Hermit Crab Project

2008 - Photography (Photography)

Charwei Tsai

location: Taipei, Taiwan
location: Paris, France
year born: 1980
gender: female
nationality: Taiwanese
home town: Taipei, Taiwan

Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo. Tsai placed live hermit crabs and shells in a sandy enclosure at the site, writing fragments of The One China policy and the Taiwanese Independence statements on each shell. As the hermit crabs moved and swapped shells, they formed new connections between the statements. Tsai calls attention to the ephemerality of political declarations and makes the movements of animals into metaphors for the changing course of history.


Taiwanese multimedia artist Charwai Tsai often explores geographical, social, and spiritual concerns through performative and ephemeral artworks. She chooses materials that decompose or change to contemplate notions of impermanence and transience. Tsai is also editor-in-chief of “Lovely Daze”, a bi-annual journal of artists’ writings and artworks curated around specific themes for each issue.


Colors:



Untitled (Cathedral)
© » KADIST

Tina Modotti

1930

The Italian photographer Tina Modotti is known for her documentation of the mural movement in Mexico...

Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D.F., Third Gallery
© » KADIST

Tina Modotti

1927

Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D...

Empire's Borders II-Passage
© » KADIST

Chen Chieh-Jen

2010

Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...

n°5 The International Sail
© » KADIST

Enrique Ramirez

2017

Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...

Other related works, blended automatically  
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Untitled (Cathedral)
© » KADIST

Tina Modotti

1930

The Italian photographer Tina Modotti is known for her documentation of the mural movement in Mexico...

Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D.F., Third Gallery
© » KADIST

Tina Modotti

1927

Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D...

Ghost games
© » KADIST

Anri Sala

2002

Ghost Games , follows the enigmatic dance of crabs “steered” by a flashlight in the night of darkness of a South American beach...

No Title
© » KADIST

Félix González-Torres

1992

Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...

Related works sharing similar palette  
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Five-Hundred Twenty-Four
© » KADIST

Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis

2022

Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524...

Royal Velázquez Portrait Expected to Shatter Auction Records
© » OBSERVER

Royal Velázquez Portrait Expected to Shatter Auction Records | Observer A portrait of a Spanish queen painted by Diego Velázquez, the 17th-century artist celebrated for his depictions of Spain’s royal family, is expected to shatter his auction record when it goes up for sale early next year...

Tropical Siesta
© » KADIST

Phan Thao Nguyên

2017

Tropical Siesta begins in a rural landscape of Vietnam...

Incense Burners
© » KADIST

Yo Daham

2020

Yo Daham has been knitting, which he initially took up as a daily pastime, to produce objects that function as an incense burner by releasing smoke...

Related artist(s) to: Charwei Tsai » Heman Chong, » San Francisco, » Shilpa Gupta, » Song Dong, » Aki Sasamoto, » Alexis Destoop, » Asia Society, » Ava Ansari, » Burçak Bingöl, » Ceren Erdem  
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Poetry Light Stool
© » KADIST

Aki Sasamoto

2012

Poetry Light Stool evokes the spirit of Fluxus, the intermedia movement that encouraged artmaking to be simple, fun, and address everyday life...

The Book Cover series
© » KADIST

Heman Chong

2009

With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...

100 Hand drawn maps of my country, Tel Aviv / Jerusalem
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2014

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...

Untitled (Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak)
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2008

The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
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Peg and Jon
© » KADIST

John Houck

2013

Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood...

Beroana (Shell money) I
© » KADIST

Taloi Havini

2015

Following her family’s political exile to Australia in 1990, Havini began to document her journey’s home to the north of Buka Island, in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville...

Tadmur
© » KADIST

Majd Abdel Hamid

2019

Tadmur by artist Majd Abdel Hamid is influenced by a book by Mustafa Khalifa titled The Shell: Memoirs of a Hidden Observer , which details Khalifa’s imprisonment in the Assad ‘desert prison’ Tadmur...