The wreckage of two scooters are just visible from beneath white sheets — the kind that is laid over a deceased body at the scene of an accident.
Intermittently, bright lights are projected onto the sheets. This is the footage from Yang Chia-shin’s (楊佳馨) two motorbike dashcams as she rolled down Keelung Road (基隆路) in Taipei one fateful evening in February, 2022.
The collision is sudden, a 360-degree spin before she is thrown from the vehicle.
Photo: Thomas Bird, Taipei Times
The perspective change is captured by both cameras, one to the front, one to the rear, as the motorbike careens out of control, until all movement stops.
This dual installation is the main focal point of Return to the Scene (重返現場), a series of artworks on view at Hualien’s Good Underground Art Space (好地下藝術空間), which document Yang’s scooter accident and her slow recovery thereafter.
“I’ve tried to reconstruct the sensitivity of the moment between life and death,” she says.
Photos: Thomas Bird, Taipei Times
Yang hasn’t just used video but a range of media and materials to recreate the sensory experience of the accident in the gallery space.
There are growls of motorbike engines revving.
She’s mounted a broken wingmirror on the wall framing a photograph of the point where she came off the road.
Photo courtesy of Wu Fang-yi, Good Underground Space
The crash required two collar bone operations and has left her shoulder scared. Yang collected a journal of doctor’s reports in the wake of the accident.
But far from being morbid or depressing, Yang’s work is more a form of exorcism — the artist’s way of working through “emotional layers” with the “aim of cleansing preconceived perceptions and heal her trauma,” as the introduction puts it.
One video shows her cleaning her scooter in an artwork titled The Motorcycle’s Rebirth (機車的重生). “It’s actually me washing away the pain of the past.”
Photo courtesy of Wu Fang-yi, Good Underground Space
“There’s movement in Yang’s work,” says the gallery’s art director Tien Ming-chang (田名璋), adding that there is a unique dynamism, which “invokes a sense of instability.”
The video is projected onto a shroud-like white cloth, which also “serves as a metaphor for the presence of death,” he says.
White symbolizes death, and is associated with the robes worn in traditional funerals.
Photo courtesy of Wu Fang-yi, Good Underground Space
In the wake of the enormous earthquake on April 3, I asked how Tien thinks Hualien residents might react to work that addresses life’s fragility and human mortality.
“Facing natural disasters is not a matter of the last two or three days for Hualien people. It is part of our DNA,” he says.
Although locals have grown accustomed to living on a fault line, he says, “Yang explores issue that we cannot escape,” in her artwork, which he believes, “will help people understand life better as a result.”
Photo courtesy of Wu Fang-yi, Good Underground Space
Photo courtesy of Wu Fang-yi, Good Underground Space
Last week saw the appearance of another odious screed full of lies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian (肖千), in the Financial Review, a major Australian paper. Xiao’s piece was presented without challenge or caveat. His “Seven truths on why Taiwan always will be China’s” presented a “greatest hits” of the litany of PRC falsehoods. This includes: Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were descended from the people of China 30,000 years ago; a “Chinese” imperial government administrated Taiwan in the 14th century; Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), “recovered” Taiwan for China; the Qing owned
Jan. 20 to Jan. 26 Taipei was in a jubilant, patriotic mood on the morning of Jan. 25, 1954. Flags hung outside shops and residences, people chanted anti-communist slogans and rousing music blared from loudspeakers. The occasion was the arrival of about 14,000 Chinese prisoners from the Korean War, who had elected to head to Taiwan instead of being repatriated to China. The majority landed in Keelung over three days and were paraded through the capital to great fanfare. Air Force planes dropped colorful flyers, one of which read, “You’re back, you’re finally back. You finally overcame the evil communist bandits and
I am kneeling quite awkwardly on a cushion in a yoga studio in London’s Shoreditch on an unseasonably chilly Wednesday and wondering when exactly will be the optimum time to rearrange my legs. I have an ice-cold mango and passion fruit kombucha beside me and an agonising case of pins and needles. The solution to pins and needles, I learned a few years ago, is to directly confront the agony: pull your legs out from underneath you, bend your toes up as high as they can reach, and yes, it will hurt far more initially, but then the pain subsides.
When 17-year-old Lin Shih (林石) crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1746 with a group of settlers, he could hardly have known the magnitude of wealth and influence his family would later amass on the island, or that one day tourists would be walking through the home of his descendants in central Taiwan. He might also have been surprised to see the family home located in Wufeng District (霧峰) of Taichung, as Lin initially settled further north in what is now Dali District (大里). However, after the Qing executed him for his alleged participation in the Lin Shuang-Wen Rebellion (林爽文事件), his grandsons were
RSS