[{"content":"The current Thailand Biennale made extensive use of abandoned buildings and renovation sites, commissioning a wealth of new works. I found myself drawn to the question of how these spaces were ‘cared for’ by the curators. Ideally, this manifests as a profound resonance between the artist’s inspiration and the site’s history, or perhaps through dedicated field research, both guided by the curator’s careful arrangement. This was a triumph in the last Biennale in Chiang Rai, but in Phuket, the connection felt thinner; many sites appeared as nothing more than empty shells for display. Of course, curatorial reality is full of practical constraints. In Phuket, the progress of commissioning artists did not align with the timeline for securing venues, implying that commissioned artists likely had no opportunity to engage with their specific exhibition sites before their works were produced. Furthermore, the scope of their research was not strictly anchored to their assigned locations, as artists were free to explore themes across the wider Phuket region. Coupled with the lack of a strong local art scene, it was hard to find artists with deep roots, and international guests often lacked the time to truly sink into the locale.\nWalking in one of the venues, the Yi Teng Complex, a former slaughterhouse turned abandoned market where once a refuge for the homeless and now a canvas for graffiti, I noticed a red brick wall where one window was roughly boarded up while the other acted as a natural lightbox for conservation photography. The collision — the raw street art versus the attempt to construct a white cube by sealing off the building’s original breath — caught my attention. Between the unwashed graffiti, the cage-like fixtures, and the flooded basement filled with trash and fish, I felt the presence of ‘ghosts’: the echoes of a life that was, and still is, unfolding in these ruins.\nYi Teng Complex, Phuket (all photo by author) I began to wonder: what if we let the ghosts of these ruins tell the story? It would be fascinating to hear these specters comment on how the Biennale has occupied their spaces.\nAt DC Phuket Town, a traditional shophouse, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s sculptures on the ground floor feel warm and lived-in. Upon entering the old house, the coolness offered by the courtyard stood in contrast to the shimmering heat rising from the streets, instantly evoking memories of summer afternoons in the Taiwanese countryside, an intimacy and nostalgia of visiting my grandparents’ home. These sculptures originated from the dogs Rasdjarmrearnsook lived with in her later years; she once noted that retreating from human society to live among animals allowed her to become more truly herself. Rather than a mere reproduction of companions, the work radiates an aura of home that fills the surroundings. Elevated on furniture supported in mid-air, the dog sculptures cradle memories and the past with a delicate lightness, blending seamlessly into the cozy environment of the shophouse.\nSweet Naive Buoyancy series, 2025, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (all photo by author) But as one moves to the second floor, Wilawan Wiangthong’s stark, cyber-themed works on labor fill the space with a jarring palette. The piece explores the struggles of female migrant workers within Phuket’s tourism industry, adopting the visual language of video games, high-tech armor, and science fiction. To me, a far more suitable venue for this work would have been the Imperial 2 Hotel, another Biennale site addressing similar themes through its related history. This sense of dissonance suggests that this commissioned art was not truly in sync with its surroundings — a gap that the ancient spirits of the house might find impossible to bridge.\nTitani, 2025, Wilawan Wiangthong (Photo by Author) Turning back to the Yi Teng Complex, I found three ghosts wandering through the abandoned market. The specters of longing come from the merchants who once anticipated the market’s renovation. Even after it closed, their commercial desire never departed; the cafes and small shops nearby still manifest the restless agitation of these longing ghosts. The spirits of vitality reside in the graffiti, stickers, and symbols that claimed forbidden surfaces to breathe life into the silence. This spirit of self-assertion has never been absent and will continue into the future. The drifting shadows follow those who move between dwellings. Every stop is merely temporary. Even with nowhere to roost, these shadows hold onto memories of the places where they once rested.\nPratchaya Phinthong presents ‘water~copy airstreak,’ a multi-media installation combining video, sound, field research, and ecological intervention at the Yi Teng Complex. The site is filled with the simulated calls of swiftlets and an array of wooden joists installed to encourage these birds to nest and inhabit the space in the future. Furthermore, drawing on recent marine biology research, the artist transmits underwater recordings of healthy coral ecosystems to a decaying reef off the coast of Phuket to accelerate its regeneration. In the exhibition space, underwater footage of this scientific research is projected against the backdrop of the market’s trash-accumulated stagnant water, creating a dialogue with the derelict building’s own aquatic ecology.\nwater~ copy~ air~ streak, 2025, Pratchaya Phinthong (Photo by Elsie Lam) At first glance, this exploration of “non-human economies and the politics of cohabitation” (as described in the Biennale guide) might seem disconnected from the abandoned market. However, I believe the three spectral forces present at the site find a resonance within this artwork. The choice of swiftlets — a bird whose nests hold economic value — directly echoes the local, unceasing longing for commercial revival. The spontaneous migration and habitation of the swiftlets imprint their presence upon the environment in their own way. The movement of birds through the city mirrors the trajectory of those groups of people perpetually existing in a state of uncertainty within urban civilization. This same desire for survival, the momentum of imprinting oneself, and the constant flux of migration happened in the coral reef regeneration. Seen through the eyes of these ghosts, ‘water~copy airstreak’ becomes a fitting annotation of local history and lived experience. While it cannot fully capture every facet of the site’s hauntings, perhaps these ghosts are willing to quietly observe how the space that once belonged to them is now, through contemporary art, inhabited.