When Islands Dream

2021 / 12 / 14 Tue.

2022 / 02 / 20 Sun.

10:00 - 18:00

  • Venue

    MoCA Stuido

  • Curator

    HSIEH Yu-Ting

  • Artists

    WANG Yu- Song
    Sean Trudi Hsu
    HUANG Hsiang- Yun
    Yannick DAUBY
    Emma DUSONG

About

On Beigan Island of Matsu, there is a custom of Dreaming Ceremony. On the 29th of the first lunar month, people go to temple to fall asleep and dream with their questions about the future. The images that appear in their dreams are the replies of the gods. Sometimes, when the questioner has difficulty falling asleep, a more sensitive "dreamer" may be appointed to ask a dream on their behalf to help receive the gods' instructions. Here, "dreaming" becomes a form of questioning, and it is not limited to one-to-one Q&A. The questioner gives away their subjectivity and invites the participation of the dreamer, to approach through a more sensitive and intuitive way. The exhibition When Islands Dream thus borrows the concept of "dreamer" from the Dreaming Ceremony, and considers whether it is possible for artists to play the role of the dreamer and to dream in place of Matsu. The poet Bai Ling once described the offshore islands as always serving the main island, "seemingly on the border, but always dreaming someone else's dream, unable to choose their own future.”By inviting artists who are "non-Matsu" or even "non-Taiwanese" to use Matsu as an anchor point for reflection, we attempt to revisit the islands as the military front line, which had experienced even longer-lasting and harsher martial law than the main island of Taiwan, with restrictions on transportation, currency, fishing sailing hours, and no lights at night. The various sacrifices made at the front line for a long time also made it difficult for the stance of "Kinmen-Matsu Abandonment" to be accepted by the islanders after the rise of Taiwanization. Yet the museums and relics that showcase the history of the "proudly defending the country" rarely touch upon such subtle emotions and ordinary experiences. Is it possible that dreams can be a gateway that allows us to get a little closer and explore the emotions and spiritual states that are hidden like underground tunnels? The exhibition invites five artists to Matsu to create artworks where they each respond to the exhibition theme with their unique approaches, forming different dreamscapes that echo one another. Whether they perceive the island in a personal and physical way, or collect the memories and perspectives of local residents, the artists try to treat the island as the main subject, while their personal perspectives still intersect with the residents and the place. And this very nature is where the unique value of “dreaming for others” lies—we are allowed to withdraw from ourselves to immerse in the state of the other, and then to return to ourselves to convey and interpret the dreams of others. So, welcome to the Matsu dreamland built by local, foreign, national, and international visions with your questions. Whether you are a Matsu native or familiar with Matsu or not, we hope that you will gain some insight through the visions of the artists, namely, the dreamers, which hopefully will lead to more realistic inquiries and exchanges.

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Artists

Hsiang-Yun Huang (X.Y. Huang)
Yannick Dauby
Sean Tully Hsu
Emma Dusong
Wang Yu-Song

Visual artist and researcher of contemporary art theory based in Taiwan and the Netherlands.
She has worked at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab as a coordinator and researcher and has since also cooperated with Taipei Digital Art Center and TheCube Project Space.
Besides research, she organizes and leads art education programs and creative workshops. She gave lectures at Lightbox PhotoLibrary and taught art courses at Onfoto Studio (Creative Photography Education Institution)
She completed her bachelor in Philosophy at National Taiwan University, before going on to graduate at the Film and Photographic Studies master at Leiden University(NL) with the thesis “The Treatment of Time in Cinema: A Case Study of Cinema of Long Take, Tsai-Ming Liang’s Stray Dogs (2013) and What Time Is It There? (2001)” employing a Deleuzian framework.

b. 1974, France/Taiwan.
Background in musique concrète and improvisation, using found objects, electroacoustic devices and phonographies.
As a sound recordist, he has particular interest for animals or nature sounds as well as urban/industrial situations and unusual acoustic phenomena. Excursions are pretext to a sonic gathering, and often leads to the realization of phonographic collages. He often collaborates with other musicians, visual artists and dancers, producing audio-visual performances, publications or installations. He is also an independent and awarded sound designer and sound mixer for cinema: documentary films, short films, fiction and experimental cinema.
He has based in Taiwan since 2007, interested into the field of anthropology and ecology, exploring the island's soundscape through artistic research, developing art projects in local communities (Hakka, Atayal) and documenting the fauna and its environment, creating art & science projects in collaborations with biologists. He has been involved in projects related to coral reefs in Penghu and mountain forests in Northern Taiwan.

Born and raised in Tainan, Sean Tully Hsu is a Butoh dancer and a student of Kazuo Ohno. He specializes in Butoh, modern dance, theater, and performance art, and works across choreography, performance, teaching, and consulting. His works are often based on the pure white body of Butoh, interpreted in a depressing, brutal, or painful way, touching the viewer through uncovered exposure and soul-searching questions.

Through human voices, spoken or sung, Emma Dusong seeks living experiences for the visitors. Since 2004, she has written mainly for her own voice. In 2020, she began to compose for other people’s voices to enrich her sound installations with various vocal colors.
Born in 1982 in France, Emma Dusong is based in Paris and Chamonix-Mont-Blanc. A graduate from the Superior National School of Fine Arts of Paris with honors of the jury, she is also a doctor in Sciences of Arts and Aesthetics and a University Senior lecturer. She writes about singing in contemporary art and cinema.
Since the early 2000s, she has shown her work in France and abroad (Centre Pompidou Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Louis Vuitton cultural space, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Cultural Foundation of Tinos…). She regularly has solo shows such as Free voice in Galerie Les filles du calvaire in 2019 and in arts centers (CRAC Occitanie, Sète, CAIRN, Digne-les-Bains) in 2016. Her works are collected by public institutions as well as private collections such as the Maison Bernard endowment fund for which she made an in situ vocal piece for Antti Lovag’s architecture.
In 2008, she received the agnès b. prize for her work. In 2017, Annette Messager (Golden Lion Award winner) presented her work in Annette Messager's favorites, a documentary for the French/German television channel arte. In 2020, she was appointed Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. She was in residency at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid in 2020-2021.
When Islands Dream is her first group show in Taiwan.

Born in Hualien in 1994, Wang Yu-Song is currently a student at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. He received a B.A. in printmaking from the School of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts in 2016, and graduated from Hualien Senior High School in 2012. A mixed-media artist, he aims at exploring various possibilities of creation in everyday lives through lived experience and personal observations. During his college years, Wang was devoted to pondering the respective medium specificity of painting and printmaking, and at the same time attempted to come close to the essence of things with artistic practices other than these two mediums. His works often incorporate affects, physical sensations, and spatial elements. His recent works focus on the “past” that has existed, the “now” that is happening, and the “future” that may take place. Wang likes to explore the ambiguous zone between fiction and reality through his own living environment, lived experience, and to a greater extent, social consciousness and relationships in groups. Through objects, images or particular spatial configurations, his works invite the viewers to open up all their senses and read and interpret the works with their own imagination.

Artworks

Winding Islands, Revolving Dreams
Days in the Lighthouse I
Memory Punctum: Photography & Cartography Workshop
She heard nothing in Matsu. She heard everything.
Facing You (Měing-hyong nȳ)
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