Installation (Installation)

Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers. These novels were mostly written by Taiwanese and Hong Kong writers in the 1980s to the 1990s to meet the cultural needs of the new social classes before being imported into China after the Chinese economic reform in the late 1980s. As contemporary China industry developed, a large number of workers became readers of this new pulp fiction.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism. Their scenes belong to the realm of childhood dreams, expressing both desire and anxiety through delicate colors and playful figures.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin brings the tension of a small but imminent catastrophe into the gallery with a raw egg balanced on the edge of a folding table.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Ship of Fools” is a literary term derived from Sebastian Brant’s 1949 satirical allegory of the same name. The work tells the story of a wandering vessel with 111 fools aboard; each of whom represents a social issue. The Ship of Fools Mooring at the Train Station is a two-channel video work by artist Liu Yu, concerning the community of people residing on the fringes of society at Taipei Main Station.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism. Their scenes belong to the realm of childhood dreams, expressing both desire and anxiety through delicate colors and playful figures.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism. Their scenes belong to the realm of childhood dreams, expressing both desire and anxiety through delicate colors and playful figures.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism. Their scenes belong to the realm of childhood dreams, expressing both desire and anxiety through delicate colors and playful figures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Black Ocean by Liu Yujia portrays a desert landscape in a state of both destruction and construction, revealing the desert’s simultaneous fragility and indestructibility. The structure of the storytelling of this film was inspired by Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities (1972). Several chapters from the book are interwoven in the film incorporating the discussions of cities and landscapes narrated by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in the novel.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Living Distance by Xin Liu is a VR work and two-channel video based on a real mission in which the artist’s wisdom tooth was sent to outer space and back down to Earth again. In the VR work, users play the role of the tooth, journeying from the mouth to outer space, with a poetic narration by Liu. The piece is exquisitely rendered, with deep blacks that make the experience especially powerful on a Vive Pro.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Salvation Mountain by Liu Yu takes California’s history of the Gold Rush as its starting point. The single-channel video combines drone footage and animations to depict desolate ghost towns and abandoned mining pits of California, leading the viewer through an out of body experience through the vast American landscape. The viewer is taken on a journey, led by the three protagonists – a pioneer, a vagabond, and the avatar of a drone–to Salvation Mountain, a man-made mountain constructed out of latex paint with Christian sayings and Bible verses, and Slab City, a migratory commune in Southern California’s desert.

Textile (Textile)

A Year · Marx by Liu Ding consists of a piece of silk onto which a poem about Marx is printed using inkjet. The work is part of the silk inkjet series A Year, which features political poems from Pine Trees on the Square , a series that Liu Ding wrote for the 2015 Istanbul Biennial. The year 2015 marked a critical political juncture for China, orchestrated by its current leadership and centered around propositions for nationalism.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Photojournalist with Two Cameras restages a portrait of a photojournalist from the background of an old photograph of protest published in South China Morning Post on January 10, 2010 under the headline “Return of the Radicals: Recent angry protests are nothing new.” The photojournalist in the photograph, probably from a protest of earlier decades, was capturing the scene of a protester’s arrest while wearing two cameras. January of 2010 was a time of pro-Democracy demonstrators called for the release of activist Liu Xiaobo, drafter of the Charter 08 manifesto calling for the end of authoritarian rule, was sentenced to 11 years in prison one month earlier. Leung’s isolating and highlighting of the photographer by bringing him from the original photograph’s background to the foreground of his studio shot calls attention to the two older cameras and the journalist’s retro-style clothing.

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)

Wailing Requiem is the fourth and final chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.