Film & Video (Film & Video)

After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective. This “return to origin” reveals an interesting critical reflection on the interactive relation between outside change and internal reflection, and the possibility for more experimental approaches that revive “traditional media.” For Ink Diary , Chen recorded his daily life and impressions within a rapidly-changing urban setting in ink wash paintings which he then turned into an animated film. The complex result of this simple process is both highly innovative and reflective of modernization.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. In midst of sounds of heavy breathing, the camera presents alternating scenes of a man and the shadow of a man wearing a long, pointed hat cast against a wall. Insinuating a sinister mood, the man and the shadow struggle to control the scene through alternating tugs and releases of a rope.

Painting (Painting)

After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective. This “return to origin” reveals an interesting critical reflection on the interactive relation between outside change and internal reflection, and the possibility for more experimental approaches that revive “traditional media.” Chen’s series Collective Memories depicts some of the most important architectural works and urban sites in modern Chinese society, especially those related to the history of revolutions. Instead of reproducing the images himself, Chen invited the public to participate in their making by using their fingers to paint directly on the paper or canvas.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video work Any Resemblance is Coincidental , CHEN Zhexiang mined portraits of real Asian criminals that were abandoned on the Internet. In order to form a database of the portraits, he saved the files under the original names retrieved from the Internet. CHEN used digital facial recognition technology to build a lexicon of the criminals’ facial characteristics in order to analyze them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment. Chen Xiaoyun has added a written narrative and a poetic quality to his works. Image fragments containing different pieces of information are linked together by the text, their interplay producing a synesthesia effect.

Photography (Photography)

The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction. Chen emphasizes the direct sensational impact of his work to allow his viewer to question the boundary between reality and art. The image of nails as food harks at a visceral relationship with the title, which cries the tone of a manifesto.

Photography (Photography)

The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image. Near his studio, Chen often walks over fallen branches in late autumn and sense their existence. Thus, his placing them in diverse contexts builds a “narrative Ariadne’s thread” where the branches become “the language of things” intertextually cohering his oeuvre.

Photography (Photography)

State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism. The title alludes to the Pre-Raphaelite notion of a brotherhood based on “truth to nature.” Censorship of the mouth and indigestion of freshly cut stalks, central to Chen’s language of tree branches, feeds back provocatively to the title’s suggestion of “state terrorism.” However, one must resist seeking symbolic meaning in the image as Chen’s focus is on the direct visual impact of the absurd act portrayed.

Installation (Installation)

Stones and Elephants by Chia-Wei Hsu derives from the Malay literary classic The Hikayat Abdullah . The author Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who once served as the secretary of Major General William Farquhar, chronicled his life in Malaysia and published his writings in 1849. Hsu’s video installation excerpts two chap- ters from this classic.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marshal Tie Jia (Turtle Island) explores the history of a tiny island off of the coast of Matsu in the Taiwan Strait that has been instrumental in the geopolitical relationships between China, Taiwan, and Japan. The Chinese frog deity, Marshal Tie Jia, is now exiled to the island where he is still revered by the Taiwanese people. The installation includes documentation of the artist’s correspondence with the frog deity placed upon an altar, while the video explores both Marshal’s birthplace in China and his current home on Turtle Island.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair. Marshal Tie Jia is a frog god, who was born in a pond in Jiangxi, China, before fleeing to Matsu Island off the coast of Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution after his temple was destroyed. Spirit Writing attempts to reconstruct the original temple using 3D modeling software, operated in real time as Hsu asks the Marshal questions, receiving answers through a divination ritual in which the chair is swung violently around by his acolytes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The word Takasago alludes to several things at once. Takasago is the name of a multi-billion dollar Japanese corporation, previously situated in Taiwan pre-World War II. It is also a famous Japanese Noh play, the oldest extant form of performance in Japan, combining dance, costuming/masks, acting, and operatic chants.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Part of the series Still Life Analysis II: The Island , the two photographs The Objects under the Civic Boulevard and A Yellow Blanket on a Wooden Pallet feature household objects of vagrants living beneath the Taipei’s Civic Boulevard expressway. Such objects include trash, unidentified discarded objects, and plants. For the artist, the underside of Civic Boulevard resembles a subtropical island with its artificial stones and potted plants decor.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist. Extrastellar Evaluations introduces Plato’s mythical state of Atlantis as the theoretical birthplace of conceptual art. Well-known and obscure epistemological notions from the annals of cosmology and mysticism guided and informed her research in the Bay Area during the Kadist residency at the beginning of 2016.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). Chiang was born with the sun in Scorpio and at the Ninth House, moon in Aries, and ascendant in Capricorn, signifying an individual who is headstrong, intense, and persistent, with a desire for leadership. Yin-Ju juxtaposes images of outer space, war, and subservient masses, calling attention to how the dictator’s violence and charismatic power over the crowd was predicted by his particular astrology.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. The video takes the form of a channeled message from Adama, High Priest and spiritual leader of the Lemurians.

