Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Online Exhibit：

Amy Cheng (Curator)

Dear visitors, welcome to the “liquid modern world!”

●Liquid Love, the title of this exhibition, owes its inspiration to the book by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003). This exhibition re-thinks and explores the experiences of contemporary life in network society through the lens of Bauman’s reflective thinking on the modern world.

●Bauman coined the term “liquid modernity” to characterize our life experiences, as they are shaped and dominated by the flow of financial capital and big data, accompanied by the artificial manipulations and ubiquitous algorithms, and the incorporation of state-of-the-art telecommunications technology today. These experiences and features were exactly what Bauman devoted a lifetime to analyzing.

●Just as Bauman argued, we are inhabitants of the liquid modern world in the information age. In this exhibition, we treat the creative thought and practice of art as an alternative and conceptual means for a new round of dialectical reflection on the world we live in.

●Citing the clues that 19th-century poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire left behind in Le Spleen de Paris, Bauman expounded his idea of non-linear liquid temporality at the outset of Liquid Love. Baudelaire wrote: “My dear friend, I send you a small work of which one could say, not unjustly, that it has neither head nor tail, since everything in it is on the contrary a head and a tail, alternatively and reciprocally. […] We may cut short […] because I do not hold the tiring will of any of them endlessly to a superfluous plot.”

●Similarly, this exhibition seeks to immerse the visitors in the reading and perceptual context of “multiple nodes” and “synchronicity,” thereby helping us reflect on today’s infoxication syndromes, yet allowing us to “envision” society from the perspective of the Baudelairean flâneurs.

●This exhibition encourages visitors to both bodily and consciously shuttle “inside” and “outside” of the time and space constructed by the works, which may prove an interesting way to grasp the concept of “liquid society.” In the 20th century, humanity witnessed the transition of society from the industrial to the post-industrial, in which the modern living experience was described as “solid”—moving from corporeality and material-based spatial transformation (e.g., from agricultural villages to urban cities) and the process of material production (humans on countless assembly lines) towards the “media revolution” of time, speed, transmission, and communication in the era of consumption and telecommunication.

●Confronted with the turbulence and changes in their quotidian relationships at the dawn of the industrial age, people tended to feel deeply uncertain about their individual and collective future. Cogitating the beginning of the industrial age, Karl Marx wrote the following words in 1848, now legendary: “All that is solid melts into air,” a sentence as thought-provoking as empirically imaginable when placed in today’s context.

●In the liquid society, people pursue velocity and variation, and emphasize mobility and lightness.

●Therefore, we are undergoing a revolution in the relationships between people, between human beings and objects, as well as between humanity and the world, through which we expect to transcend the confines of “fixed” relational ties and embrace an imaginary future as changing as expanding. Such a zeitgeist is not only altering people’s mind and conscious, but also drastically reshaping the politics of every society and social stratum.

●The future is now ! has become a reality.

●According to the results of searching for the phrase on the Google search engine, the phrase, “The future is now.” originates from the title of a short documentary in 1955 which gave prominence to future-oriented, advanced products in U.S. government labs, such as the video telephone, home video recorder, electronic composing system, pocket radio, and wrist radio.

●Indeed, the future is now, and some scenarios of “future” have even become the past. We live in the future, or, to put it another way, our “present” is the “future” in the making.

●How did the interpersonal relationship between humans, as well as that between humanity and the world change? Bauman discussed the relationships “in the clouds” in Liquid Love: People have unquenchable thirst for close “connections” (social bond) on the one hand, and ask for the “freedom” to be detached anytime on the other. He invoked the metaphor of love to tackle the relationships and the collapse of traditional values in the age of information and consumption.

●In other words, as technological products such as electronic media, the Internet, and smartphones become part of the quotidian existence of half the global population in the contemporary world, we expect to be online anytime so that we can become connected with others in an easy, unhindered fashion, yet we also want to be capable of being offline and severing the social ties with others if necessary.

●The previous ideal of a relationship as strong as diamond has been liquefied today. “Be water, my friend,” Bruce Lee said in a TV interview in 1971. This quote embodied his spirit, and, more thought-provoking, it implied the “art of ‘being’” in contemporary liquid life.

●The question to be addressed in this exhibition: what counts as the “covenant relationship” in contemporary liquid life? The seven participating artists in this exhibition outline seven different scenarios for the visitors.

