A Taiwanese artist has created an installation piece that takes away people’s cellphones to encourage them to reflect on their relationship with technology.
Cheng Hsien-yu’s (鄭先喻) Discharge What You Charged — which consists of cube-like lidded apparatuses on plinths arranged around a display space — is part of “Transistor,” a special exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei.
When a viewer places their phone on one of the apparatuses, its lid closes and locks the phone up for 15 to 20 minutes before opening again, revealing it almost completely out of battery, Cheng wrote in his Web site.
Photo: CNA
The exibition’s organizers sought to encourage artists to create without feeling bound by conventions, and support one another through inspiration and collaboration, Hong Foundation chairman Royce Hong (洪裕鈞) told a news event on Friday, the exhibition’s opening day.
The exhibition, which showcases 11 contemporary artists, has a special focus on works that challenge boundaries, reflect broadly on modern issues and demonstrate a spirit of originality, MOCA director Loh Li-chen (駱麗真) said.
While most of the 23 creations have been displayed before, five pieces debuted at the show, she added.
The new pieces include Hung Yu-chun’s (洪裕鈞) The Instant of Change (創變瞬態), which features a deconstructed and suspended Xing Mobility Miss R electric supercar prototype, Loh said.
The other pieces that debuted at MOCA are creations by Hsu Chia-wei (許家維), Chang Shuo-yin (張碩尹) and James Ming-hsueh Lee (李明學).
The exhibition also showcases Habitat, a collaborative piece by Cheng and Chang Ting-tong (張碩尹) that is comprised of a high-temperature box containing 8,000 mosquitoes that fed on the blood of the artists and a video game that electrocutes the insects when it is played.
Another piece featured is Liu Yu’s (劉玗) If Narratives Are a Deluge, a multimedia creation that uses video and installation art to explore a flood myth that is part of the traditions of 254 ethnic groups speaking 84 different languages.
The exhibition is to run until Oct. 23.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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