Tai-Thai Boba Milktea Wave Wave – Taiwan and Thailand New Media Art Exchange Project

Introduction

Boba Milktea has made a big splash on the global stage, and is now synonymous with Taiwan. When talking about the cultural food of Taiwan, “Boba Milktea” would be the name that cried out among the crowd. In Thailand, similarly, Thai Iced Milktea would be a tourist must for Taiwanese. The special aroma of Thai tea leaves, topped with condensed milk to add fragrant flavor, has created a significant impression of Thailand. This exhibition attempts to combine the characteristic flavors of these two drinks from Taiwan and Thailand. Through multiple attempts, Tai-Thai Boba Milktea Wave Wave (Tai-Thai Boba Milktea Micro sugar Micro ice), the golden proportion with the best taste, a new cross-border drink, is born.

This exhibition provides the public with a sense of self-rewarding, collective consolation, and little fortune viewing experience through transcreation and cross-multilingualism. The Tai-Thai exhibition team and these 10 artworks take a unique artistic simulation technique to play with the conventional art forms such as video, music, craft and life aesthetics, giving out an alternative set of humours, ironic, funny, ludicrous, but earnest and cute alternative-creative status. These seemingly wave-wave (micro sugar, micro ice) artworks hide different details and echoes, reflecting the current elusive social situations and phenomena in the historical context of Taiwan and Thailand, in the hope of drawing a meticulous and diversified yet vivid picture of the contemporary art and social conditions in Taiwan and Thailand.

Curator

CHEN Nien-Ting

CHEN Nien-Ting (b. 1990) is an independent curator and visual artist. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art, United Kingdom, and is currently pursuing her PhD in Art at the Liverpool School of Art and Design (LSA, LJMU). She works across cities in both Asia and the United Kingdom, with her research, practice and projects focusing on developing strategies to bring young artists onto the world stage through the exchange, sharing and combination of resources. At the same time, she continues to actualize various interconnected art projects and curatorial works in places such as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, etc..

Supapong Laodheerasiri

Supapong Laodheerasiri was born in Chiang Rai, Thailand in 1985. He currently lives and works in Chiang Rai and Bangkok, Thailand. He applies images in a conceptual manner, using a variety of media and techniques, while emphasizing the presentation and expression of his concepts. Several of his artworks explore the questions about perceptions and interpretations of objects and language; for example, when positions, functions or contexts of objects and language are shifted or moved; their definitions become different or ambiguous. The shifts of them cause the alternative choices of evaluation or understanding, with new issues arising.

Artist

Chulayarnnon Siriphol

Chulayarnnon Siriphol was born in 1986. He is thus working between the role of a filmmaker and an artist. His works are in-between documentary and fiction, reality and supernatural. He questions the belief of virtue and ideal through sarcasm, illusions, and his own sense of humor. He is currently living and working in Bangkok.

SUN Chih-Hsing

SUN Chih-Hsing (b. 1994), graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2015, now studies at Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts. His unique perspective pieces up little stories in everyday life and imagination, by layering contradictory elements between the sense of speed and the dislocation of space, absurdity and rationality, etc, creating credible experiments in this seeming absurdity. In breaking the foundation of conventional storytelling, SUN asks “could a cognitive misconception become a new perspective to understand culture?“. SUN has won various awards including CTBC Arts Award Taiwan 2019, Outstanding Art Prize of School of Fine Arts, Taiwan 2015.

Sid and Geri

Sid and Geri is an art group established in 2017. The group collaborates with different types of people around different cultures. By deploying various medium through video, animation, multi-media as well as space installation, their works show a unique sense of humor to express “the patterns around people”, reflect the daily living experience, provide a fantasy-like narrative, by using visual and sound stimulation to show the absurd, frantic, and meaningless appearance of this era.

Witaya Junma

As an artist, Witaya Junma is enthusiastic about applying fresh approaches to his art and also has explored various branches of science in creating his work. Technology and machinery have thus become a significant part of Witaya‘s art. To him, they are products of the observation or imitation of nature. In other words, they are replicas of living things, and their creator is us, humans. The main role of technology and the machine is to make our lives easier, however, if technology and machinery are offered a place in the art world and give them different roles, from telling stories to amplifying expressions, Witaya believes we can create new art forms. And if they are used wisely, technology and machines can help convey the artist’s objectives more effectively than convention.

Tulapop Saenjaroen

Tulapop Saenjaroen was born in Thailand in 1986, who holds an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Art and MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts, is an artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. His recent works interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. In the combined narrative and essayistic manner, lurid and liquid, he lately investigates on subject matters such as tourism, self care, and free labor through re-making and re-reading the produced images and their networks.

Supervisor
Taipei City Government

Organizer
Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government
Digital Art Center, Taipei

Sponsor
Ministry of Culture

Duration

2021.05.15－06.13

Venue

Digital Art Center, Taipei
（No. 180, Fuhua Rd., Shilin Dist., Taipei City）

（cancel）Opening & Guide Tour
05.15 Sat. 15:00

（cancel）Artist Talk
2021.05.16 Sun. 15:00
When Thai Wave phenomenon meets up with Taiwanese meme culture.
Speaker
LIN Hong-John（Professor of Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts, TNUA）、CHEN Nien-Ting (Curator)、SUN Chih-Hsing (Artist)、Sid and Geri (Artist)