●Egyptian artist Hassan Khan’s work The Infinite Hip-Hop Song is an algorithmic product. Once the computer boots up, it produces an endless, non-repetitive stream of hip-hop songs. The artist derives the vocals from the pre-recorded tracks by many hip-hop singers. This automatic composing system bears more than a passing resemblance to an autopoietic “organism.”

●In his work Drinking from the Spring of Liquid Love, Japanese musician/artist dj sniff gathers songs whose titles and lyrics contain the term “liquid love” from a huge volume of online information. The length of the “collected data” is about half a day. The artist remixes these songs into a “new work,” and then plays it via the reconnection of a set of repurposed sound objects like turntable, cassette player, spring, and amplifier. After layers of deconstruction and reconstruction, the source material becomes unintelligible to the visitors as “sound signals” and a new song engraved onto vinyl.

●German artist Hito Steyerl’s work Liquidity Inc.can be interpreted as a survival strategy for individuals in face of the unstable and uncertain future (e.g., financial and market fluctuations or economic recession) in the liquid world. Bearing the signature of Steyerl’s message-based image, the protagonist in this work is a financial analyst who has been unemployed since the global financial crisis and implied to embody Bruce Lee’s philosophy of life: “Be water.” Steyerl also created an “immersive” environment for the visitors, as if they were temporarily sitting on the seats “amidst waves” to experience this work.

●Chung-Han Yao’s work Feel the Space seeks to investigate the parallel evolution of the real world and the cyberspace. The artist recorded several outdoor DJ performances in Taipei, and these recordings are played back in the exhibition venue between the same hours of a day as those of the real events. Nonetheless, the visitors can only hear the ambient sound in the exhibition venue. They must go on the Internet via their smartphones to attend the “scene of performances” if they want to listen to the music played by the artist. Their visual and auditory senses thus simultaneously overlap each other and become displaced in the real world and the cyberspace. Ergo, the visitors shuttle between two disparate worlds by means of changes in the way of listening.

●Hao Ni’s work Structure Study VIis a six-channel video work. The artist firstly edited the video footages of events such as disasters, conflicts, factory machines, explosions, and running animals he collected from YouTube into three parts. Then he invited three drummers to imitate the situations that the images indicate. The artist edited these video footages in a way as if he were “composing music,” producing a symphony of impassioned, fierce images and sounds with a subtle touch of order. This work allows the visitors to feel the powerful impact of massive images in the cyberspace.

●Yu-Chen Wang’s multimedia installation If There Is a Place I Haven’t Been To follows her consistent surrealist style, offering astute observations to the industrial development and scientific thoughts of all stripes in the contemporary society, and meanwhile interpreting them in a wonderfully imaginative fashion, insofar as to engage in dialogues with memories, histories, as well as different people, events and things. Wang’s painting features an ecological system composed of gorgeous creatures and machines. She ingeniously blends the files, images and sounds she collected into the multiple storylines and perspectives of this work, shaping a concatenation of autobiography-like “temporal landscapes” that engulf visitors.

●Chi-Yu Wu’s work The LED Futureis a black futurist sci-fi image. The artist created a world in his imagination where the natural source of light (i.e., the Sun) has completely burned out, and we have no choice but to depend on the artificial source of light (i.e., LEDs) for survival. Apart from serving as the source of light and representing images nowadays, the extensively used LEDs have become the primary terminal interface for messages and signals—LEDs replaced God-created light, becoming the fountainhead that shapes memories and consciousness. The artist utilizes such imagination to reflect on the development of human history and civilization.

●Dear visitors, as we immerse ourselves in the lapping of images, sounds and messages, and enjoy the high-speed mobility and exchange of body or consciousness, we’ve forged a symbiotic relationship with countless individuals. The world in which artificial intelligence replaces natural perception keeps thriving. How can we re-explore ourselves and our relations to the community amid these dazzling and stunning situations? Perhaps it is the very question we should try to answer as we share love in the clouds and live in the liquid world.

