“Minsheng Village and People’s Livelihood Village” is exhibited at the Nanhai Arts Glalery, 2013.

By corresponding to human social activities, I chose to work on the observation, reasoning, and creation in the museum of fine arts, tourist attractions, as well as ties (hidden waterway and the city of subway cars) between these two; the city of subway cars was an alternative lifestyle I had found while I was working on the observation of bedroom town at first, and although people no longer think of the waterway underneath the city, but life on the river was like an ongoing noise in the empty corridor. The Living pattern in this place was like a densely packed crowd in a corridor, which never stopped. The occupied river course began to intrude on our living space.

“Minsheng Village and People’s Livelihood Village” is the building constructed along the said river.

Named “Minsheng Village and People’s Livelihood Village”, I used the turbid daily water and the residents without river awareness as the main plot for the narrative development. I also attempted to reconstruct the village where the invisible river runs through and overspills the spirit of the river onto everyday life. This orientation of ghosts and goblin is often retained in the narratives. Through proses written daily, paintings, peep records, and other more conceptual approaches, I began developing narrative techniques that differ from image media or fiction proses. Even though I often drew inspiration from both, whether in a future time setting described in movies or in detailed descriptions of emotions and street scenes in novels, more originality is the narrative form I intended to present. This also prompted me to start observing the relationship between natural objects in daily life and modern systems. From the painting of my predecessor Chen Cheng-Po, the author’s imagination for public space is noted. The oriental sentiments have also inspired me in terms of forms of painting expression. On the topic of the relationship with the natural environment, the narrative aspect also covers two parts: visible and invisible. Wastes, recycling, and concept declaration fall under the visible part of this type of narratives. As for the invisible part, other living aspects or lifestyle relatedness ought to be sought to achieve integration that leads to useful “logic”. Confronted with the concept of originality as the narrative logic, my primary consideration when choosing materials is the existence of people or objects presented by the narrative itself, rather than the authenticity of an event. With this as the focus, I was a director and screenwriter who cut out segments of useful logic from the works during the narrative integration process.

“Minsheng Village and People’s Livelihood Village”-It is about my roommates’ article which took three months to write. It is available on the social network for public access. In the content, she describes in text the noises she heard all day in the place she rented and released it on the network platform late at night.                                                                          《The Empty River》 and《A Never Left Carriage Life》

 

“Trees and Trimmed trees” is exhibited at the Industrial Bank of Taiwan, 2008.

Short journeys, river tracking, jogging, etc. with strangers, compared to sports events, are seemingly long and slow, but they are also exercises most likely affected by the ever-changing surrounding environment. Exercises of this type extend awareness for the environment and public space, which in turn promote the writing about the city of subway cars that continues to whirl to the depth of the river bottom.

The city of subway cars is a surreal fiction written using the contemporary art approach. From the “Mutual Tour” at first, I squeezed myself into the crowd of strangers and pulled out every individual every now and then. In the “Minsheng Village and People’s Livelihood Village”, three roles are emphasized, my roommate, the engineer, and I. The fantasy diary, concept painting, diary updated through social networking, and the sculpture of cooperation are blended. The “relationships” written in the novel are not entirely about the author, but a space saved to turn the unexpectedly generated resonance into a continuous writing process.

Deeply influenced by the artistic and literary field of the 1930s and 1960s, I began taking another approach to dig history, the emotional writing and rational integration. The works developed with it as the background are narratives, hidden in them are the ghosts and goblins blended in as immigrants, naturalness, and modernity. With the night turned into day and out in force, it was Taipei in the year 2015.

“He remembers finally finding something to do that summer. Every night, he shuttled between San Francisco and Carmel in the long truck loaded with ice. He drove the truck that had the length of a train from twelve mid-night until five in the morning. When the world was peacefully asleep, he was awake feeling desperate. He tried to keep his blood streak-filled eyes open to look at the tortuous mountain road instead of the foot of the mountain. He was amidst a thin layer of mist and the blue sea so blue that it made his head spin. Behind him was stiffening ice that weighed thousands of kilograms; in front of him were a dozen layers of rocky cliffs that made his heart freeze. Despair, rage, and regret continued to burn inside. He slowly crawled and drove, struggling through the most lonesome road this mortal world has known”. -Extracted from a full-length novel in Lihua “Palms Again” published in 1967.

 

The mutual tour was a photo album journey that began with a trip in 2010 when I forgot to bring the camera and had to talk to strangers taking pictures by the road. Since I was at a tourist attraction that generates high-density images, I wandered around and walked up to passers-by to talk to them after they finished taking pictures with their camera. We swapped our contact info so they could send me the pictures later. I late wrote on the bottom of each picture my experience of meeting each person or the observation I made.

Mutual Tour