A film screening, as part of public program of Ring Project “Metaphors about Islands” in collaboration with Waley Art, presents 4 short films by artists from Taiwan, continued with a Q&A session.
From geological conditions, the intertwined narrative of the island and the land Gods, visualizing faith, to colonialism is describe and purpose through artists perspective into videos.
The screening will be conducted at National Awakening Museum (Audio Visual Room), Sunday, 16th January 2022 at 12 PM.
The screening capacity is limited to 20 person, the door will be close once it reach its maximum capacity. The registration is conducted directly on the spot.
Earthquake Disaster, Shooting and Dead Body
Liang, Ting-Yu｜Taiwan｜Video Installation｜2021｜10’20”
Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and Nepal are located at the boundaries between tectonic plates and the fault zones, with similar geological conditions. Images of disaster victims’ bodies were seldom found in highly-developed areas, on the contrary, death photography were discovered mostly in the peripheral regions. Starting with the photography of earthquake victims’ bodies taken in Taiwan, which was under Japanese colonial rule at that time, “Earthquake Disaster, Shooting and Dead Body” connects a death photo of the 1906 earthquake in Taiwan with contemporary post-disaster photography of the dead in Kathmandu, Wenchuan, Kobe and Indonesia. Portraying the hands of victims, the video builds a narrative of the production chains of death photography and the necrophilia.
Liang, Ting-Yu
Liang Ting Yu (b. 1994, Taiwan) received his master’s degree in trans-disciplinary arts from Taipei National University of Arts. Liang’s practice focuses on integrating regional investigations and studies with project-based art actions and mixed media art. He examines issues related to historical archives and ethnic relations, and has recently expanded into exploring archives and local myths and legends. Using motion images, local ghost stories, image production, and writing, he creates art that looks into relationships between ghosts and topography.
Copy Island
Lin, Yan-Xiang｜Taiwan｜Full HD、3D、Full HD Two-channel Video, 3D Print Model, Wooden Model｜2021｜12’33”
The video “Copy Island” is based on a temple built on an artificial island. Following the will of the land Gods, an artificial island in an isolated pond was built by locals, thus creating a fictional landscape that exists in reality.
This video is constructed by the intertwined narrative of the island and the land Gods, by using 3D modeling in computer software to simulate the process of visualizing faith in religion, grafting the spirituality from different eras in a fictional way, to reflect how nature is capitalized in the society, at the same time, responding to Taiwan’s ideology of being an “island”.
Lin, Yan-Xiang
Yan-Xiang Lin, born in Taoyuan, 1997. Studying in Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts, National Taipei University of the Arts.
His works focus on multiple imagery in words, images, and bodies, and has long been interested in flora and fauna, geopolitics, religious beliefs… and other issues. With Route as the origin of thought, finding the border among the ever-changing boundaries. Through field practice and writing, he produces differences and perceptual experiences, then responds to the social phenomena and our own feelings that we are concerned about.
Recent projects include the study of the land gods from the perspective of pan-spiritual beliefs: Fu-De (福德), If mountain has deities, and Lyu-Feng Temple, which shown Xinbei and Taoyuan. The Aerotropolis in his hometown which was acquired by the government. Sacred Ibis which responded to environmental politics with the theme of animals, etc.
He has been a participant and curator in Reentry TNUA Dept. New Media Art Graduate Exhibition 2019, co-participant in Island Tales: Taiwan and Australia in Taipei Fine Arts Museum. He also exhibited in The Wandering Land God – Topology of the Gods in Beito Bao-de Temple (流浪的土地公－北投社保德宮的神明地誌學) at Honggah Museum, Photo GO – Tainan International Foto Festival, Taoyuan International Art Award, etc.