\n🔺\n","date":"2026-03-26T00:00:00Z","image":"/post/they-crouch-in-a-silent-gaze/cover2.png","permalink":"/post/they-crouch-in-a-silent-gaze/","title":"They Crouch in a Silent Gaze"},{"content":"When an artwork promises to sense the insensible, it engages in a profound semantic struggle. Dark matter haunts the universe through its refusal to appear, a ghost in physics detectable only by its gravitational footprint yet silent to the visible spectrum. My approach to Su Wen-Chi 蘇文琪 and YILAB’s Sensing Dark Matter 暗宇之感 was therefore charged with a specific anticipation. I did not expect a literal scientific visualization, nor did I await a mystical seance. Rather, I anticipated a rupture , a disconnection from mundane sensory reality that would prepare me to explore a new regime of perception. Yet, as I emerged from the experience — a duality of dance video and VR journey — I was left suspended in a lingering ambiguity. Had I truly developed a new cognitive framework for the cosmos, or had I merely traversed a constructed, aesthetically pleasing void? The answer, I realized, lay not in the artists’ intentional cues, but in an inadvertent choreography of my own body, triggered by the very absence of sensation.\nThe inquiry begins with the dance video, situated within the stark, subterranean Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory in Australia. We witness dancer Tien Hsiao-Tzu 田孝慈, clad in Klein Blue, navigating a high-tech cavern of aggressive whiteness. She moves amidst a constellation of scientific apparatuses. As the camera captures her tactile interactions with the walls, meters, and conduits, I was instinctively anchored in a terrestrial experience. I projected my own memories of lab rooms — or cinematic depictions of laboratories familiar to a general audience — onto the video, grounding the perception in the tangible machinery rather than the cosmic unknown.\nThis reliance on environmental feedback is not merely a viewer’s projection but a stated methodology. In interviews regarding this work1, Su Wen-Chi described the team’s process as an improvisational exploration of the cave’s humidity, temperature, and acoustics. Team member Hsieh Wen-Yi 謝文毅 used 3D scanners to reconstruct the tunnels and lab spaces, while Wu Ping-Sheng 吳秉聖 captured the shape of the sound fields. Dancer Tien Hsiao-Tzu similarly noted that the rock walls, high-ceilinged space, and atmospheric shifts triggered her intuitive response. This approach extends into the work’s second component, the VR, which Su describes as a technological reconstruction allowing the audience to “enter” the cave and the colossal detector. Consequently, as we fly through the chandelier-like structure of the recreated detector in VR, we gain a deeper understanding of the facility, yet dark matter remains hidden in an inaccessible elsewhere. Narrative and visual cues highlight site attributes like humidity and infrastructure. However, these are man-made or geological conditions, not emanations of dark matter. Thus, the work appears to be capturing the features of the laboratory, rather than an encounter with dark matter itself.\nTo navigate this skepticism, I turn to the theoretical framework of Karen Barad’s Agential Realism2. Challenging the classical view of measurement as recording pre-existing facts, Barad draws on quantum mechanics3 to argue that reality emerges only at the moment of an “agential cut.4” Before this cut, there are no fixed boundaries — not even between the measurer and the measured; it is only after the agential cut that a specific reality is determined. Measurement is therefore not an idle recording of independent facts but an active participation in their generation. Viewing the work through this lens, the dancer needs not compete with scientific indexicality5 because her dance, as a unique agential cut, is the measurement event itself. The question shifts from “Is there a direct link to the object?” to “What is the specificity of this agential cut?” Even if Tien’s somatic feedback is triggered by the laboratory’s humidity and the hum of machinery, these are the particular facts around this specific agential cut. Her body — flesh, sweat, and proprioception — entangled with these conditioning elements, collapses the possibilities of the dark matter into a singular, determinate measurement.\nHowever, a sharp dissonance arises when the potential richness of this dance was translated into the visual representation. Whether in the video’s post-production or the subsequent VR experience, the visual language retreats into swarms of drifting white light points. Here lies the work’s most significant aesthetic limitation. Rendering the unknown into particles activates the audience’s pre-existing cognitive anchors from basic physics education that we see the world as composed of electrons, protons, photons, etc. While dark matter research indeed leans toward particle physics, this artistic choice semantically narrows the subject. It reduces the profound mystery of dark matter into a generic variable, a vacant signifier, or a placeholder. These particles become empty containers: they signify science in a general sense but fail to carry the specific weight, tension, and entanglement of the dancer’s unique labor in the underground lab. The visual cleanliness of the VR particles sanitizes the messy reality of the agential cut I had just theoretically validated. I found myself recognizing the image of physics, but not acquiring a new imagination for the dark matter itself.\nThis visual flattening brings me to the core of the medium: Virtual Reality. My expectation for VR in this context was rooted in its potential as a somatic bridge. Since I cannot physically inhabit the dancer’s body or visit the Australian underground, I expected VR — functioning as a trans-corporeal medium — to manipulate my senses to approximate the tension, gravity, and resistance Tien experienced. I expected the technology to translate the fleshiness of the dancer into a tangible sensation for the seated viewer. Intuitively, VR appears to deprive the user of somatic grounding, operating primarily through the visual. However, it is here, in the gap between the dominance of the visual and the absence of physical feedback, that I identified a distinct phenomenon, one that likely exists independently of the work’s narrative intent. In fact, I argue that this very characteristic of VR holds the potential to become the medium-specific quality essential for exploring dark matter.\nScientific literature on “pseudo-haptics” offers a lens to understand this quality. