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)

In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text. The performance begins with two broad-knife-wielding characters circling each other in conventional operatic steps. Oblivious to the presence of these two on stage, additional characters, in a mix of period costume and contemporary dress, enter the stage in increasing droves to consume a various of foods laid out on a table until they collapse and pile on top of each other.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Trinity , Wang Mowen uses video to tell the story of a young woman who wants to know the whereabouts of a person born sixty years ago. She visits three fortune tellers and provides the person’s birth date. Each psychic deliberates and comes to the correct conclusion that the woman in question is the seeker’s mother.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean by Yuyan Wang reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro-events from ‘satisfying videos’ that swarm on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds through layers of appropriation; referencing trance and minimal music in the process. The work addresses a desire for groundless waves, blended with today’s inexorable entropy of information societies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Moon Also Rises by Yuyan Wang comprises a one-channel video and light installation. The work is based on a 2018 initiative in China to launch three artificial moons into orbit above major cities to provide continuous daylight. Set in an oppressively illuminated environment, the images depict lethargic crowds in megacities, surrounded by glowing neon lights, and workers in LED factories performing repetitive tasks on an assembly line in a kind of trance state.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tungus is the third 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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Smoke and Fire is the first 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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Orbit by Bo Wang is based on the story of Hu Na, a former professional tennis player who was known for defecting from the People’s Republic of China. While on tour in California for the 1982 Federation Cup with the China Federation Cup team, Hu Na fled her hotel room and sought refuge at a friend’s home on her second day in the United States. In April 1983, she requested political asylum on the basis that she had a well-founded fear of persecution because of repeatedly refusing to join the Communist Party of China’s tennis team.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wang Xu’s video Summer Wind Before Rain was made during his residency last summer at Storm King, where he lived in a hut made of wood and gathered clay from the nearby forest. During his residency, he interacted only with the sculpture park’s gardener. In the eleven-minute video, we see the gardener ride a lawn mower the size of a golf cart, and we observe the artist slowly make a large, realistic bust of the gardener, bit by bit and layer of clay by layer.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflection Paper No. 2 is one of four videos in which Wang attempts to accurately illustrate the writings of influential Chinese Eileen Chang, who published her works during the Japanese occupation of China. Image and text reflect on the everyday experiences of women in society, family, marriage, love, and death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Distorting Words is the second 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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Interrogation is a video constructed entirely from still film photography and photoshop collage — playing out as a photomontage along with a voiceover. By using still photography instead the moving images, Wang Tuo creates room for the audience’s imagination. The voiceover produces a rhythm to enhance the tensions in the work.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings is a two-channel short film by Bo Wang and his frequent collaborator Pan Lu. It takes the history of the British colonial search for tropical plants as a starting point, revealing how early colonial rule and ideologies shaped Hong Kong through the Western gaze. Through the process of transporting and collecting plants, Joseph Banks, who was the botanist and naturalist of the first British diplomatic mission to China (also known as The Macartney Embassy) and advised King George III on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London with the most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world.

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)

Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945. Yoneda focuses both on the original Japanese features of the houses and on details that have been altered since the end of the occupation. The yet-to-be acknowledged history of the occupation of Taiwan and other East Asian countries by Japan during World War II is subtly disclosed in these pictures.