As a researcher in the field of sound culture and the co-founder of TheCube Project Space (Taipei-based, non-profit), Jeph Lo has devoted long-term attention to the development of indie music, experimental music, as well as sound art and culture in Taiwan. He used to write special reports on the thriving indie music in Taipei for weekly and periodicals in the 1990s. He edited Walk the Music: Taipei Music Map since ‘90 (2000) and translatedAltered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (2002). Besides, he co-curated the exhibition Altering Nativism─Sound Cultures in Post-war Taiwan (2014) and worked as the chief editor of the exhibition’s catalogue. Moreover, he is the chief organizer of the website Sound Traces: Taiwan Modern Sound Culture Archive (soundtraces.tw) and the online-streaming Talking Drums Radio.

Dayang Yraola (b.1976) is a curator from Manila, Philippines. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Philippine Studies and Master of Arts in Museum Studies from the University of the Philippines, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies from Lingnan University Hong Kong.

She is former Archivist and Collections Manager of the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology (2006-2015); curator of Jose Maceda Exhibit Series Stamped/ Transi(en)t(2011-2015) and Composite Performance/ Noise(s)/ Circuits(2015-2018); and at present an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts.

Dayang’s curatorial focus is on process as media (archival and laboratory), technology as media (analogue, digital, mechanical, electronic), and senses as media; with research on ecology of art practices (art residencies, sound practice communities), and sounding and listening cultures (Sonic Manila Research, since 2014).

Chee-Wai Yuen is a musician, artist, designer and curator based in Singapore. Born in 1975. Often inspired by ideas drawn from philosophical and literary texts, and perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, Yuen’s stylistic oeuvre in improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility and indeterminacy. 

In 2008, he teamed with Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (South Korea), and Yan Jun (China) to form the improvised music quartet, FEN (Far East Network). FEN focuses on the continuing multifaceted networks and collaborations between Asian countries. Since its inception in 2014, Yuen is part of Ensembles Asia as Project Director for Asian Music Network, to which he co-curates the annual Asian Meeting Festival (AMF) with dj sniff in Japan. 
 
He is also a member of the avant-rock band The Observatory (Singapore), with whom he plays guitar, synth and electronics. With thirteen albums to date, his latest album Authority is Alive (2020) is a collaboration with Haino Keiji. The Observatory has also conceived a vanguard of initiatives such as the annual festival Playfreely, which gives artists new creative venues for performing and working together. Through Playfreely, he is also the co-curator of Nusasonic, a multi-year project that plunges into a broad spectrum of experimental sound and music cultures in Southeast Asia, enabling dialogue within the region, with Europe, and beyond. 

He continues to tour extensively with FEN and The Observatory, performing in Europe, America and Asia regularly, and has presented in MIMI Festival, Lausanne Underground Music and Film Festival, All Ears Festival, Ftarri Festival, Gwangju Biennale and CTM Festival.

Born in 1978 in Malaysia, she now lives and works in Taipei. Au’s works focus mainly in questioning, exploring as well as expanding the relation between images, image making, history, politics and power, through video installations and other mediums. Sow-Yee’s recent works focus on re-imagined history of Malaysia, South-east Asia and its related region from perceptions and ideologies bounded by the Cold War.

She is a finalist for the 2018 Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize and Han Nefkens Foundation - Loop Barcelona Video Art Award 2018. Sow-Yee’s works were exhibited in MMCA (Seoul), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), HKW (Berlin), Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, Singapore Film Festival among others. Sow-Yee is a guest writer for online magazine No Man’s Land and co-founded Kuala Lumpur’s Rumah Attap Library and Collective in 2017.

Born and currently lives in Taipei. Teng graduated from the Media Arts and Sciences program from MIT School of Architecture and Planning. He had been invited to be the resident artist at Villa Arson (France, 2009) and Para Site (Hong Kong, 2014). Recently shows (selected) include Taipei Biennial (Taiwan, 2012), Dojima River Biennial (Japan, 2013), ALTERing-NATIVism—Sound Cultures in Post-War Taiwan (Taiwan, 2014),Discordant Harmony (Art Sonje Center, Korea, 2015),RR ZZ(Gluck 50, Italy, 2015),Hiroshima Trilogy: Part III (Hiroshima MOCA, Japan, 2015),Public Spirits (Warsaw CCA, Poland, 2016),Metahistory (TKG+ Gallery, Taiwan, 2018), Mercurial Boundaries(Museum of NTUE, Taiwan, 2019) and Rotating Exploded View Diagram of Historiography(Galerie Nichido, Taiwan, 2019).

