Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

2017 Street Fun, Fun Street－MOCA X Community Art Festival The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Taipei began collaborating with the people from the Zhongshan and Shuanglian neighborhood in 2012, forming an interactive relationship with the community through art. Throughout these six years of on-site implementations, MOCA’s dedication in advocating a “wall-less art museum” has clearly taken root in the area’s streets and alleyways. Many talents working in the creative cultural industry have moved into the area, with changes also observed in the lifestyle of the local residents and qualitative changes made possible for the community as whole. As the entire cluster of community is moving towards a new future, the art project serves to facilitate the energy that is propelling the changes, while also preserving the essence of past cultures. It simultaneously pushes forward spatial and temporal shifts and also seeks to capture fleeting yet eternal sparkling glimmers. Under such state of dynamic equilibrium, through the push-and-pull, scenes of stabilized segments of space-time are captured from people’s everyday activities in the community, and these extended segments seem to be moving landscapes lingering from residual visual effects, giving shape the community’s history. The art project evokes butterfly effects, prompting essential commotions in the dynamic balance. Through the ripples stirred in the existing structure, these artworks sparking the commotions seek to further examine the process of change observed with the deconstruction and reconstruction of the community’s former order. Looking back at the past six years, we are making a new turn this time and have invited eight sets of artists to study and do collaborative work in the area surrounding MOCA, Taipei, radiating outwards with the museum acting as the geographical center. Furthermore, using the mutual trust and relationships that the museum has established through our years of working with our neighboring community, the artists are invited to condense contemporary art’s social focus into the community, inciting direct physical contact with the people, engaging in collaborative experiments and on-site practices based on those people’s everyday lifestyles. The aim is to create a series of artworks by blending together each other’s energies and through interacting with the community’s people, occurrences, and things. As the autumn sun still shines gloriously, stroll through the area’s alleys and byways to find these artworks, with communal memories of the local people blended with small delights offered to the visitors, as these artworks fit in perfectly into our everyday lives. Although the city continues to shift and change, there are always certain constant values that never seem to waver with steady contributions extended, enduringly. Those people, those stories dwell on the streets of this community and have come to form a landscape in this autumn season that holds a vitality that is slowly trickling outwards.