YUAN Goang-Ming

On the Way Home

1989｜Color｜13min

This work was a project that the artist developed for his undergraduate degree and was also his first experimental video to incorporate actors and micro-narrative. Yuan received the Golden Harvest Awards for Best Experimental Video in 1990 for this work. The video shows the main character in everyday scenarios, but each detail gives viewers an uncanny feeling.

Huang Mingchuan

Myth Trilogy: The Man from Island West

1989｜Color｜86min

A-Ming, a sinicized Atayal with an identity crisis, returns to his childhood home and attempts suicide. An older Atayal man saves his life and lets him stay in his riverside chicken coop. The older man and his son A-Chiang work at the mining site, but A-Chiang becomes increasingly unwilling to work and dreams of moving to Taipei, harboring imaginations about the city. The older man insists on staying in the village, and conflict silently festers between the two. Hsiu-Mei, a child prostitute who exudes urban sophistication, steals a large amount of money from a capitalist and escapes to the village, hoping to get married and settle down, and her prospective partner is her childhood sweetheart A-Chiang. The arrival of Hsiu-Mei brings gossip to the village, and her acts of wooing A-Chiang create anxiety about whether to leave the village at once. This story unfolds with the parallel and intertwined narratives of A-Ming and the ancestral spirits; most of the film is presented in the Atayal language.

Myth Trilogy: Bodo (Digitally Restored)

1993｜Color｜80min 國家電影及視聽文化中心提供

On a hot and humid summer’s day on the island, an orderly named A-Chi discovers the corpse of a company commander and finds an eerie sketchbook filled with strange and fanatic doodles in his trouser pocket. Since that day, the bizarre contents of the sketchbook start appearing in A-Chi’s life, eating away at his simple military life. The death of the company commander is closely connected to the soldier I-San, who has run away with a gun. The company commander’s girlfriend, Kang-Hua, is a famous beauty in the army, and she falls into the hands of the battalion commander not long after the company commander’s death. A-Chi finds Bodo, a mix-raced gangster with long hair near the sea; Bodo comes from Taiwan and arrives on the island to seek shelter and sell guns illegally. Bodo is the epitome of the erratic state of society and the army of Taiwan after the lifting of the Martial Law and is the only film created in the style of Magic Realism in the 1990s.

Myth Trilogy: Flat Tyre

1999｜Color｜74min 國家電影及視聽文化中心提供

A-Meng and Hsiao-Ning are estranged lovers. At first, Hsiao-Ning fell in love with A-Meng due to her fascination with his black-and-white photographs, but now the two are drifting apart because A-eng has devoted everything to documentaries. During the time that Hsiao-Ning moved to live in Hualien, A-Meng spent his entire days following the eccentric photographer Chien-Hsien, carrying a 16mm camera to document outdoor sculptures. The two travel to every corner of Taiwan, into the mountains and the sea. Throughout the process, the two discover that each outdoor sculpture reflects the political changes in Taiwan. This discovery leads the two into a deep reflection on history, which in turn inspires a series of humorous discussions between A-Meng and Chien-Hsien, who have distinct personalities.

SU Yu-Hsien

The Chair

2012｜Color｜21min

The Chair comes from an idea I had when I was little. I went outside to collect a lot of discarded cables and stealthily pulled out the badge of Mercedes-Benz from a Benz car. Later, I went home and put the chair upside down, decorating it with cables and the badge. I sat in the chair for a whole night. At that moment I believed that I had made a time machine. The event has been hovering around my mind for a long time. The desire of being an artist perfectly motivates me to do this work again. The chair may be a real time machine, or at least through the process of reproduction, it connects my childhood with the present. By means of being positioned as an art work, the trip from my studio to the gallery literally becomes my time travel in reality.

TSAI Ming-Liang

Stray Dogs

2013｜Color ｜138min

Hsiao-Kang is a good for nothing who holds signboards for a living. He smokes and pisses in the streets that are ever flowing with vehicles and pedestrians. The only people in his life are his two children. They eat together, brush their teeth together, get changed together and sleep together. They have no water or electrical supply and sleep on the same mattress with a head of cabbage, tightly embracing each other. The whole city has become a dumping ground for stray dogs and the river is far, far away. Then, one stormy night, he decides to take his children on a sailing trip.

Wang Jun-Jieh

Sin City 00:00:00:00

2013-2014｜Color｜17min

Sin City 00:00:00:00 is a video installation created in parallel with the technological media No Human Theater Sin City. A chase ensues for four characters (a female retail worker, a police officer, a young girl, and the manager of an international corporation) whose paths cross in the non-linear countdown of the final 24 hours till doomsday. They portray the flux of desire and ambiguity in the digital information age and in a capitalist world, and confront the realities of existence in an endless rheology of characters, objects, information, and civilization for the contemporary man.

HSU Che-Yu

Single Copy

2019｜Color｜21min

The first conjoined twins underwent separation surgery in 1979 and the whole procedure was broadcast on TV. During that period, Taiwan was under Martial Law. As such, this surgery was often

interpreted as a metaphor for the relationship between Taiwan and China. Back in 1979, in order to prepare for the separation surgery, the hospital invited an artist to make a cast of the conjoined twins. The attempt to make a cast was however unsuccessful, since it was difficult to control the babies during the moulding process.

In Single Copy, the artist re-casts the body of the now 43-year old Chang Chung-I, and also uses 3D scanning technology to archive his body. The data from the archive are then used as sources for capturing memories from Chang’s earlier life. Through this process, the artistI attempts to explore the workings of biopolitics and the functioning of one’s memory.

HSU Che-Yu

The Making of Crime Scenes

2022｜Color | 21min

In 1984, Taiwanese American writer Henry Liu was shot to death in his own house in the US by a Taiwanese assassin. Afterwards, this case was eventually confirmed to be a political murder jointly

committed by the Military Intelligence Bureau and the biggest mafia United Bamboo Gang in Taiwan. The assassin Wu Dun established a film company as a producer after he was released from prison, making several “wuxia (martial arts) movies.” The artist revisited the film studio, which was once used by Wu and is now deserted, to film wuxia scenes and collaborated with a 3D scanning team, who provides forensic scanning service at crime scenes, to reconstruct the work scenarios of Wu. This work seeks to reflect the collective unconsciousness in the political history of Taiwan through the gunman’s multiple roles—a filmmaker, a killer, a gangster, and a patriot.

LI Yi-Fan

howdoyouturnthison

2021｜Color｜17min

In howdoyouturnthison, Li Yi-Fan focuses on the evolution of image-making tools after the emergence of the virtual world. Using game engine and real-time image as his starting point, Li has developed his own image production toolkits, which he utilizes to produce narrative images in a more intuitive manner. With modern VR equipment and systems, he is able to “write down” images with a more intuitive and sensory approach, and thus interrogates the contemporary relationships among humans, technology, and images.

​台新藝術獎20週年大展

Taishin Arts Award 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Art & Artists

台新藝術獎20週年大展