Ujikaji is a curatorial project in the form of an experimental music label, mail order and event organiser. Its key interest is in bringing to fore sounds and sound cultures which may be marginal, ignored or forgotten. Recent music releases on vinyl, cassette and digital include albums by FEN, Pupa, The Observatory and Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. Ujikaji co-presents the acclaimed BlackKaji series of experimental sound events, which is equally comfortable with holding intimate studio gigs as it is staging mid-size festivals.

Amy Cheng is a curator and writer based in Taipei. She co-founded TheCube Project Space with Jeph Lo in 2010, which serves as an independent art space devoted to research, production and presentation of contemporary art in Taipei. Her curatorial practice centers on the historical and geopolitical relations between Asia and the world in the contemporary scene. With the aim of delving into local culture and establishing long-term relationships with artists, she explores the possibility of “expanding curating.”

Recent exhibitions curated by Amy Cheng include: The Ouroboros(2019, Taipei, Luxembourg), Towards Mysterious Realities (2016–2018, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul), the exhibition series Re-envisioning Society(2011–2013, Taipei), and The Heard and the Unheard: Soundscape Taiwan, Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition－La Biennale di Venezi (2011). She also co-curated exhibitions such as Tell Me a Story: Locality and Narrative (2016, 2018, Shanghai, Torino) and ALTERing NATIVism－Sound Cultures in Post-War Taiwan(2014, Taipei, Kaohsiung). Cheng has been appointed as the jury member of the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2017) and of the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award (2015).

Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer who is known for his broad and diverse artistic practice that includes music, performance, moving and still image, sculpture, installation and text. Khan’s work engages with both familiar, shared conditions as well as elusive and undisclosed to produce forms that excite the imagination, raise fundamental questions, channel simmering undercurrents, seduce and alienate, engage with expectations, pose mysteries as well as help re-articulate our experiences with the shifting structures of power.

In 2017, his work was exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennale at the Giardino delle Vergini (Arsenal) and was awarded the Silver Lion for a promising young artist in the International Exhibition Viva Arte Viva. A new version of Composition for a Public Park,the celebrated installation at the 57th Venice Biennale, has been inaugurated at the Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, in October 2019.

Hassan Khan’s notable solo exhibitions include The Keys to the Kingdom, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2019-2020); Host, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany (2019-2020); The Portrait is an Address, Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon (2016). He also participated in dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), Sharjah Biennale (2015), New Museum Triennale (2012), Manifesta 8 (2010), the 3rd Yokohama Triennale (2008) and Gwangju Biennale (2008) amongst many other international group shows.

As a musician and performer, he regularly performs his music live, for example at the Ruhrtriennale, Essen (2018), the Intonal Festival Malmö (2017), and the Guggenheim Museum New York (2016). His most recent publication An Anthology of Published and Unpublished Writings is co-published by Staedelschule and Koenig Books and his latest album SUPERSTRUCTURE EP was released in 2019 by The Vinyl Factory.

dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) is a musician and curator in the field of experimental electronic arts and improvised music. His musical work builds upon a distinct practice that combines DJing, instrument design, and free improvisation. His collaborations include Evan Parker, Otomo Yoshihide, Martin Tetreault, Paul Hubweber, Tarek Atoui, and Senyawa. He was the Artistic Director of STEIM in Amsterdam between 2007 to 2012 and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University Hong Kong between 2012 to 2017. He is now based in Tokyo where he is the Co-Director of AMF (Asian Meeting Festival) — a festival that aims to bring together experimental music practices in Asia and teaches at Kyoto Seika University.

Hao Ni (b. 1989, Hsinchu city, Taiwan) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Originally trained as a sculptor, Ni's work often combines sculpture, installation, video and sound performance that explores the continuously changing power systems and structures that control the world and our daily existence within them.

Hao Ni's work has been featured in exhibitions at places like Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston; 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford; and the Queens Museum, New York. His recent solo exhibitions include Ambush at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Siege at T293 in Rome, and Trust me Love me at Gallery VACANCY in Shanghai. Hao Ni’s Structure Study V was exhibited in Aujourd’hui aura lieu at the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project, 2018. In 2019, Hao Ni's Structure Study I was acquired by MMCA Seoul (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea) and will be included in its upcoming exhibition in 2020.

