Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all. –André Breton “Nadja”, 1928 Project Rrose is a series of works that pays homage to indifference. It also revisits the outdated question of “what is art?”. This series began in 2009. Based on Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage, the last large-scale installation of French artist Marcel Duchamp, it examined issues of desire, eroticism, fear, mystery, nature and death. The imagined scenarios inspired by Duchamp’s work suggest seen and unseen eros. They are a kind of expanded narrative imagination. The long concealed issues related to civilization can only be revealed through the seemingly trivial things of everyday life. Regarding the question of the functions of art in the present age, there is no more pure aesthetic art. But if we take away its visual aspects, form and techniques, what is left of art except for a shell that gives retinal pleasure and the flow of money? Repressed eros is like civilization that has been heterogenized, and the role of art in it has become increasingly ambiguous. Can art be liberated from repression in contemporary society? Indifferent Sélavy, the final chapter of Project Rrose, takes its cue from the origin of Rrose Sélavy, the pseudonym of Duchamp dressed as a woman in the 1920s: it explores ambiguous identities and social relations, as well as playfully mocks the present civilization. It also dispenses with the aesthetics of art. Rrose Sélavy was the means by which Duchamp responded to his generation, and a symbol of his maverick stance. Like a soul that has separated from the body, Sélavy steals into the world with multiple identities. Her gender is irrelevant. She is like a ghost that purifies this world. This is reminiscent of Surrealism, a movement contemporary with Duchamp’s times that attempted to break with the prevailing values and logic, using creative destruction to warn against the complacency of the times. Indifferent Sélavy creates a secluded room that is on the verge of destruction. Through the entrance of ambivalent and melancholic characters, including Sélavy, Nadja and Dora, it depicts feelings of repression, wanderings, indifference and alienation, as well as a crazy passionate state that stands opposed to the outside world. A stone pillar that inexplicably breaks and erupts into fire, androgynous portraits and a diary that resembles a storyboard…Like the exhibits in a surrealist museum, it is a metaphor for the chaos and entanglement of the present world. The wanderers in the room truly belong to the contemporary age. They are misfits and incapable of adapting to the times. However, dissent and dark marginal zones actually open up the possibility of escape from the present chaos, just like the way madness opens a way out. Only after disintegration and destruction can light penetrate through, even though darkness is never far away.