A pig’s head sits atop a shelf, tufts of blonde hair sprouting from its taut scalp. Opposite, its chalky, wrinkled heart glows red in a bubbling vat of liquid, locks of thick dark hair and teeth scattered below. A giant screen shows the pig draped in a hospital gown. Is it dead? A surgeon inserts human teeth implants, then hair implants — beautifying the horrifyingly human-like animal.
Chang Chen-shen (張辰申) calls Incarnation Project: Deviation Lovers “a satirical self-criticism, a critique on the fact that throughout our lives we’ve been instilled with ideas and things that don’t belong to us.”
Chang is among 10 finalists in last year’s Taipei Art Awards whose work is currently on display at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum until March 2. It is decisively contemporary — exhibits are written, filmed, even rapped, offering alternative mediums and compelling storytelling.
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Each artist is given a room of their own, offering up parallel universes from the violent and uncomfortable to the nostalgic and emotive to the futuristic and sci-fi.
The largest and impactful exhibit is Father’s Vital Collection: Heaven and Earth Are My Buildings, And Houses My Clothes, How Come Y’all Step Into My Trousers? by Sim Chang (張哲榕), its contents as delightfully complex as its title.
The space recreates his father’s second-hand book store, with piling yellowed pages and photographs of his father roaming the streets of Taipei collecting pots, pans and all manner of junk.
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Interspersed with the fading books and photographs, Sim Chang lays bare the soaring highs and crashing lows of his bipolar disorder, which he was diagnosed with while working on this project. Combined, the visitor is immersed in the world created by two minds — one that is at times manic, the other exhibiting the compulsion to hoard.
Sim Chang says his condition has “gifted [him] with something special,” because it enables him to understand and sympathize with his father. It also bestowed him with natural rhyming abilities — abilities that combine in a featured video of him rapping in a frenzy, while sitting on his father’s “vital collection.”
Poyuan Juan’s (阮柏遠) Yes, I’m a simp. Simply in love with... elicits concerns for the incoming age of AI and lives lived digitally. We are warned before entering: “only suitable for over-18s due to scenes of a sexual nature.”
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Yet it’s not so much explicit as it is strange.
“An automatic vomit,” an AI sex doll says non-sensically on a glitchy, anime-inspired multiscreen display. The room glows neon green and shades of violet, robotic voices echoing through the exhibit’s clean negative spaces.
Juan’s work explores online romantic relationships experienced through “the emotional linkage of the spirit and the sensory perception of physical contact.”
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Another screen projects a live video stream, as a wide-eyed, nearly-naked cartoon girl receives thousands of messages from “simps,” a Gen-Z insult for those who obsess over a romantic interest, lusting over a sexualized protagonist while hunched over computer screens.
Oversized iPhone screens flick mindlessly through Instagram reels; the exhibit explores “the overlapping of digital and real spaces, much like being trapped in a social media browsing loop,” Juan says.
The work of the young artists exhibited this year is interconnected in its feeling — futuristic, yet worryingly of the now.
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
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