globe have been covering their faces and flocked into the streets for the pandemic and protests. They shuttle between real life and tons of images like ghosts and in the end converge into gigantic online databases to be flattened into digits and files with all kinds of fake news and memes, collaging the absurd situation of contemporary human beings. Meanwhile, what do the massive production and seeing of images in everyday life represent for? Is it the return to a shared sense of humanity that sees human beings as a whole, stating that no one can always look out to the world on the deck formed by interface of digital technology as a bystander; or, is it the revelation of further non-human indifference? (The work was completed in collaboration with workshop participants.)

Photography：Shan-Wen KE