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Hito Steyerl was born in 1966 in Munich. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Steyerl has studied at the Academy of Visual Arts, Tokyo and the University of Television and Film, Munich. She also completed a doctorate in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Steyerl is the recipient of the 2019 Käthe Kollwitz Prize from Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 2015, Steyerl was awarded the EYE Prize from the EYE Film Institute Netherlands and the Paddy & Joan Leigh Fermor Arts Fund. In 2010, she received the New:Vision Award from the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival.

The artist’s recent solo exhibitions include Hito Steyerl: Drill, Park Avenue Armory, New York (2019); Power Plants, Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Hito Steyerl,Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2019); The City of Broken Windows, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2018); Liquidity Inc., The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); Factory of the Sun, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); The Distributed Image, LUMA Foundation, Arles (2016); Too Much World, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016).

From 2014 to 2017, Steyerl co-founded the Research Centre for Proxy Politics at the University of Arts Berlin. The initiative led a series of workshops and in 2017, it concluded with a final conference, The Proxy and Its Politics, and the publication of Proxy Politics, Power and Subversion in a Networked Age(Archive Books, Berlin).

The work of Yu-Chen Wang asks fundamental questions about human identity at a key point in history, where ecosystems and techno-systems have become inextricably intertwined. At the same time, her Taiwanese origins, combined with a London-based practice, have created a vision that is personal and autobiographical. Her central practice is drawing, allowing her to explore and meditate on mechanical and biological forms, and the ways in which their bodily borderlines blur and mutate. From these extemporizations, she then finds collaborative routes that take her work into the realms of fictional text, provoking the subsequent production of sculptural installation, performance, music, and film in various combinations.
 
She has exhibited internationally, including at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2020) ; Science Gallery Dublin (2020); iMAL, Brussels (2020); CCCB, Barcelona (2019); Tbilisi Triennial (2018); FACT, Liverpool (2017); CFCCA, Manchester (2016);  Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2016); Manchester Art Gallery (2016); Yeo Workshop (Singapore, 2015);  Taipei Biennial (2014); Hayward Gallery (London, 2014). She was an artist-in-residence at Taipei Artist Village (2019); Seoul Museum of Art (2017); Drawing Room, London (2016-17); Science and Industry Museum (Manchester, 2015). 

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Chi-Yu Wu born in 1986, is an artist based in Taipei, Taiwan. Chi-Yu’s work has long been focusing on re-establishing the connections among humans, things, animals, and the ruined world left by technic capitalism. His practice revolves around the moving image, looking for contemporary narratives in lost memory through the reproducing of oral history and myths. He is also involved in different collaboration projects of installation, video installation, and performance.

The exhibitions he once participated include: The Ouroboros(TheCube Project Space, Taipei/ Casino Luxembourg, 2019); Serious Games (HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019); 12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2018); Trans-Justice (MoCA, Taipei, 2018); Crush (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2018); Taipei Biennial (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2016); The 2nd CAFAM Future Exhibition (CAFA Art Museum, Beijing 2015). His films have been screened at Short Film Program-Art Basel Hong Kong (2019); Beijing International Short Film Festival (2017); EXiS Festival (Seoul, 2017); Arkipel Festival (Jakarta, 2016). He had a solo show: 91 Square Meters of Time (TKG+ Project, Taipei, 2017) and was a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2014-2015).

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Chung-Han Yao is an artist, music composer, DJ and assistant professor at the Department of Architecture of Shih-Chien University. Creative practice is a part of Chung-Han Yao's life, from the seemingly broken fluorescent lamps to the vibrant light; from the deconstructed sound art composing to the dance music production; from the framed works to the reflection on the spatial scale.... He employs the corresponding and contrasting relations of light and sound to trigger viewers’ imagination of physical senses.

Yao has won the First Prize in Sound Art in Digital Art Festival Taipei (2008), Honorable Mention in Taipei Art Awards (2017), and has participated in Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2009), NTT ICC-Emergencies!014, Tokyo (2010), STEIM - Massive Light Boner, Amsterdam (2010), City Sonic: International Sound Art(s) Festival, Belgium (2015), Beyond the Frame: New Media Arts from Taiwan, Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2016), and The Way Things Go, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2016).


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