CARTOGRAPHERS
Kuo, Chin-Yun｜Taiwan｜Single Channel video, Sound｜2020｜28’32”
Stepping on this blank zone in October 2019, I wanted to know if I, as a modern Homo Sapien, have the animal instinct to follow the same path of my traces. The route that Truku people migrated to east had already met the colonial modernity at the end of the 19th century. The colonizers established an army to conquer Truku tribes in taking the very same route of the migration. The colonial governance hit the tribal world almost like a pandemic disease, and no sooner had they implemented the census, jurisdiction, and tax system. In order to obtain food, the aborigines followed animal trails to expand their hunting field. In Truku’s oral history that there were black dwarves living here long before they came here, and this land they inhabited was not their discovery.
The colonists followed the same trails to expand governance, and on the other hand, they required fine colonial engineering that eventually including land surveys, anthropological and topographic investigation, and cartography. In this land of hardship, the implementation of governance techniques needed to create a fictional collective consciousness that overrode individual will to construct an ideology that “dehumanized” the aborigines on the land. Only by claiming the “barbarism of the savage” could legitimate the enforcement of state formation. These traces of control have already occurred on the land that is now scarcely traced and hard to reach.
At the moment when this engineering of modernization is completed, The cross-island highway constructed by the following regime who took over the island has detoured and no longer cut across this place. The land that we called nature, that covered by secret forests, full of the few remains of schools and police stations left by state formation engineering, and countless survey points.
When I arrived at the old Qlapaw tribal site, I accidentally discovered the abandoned hut of a mountain farm. It was a shelter built with canvas printed campaign portraits, bamboo and wood of various lengths. It looks like a nest woven with plastic straps in order to lay eggs by parent birds who weave its nest in the wastes of the modern world. It had been the base of the Qlapaw hotel of the national park, for 60 guest-occupancy with a dining hall and a bathhouse, that altogether built on the site of the original tribal house by Japanese occupiers.
Today, this hotel of national park, nicknamed the “Qlapaw Club” by the explorers of the colonial heritage, is left with a stone-built three-burner stove. Over the centuries, dwarves, beasts, Truku people searching for hunting grounds, explorers of the Japanese army, Burmese and their descendants, as well as lost migrant workers — who altogether arrived, expelled, and were displaced from a foreign land — settled in the high mountains. After the reigned map drawn by the cartographer dispatched by the state no longer cares about this place, what remains are the wanderer’s ghostly nomad, drawing a meandering map on the blank zone.
— By Cetus Chin-Yun Kuo
Kuo, Chin-Yun
Chinyun Kuo, whose work focuses on material media, space, and the interaction between people and the space in which they occupy. Since she graduated from the Department of Architecture at Shih Chien University in 2012, Kuo has been involved in art, spatial and theatre designs. Her in-situ works of the urban landscape often occur within the field of daily life, challenging the rationale of the collective consciousness. After relocating to Berlin in 2016, Kuo became aware of the unique position of Taiwan in international relations, the influence of colonialism, and the conflict among multiple ethnic groups and cultural identities in Taiwan. Kuo has since focused on colonialism, human migration, and globalization in her artistic work, seeking the connection between historical context and the individuals. Her works are often presented as installations, performance art, and in-situ projects. Kuo is currently studying at the MA program in Spatial Strategies at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee.
Back to Glory: Juguang Garden 1
Chen, Chun-Yu｜Single Channel Video｜2021｜4’10”
CHEN Chun Yu, in this exhibition threw a proposal for senior citizens’ military service, “Back to Glory: Juguang Garden.”
The artist propose a hypothetical future: what are our responses to an aging society? As the time frame of human “usefulness” is carved out by the ability of labor, how do we use leftover labor in a more “efficient” manner? Chen presents his imagination of militarizing the senior population as a solution, fighting against the imagination of “becoming great again” through dystopian thinking. If his idea comes true what would we see the scene in Juguang Garden (A TV program made for army)?
Chen, Chun-Yu
Chen, Chun-Yu was born in 1989 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and currently lives and works in Taichung.
Chen’s works are inspired by observations of the micro-world and correspond to an exaggerated (impossible) method of realization. To face problems with a sincere and practical approach is not the artist’s intent, and Chen prefers to humorously tackle moral principles and ethics that seep through irrelevant associations and to paralyze social imaginations that require restructuring.