Photography (Photography)

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. (2010), which takes as its point of departure the political context of the 1950s and the Cold War, when American interests in Taiwan overlapped with the Chinese civil war. Cooperating with the Chinese Kuomintang, the American CIA established something called Western Enterprises, an agency whose main tasks included training an anti-Communist National Salvation Army (NSA) for a surprise attack on Communists in mainland China and establishing Taiwan as a base for anti-Communist operations in Southeast Asia. Narrated from the point of the view of the artist’s father, once a member of the NSA, the project interweaves personal experience with historical events.

Photography (Photography)

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. (2010), which takes as its point of departure the political context of the 1950s and the Cold War, when American interests in Taiwan overlapped with the Chinese civil war. Cooperating with the Chinese Kuomintang, the American CIA established something called Western Enterprises, an agency whose main tasks included training an anti-Communist National Salvation Army (NSA) for a surprise attack on Communists in mainland China and establishing Taiwan as a base for anti-Communist operations in Southeast Asia. Narrated from the point of the view of the artist’s father, once a member of the NSA, the project interweaves personal experience with historical events.

Photography (Photography)

In Hsu’s work, Colonia China (2014), the artist documents a Chinese cemetery of Costa Rica’s Limón Province, along the country’s Caribbean coast. Serving as the final resting place for Chinese migrants who came to Coast Rica during the late nineteenth century as indentured laborers working to construct the Transatlantic Railroad, the Colonia China speaks to a long but divided history. Hsu’s photographs of the burial ground also echo her interest in typography, with blocky black lettering and painted Chinese characters marking the cemetery as a space belonging to two different worlds.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Music While We Work (2011) is the first part/work of a long-term research project started in 2010. The project revolves around and beyond the history of sugar in the small town Huwei in central Taiwan (the artist’s hometown). The town was nicknamed as the “Capital of Sugar” during the Japanese colonial ruling (1895-1945) of Taiwan.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sexy shows Yan Xing unsuccessfully trying to reach orgasm in freezing temperatures among the falling rocks and howling winds of a precarious canyon. His erotic failure leaves the voyeur-viewer unfulfilled and disappointed. The work explores notions of identity, masculinity, sexuality, voyeurism, and cultural taboos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dr. N Song belongs Ozawa’s body of work The Return of Dr. N in which he follows a humorous fictional character based upon the historical figure Dr. Hideyo Noguchi who researched yellow fever in Ghana in 1927. Though Dr. Noguchi was known for his unruly temper and behavior and many of his discoveries were erroneous, he was widely revered in Japanese society. Ozawa’s Dr. N story explores links between Japan and Africa, past and present, fact and fiction, through the commissioned work of Ghanaian painters and musicians working in popular African styles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

One Day in the Mountain is a bilingual calligraphic performance piece written in ink superimposed with food leftover from a meal. The eponymous text: “One day in mountain is worth two thousands years in the world.” is written horizontally from left to right in both English and Chinese, following the writing order of modern Chinese instead of the traditional vertical right to left. With the word “is” migrating from the middle of the English phrase to be surrounded by Chinese characters, the resultant text appears to be spatially illustrating the meaning of being isolated in the mountain.