Grating describes the placement of Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! (呼累！呼累！呼累！), a sound installation that echoes throughout much of the first floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA). Sounding more likes shrieks of pain than squeals of joy, the work distracts visitors from appreciating the other pieces nearby.
Though the installation by Qin Ga (琴嘎) sets an annoying tone, Spectacle — To Each His Own (各搞各的：歧觀當代), a group exhibit put together by China-based independent curator Gu Zhenqing (顧振清), is for the most part worth a visit. Twenty-eight artists from Asia, North America and Europe working in new and traditional media investigate the individual in society and raise questions about how new media affects human subjects.
Jin Jiangbo’s (金江波) God, Go Ahead With Chatting (天哪，你去聊吧) enlivens the old theme of information overload in the digital age. The video and sculpture installation shows a man slumped over a flat screen monitor that rests on a table. Above him hang 20 other monitors showing different Web pages. Is the man dreaming of the monitors or are they the cause of his catatonic state, or both?
Located across from Jin’s work is Xu Zhongmin’s (�?�) Sisyphean Egg Shape #1 (蛋形 No.1). Stainless steel skeletons bound together with string rotate frenetically on an egg-shaped sculpture split while a second group of skeletons continuously scale the egg’s yolk, a sequence that evokes the manic activity of contemporary life and the difficulty of following one’s own path.
The artist collective 3P = 3 Players (3p小組) — consisting of Xie Rong (謝蓉), Wang Mei (王玫) and Li Hong (李虹) — recruited pairs of volunteers from different walks of life to film their thoughtful video installation Relativity (相對論), a meditation on eye contact as a means of communication. The artists had their subjects face each other for three minutes and used three cameras to film their reactions.
A middle-aged woman sheds tears in front of the doctor who cured her cancer; a little girl giggles uncontrollably as a taller, emotionless boy stands in front of her; a diminutive worker shifts uncomfortably, eyes moving back and forth, as he faces his expressionless boss. The cancer patient’s tears, the girl’s laughter and the worker’s nervous expression all reveal a depth of human character that I have rarely seen on film. I found myself transfixed as I wondered how I would react if I had been one of the characters in the videos.
The above works by Jin, Xu and 3P = 3 Players appear at the beginning of Spectacle and are rich enough in content to warrant exhibits of their own, though the unsettling noises emitted by Hurray! push visitors further into the museum.
Less impressive are Timm Ulrichs’ Tears, a video of an old man crying that seems to represent the sadness people feel in their daily lives, and the clash of good and evil as conceptualized through multiple images of a girl skipping in Tomasz Wendland’s Angels. Both reveal little about their subjects and can be passed with a yawn.
More engaging is Tiong Ang’s digital short Models for (the) People, in which an African man stands in the middle of a street in Shanghai as passers-by gawk at him, a meditation on the superficiality of collective perceptions and cultural stereotypes.
Other notable works include Miao Xiaochun’s (繆曉春) film Microcosm (坐天觀井), which uses Christian symbols and computer generated graphics of scenes including the Garden of Eden and Armageddon to show how curiosity can lead to both creation and destruction; and Weng Fen’s (翁奮) sculpture Ideologies, a model city made from 100,000 eggshells that when seen from above looks like US$100 and 100 renminbi notes.
Dec. 16 to Dec. 22 Growing up in the 1930s, Huang Lin Yu-feng (黃林玉鳳) often used the “fragrance machine” at Ximen Market (西門市場) so that she could go shopping while smelling nice. The contraption, about the size of a photo booth, sprayed perfume for a coin or two and was one of the trendy bazaar’s cutting-edge features. Known today as the Red House (西門紅樓), the market also boasted the coldest fridges, and offered delivery service late into the night during peak summer hours. The most fashionable goods from Japan, Europe and the US were found here, and it buzzed with activity
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
These days, CJ Chen (陳崇仁) can be found driving a taxi in and around Hualien. As a way to earn a living, it’s not his first choice. He’d rather be taking tourists to the region’s attractions, but after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the region on April 3, demand for driver-guides collapsed. In the eight months since the quake, the number of overseas tourists visiting Hualien has declined by “at least 90 percent, because most of them come for Taroko Gorge, not for the east coast or the East Longitudinal Valley,” he says. Chen estimates the drop in domestic sightseers after the
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, speaking at the Reagan Defense Forum last week, said the US is confident it can defeat the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Pacific, though its advantage is shrinking. Paparo warned that the PRC might launch a “war of necessity” even if it thinks it could not win, a wise observation. As I write, the PRC is carrying out naval and air exercises off its coast that are aimed at Taiwan and other nations threatened by PRC expansionism. A local defense official said that China’s military activity on Monday formed two “walls” east
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