“Soap” is an original online exhibition project by Chang Ting-Tong, which serves as his response to this pandemic period when physical activities are absent and social activities only available in the digital form.

Kadaververwertungsanstalt (literally the Carcass Utilization Factory) spread during WWI as his starting point. As a propagandist event, the rumor was deliberately spread by British intelligence agencies, who concocted and circulated the story of a secret factory in the depth of German forests that rendered down corpses of soldiers to produce soap for the German armies when materials were scarce. With sensationalizing illustrations and textual reports, the rumor combined conspiracy theory and prejudices against Germany to facilitate a shift of the public opinion during the war.

Different from most online exhibitions that reproduce physical space using the virtual form, Chang directly recreates a fictitious factory that only exists in fake news and never in real life. Afterwards, this reproduced information production center is encoded and constructed by a software engineer to be represented on the internet and transformed into a site-specific work in the digital world.

This project was part of the 3rd Dreamin' MoNTUE and was presented and experienced online. For this exhibition, the project is showcased through a collaboration with composer Hui Tak-Cheung and reimagines Soap through experimental music to present the single-channel video version.