Daphne Chu

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  diary September 17, 2018

  Remember the Time

  TAXI DRIVERS IN KOREA DON’T TALK MUCH, and with the fear of confusing them even further, I’ve learned to just hand them my phone and help as they put on their reading glasses to zoom in on my destination. While being transported around Gwangju and Seoul earlier this month, I thought of last year’s hugely popular South Korean film A Taxi Driver and Chia-En Jao’s 2016 video Taxi. But, really, the first thing you notice in these cities is that Google Maps does not work. You can search for your destination and see your position, but the app cannot provide a route. This, upon further research, is

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  picks July 27, 2018

  Tao Hui

  Leng Shuihua was conceived in three weeks and entered the world an elderly woman. The product of a residency in Taipei by Beijing-based artist Tao Hui, the character was created for “The History of Southern Drama, Scene A,” an exhibition that takes its name from Leng’s sole literary work, a fictional memoir on the state of affairs between China and Taiwan across half a century. The show is staged in a two-story Tianmu house with a garden, built to quarter United States Armed Forces sometime between 1950 and 1979.

  In the foyer of Leng’s imagined residence, a flashlight rests atop a piano bench by

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  interviews May 22, 2018

  Hsu Chia-Wei

  Hsu Chia-Wei weaves together complex narratives of geography, history, and myth through storytelling in his films and installations. Based in Taipei, he has traveled to various locations in Asia for his work, often foraging for stories in the aftermath of war. In addition to his art practice, Hsu is a member of Open-Contemporary Art Center, an artist-run space founded in Taipei in 2001. Hsu’s art will be included in this year’s Gwangju Biennale. He is also currently participating in the Biennale of Sydney. Here, he talks about his film Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau, 2015, and the related maps

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  picks September 15, 2017

  Lai Chih-Sheng

  If 30 cm (all works 2017), a common thirty-centimeter plastic ruler stretched and distorted by Lai Chih-Sheng, can be used to navigate “Between Dog and Wolf”––a title inspired by the French expression “entre chien et loup”—it suggests that our familiar methods of assessment are of no use in a site of uncertainty, metamorphosis, and transformation.

  Lai creates minimal works that are often connected with the unseen labor behind producing a show and the display systems within a gallery: Placement notes and handmade marks from installation processes appear in Tape, paste filler and paint, while dust

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  picks July 26, 2017

  Su Yu Hsien

  Two large video projections occupy opposite ends of the main space of this venue, together making up the two-channel work Prophet, (all works 2016). One projection shows layers of red curtains towed by pulleys, never revealing the stage, while the lights slowly dim. In the other, an elderly couple, basking in the red glow reflected by the curtains across the room, argues about the man’s failed ambitions as a modern intellectual. Staged in theaters in 1965, the play Prophet was originally meant to be staged with the couple performing while seated in the audience, but was rejected by the director,

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  picks June 28, 2017

  Joyce Ho

  Joyce Ho’s current exhibition opens with Pull me up softly, 2017, a pair of red rain boots rising with the assistance of chains and a motor, and then—once having ascended, swoosh—free-falling back onto the carpeted wooden platform below before being pulled up once again. Other works in the exhibition feature an easy perpetual motion, which Ho compares to water, flowing long and far, “searching for a tangible edge to stop.” Paintings on light boards, A white note and A white corner (both 2017) switch on to reveal sepia images: in the former piece, a girl with her back turned toward the viewer,

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  interviews October 21, 2016

  Charwei Tsai

  Charwei Tsai is an artist based in Taipei and Saigon whose works, grounded in impermanence, often use writing as a medium for meditation. In addition to her artmaking, Tsai also publishes the journal Lovely Daze. Here, she speaks about the launch of its tenth issue, her new photography series “Universe of Possibilities,” and an exhibition that shares the same title, which is on view at TKG+ Projects in Taipei through November 20, 2016.

  “UNIVERSE OF POSSIBILITIES” contemplates the immense capability of one’s mind to transform perceptions of an accepted reality. These planetlike images are in

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  picks September 12, 2016

  Chen Po-I

  In this exhibition, Chen Po-I presents a collection of photographs created in the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot in 2009 in the most severely damaged area of Taiwan, between the Bo-lai and Fu-xing villages of Laonong River. The series includes images of brown, grayish mountainous landscapes, with plastic mesh, chicken wire, concrete boulders, and containers camouflaged in the environment, while the only black-and-white image, Post Morakot, Shengjing Bridge II, 2015, captures a stark, abraded mountainside next to forested lushness, its surface gridded to make way for roads and a highway bridge. In

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  picks June 27, 2016

  Yuko Mohri

  Inspired by John Cage’s performance piece Musicircus, 1967, which invites musicians of different genres to perform together, Yuko Mohri, in her latest exhibition, simulates Cage’s multi-ring conception of the circus. The piece I/O – Circus without Circus (all works cited 2016) spans the gallery space: scrolls of paper draped from rotating and stationary black tubes, suspended from two shelves hung from the ceiling; lightbulbs flickering; cables twitching and tapping at their ends, while connected to everyday objects—a ladle, a plastic bag, a pair of window blinds, a set of spoons, and an accordion

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  picks May 25, 2016

  Liu Xiaodong

  “Liu Xiaodong in South Africa” presents a collection of fifty works commissioned for Louis Vuitton’s “Travel Book” series, which led the artist to take a trip to the country in August 2014. The exhibition emphasizes the impossibility of recording all the details of a place by highlighting Liu’s various artistic formats—his journals, discussed in an accompanying video, and his photographs and watercolors, which play off one another in the show. In many of the latter works, light pencil marks bracket the four corners of the center of the xuan paper like a camera’s viewfinder, providing a reminder

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  picks January 17, 2016

  Wei-Li Yeh

  Three Places for Marguerite Duras, 2003–2006, consists of seven photographs taken by Wei-Li Yeh in an abandoned house next to his residence. The series documents four consecutive years, with every sequential photo captured from the same angle, and opens with Yeh’s blurred self-portrait. The series chronicles real or staged events as the artist returns to document the gradual changes and deterioration of the space.

  The photographs are presented in various formats: printed on canvas, mounted on acrylic or as light boxes, or lying on a table. Their considered mounting and display highlights the

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  picks December 10, 2015

  Chen Chieh-Jen

  Chen Chieh-Jen’s The Bianwen Book—riffs on a literary form popular in the Tang dynasty, which Chen envisions here as a spatialized book that the audience can walk through. The central work in this show, Realm of Reverberations, 2014, is a multimedia installation that uses nonlinear possibilities of time and space to explore social histories. Made up of four black-and-white films, Tree Planters, Keeping Company, Suspended Room, and Tracing Forward, which play consecutively on a 104-minute loop, the work is inspired by the Losheng Sanatorium and the preservation movement surrounding it and also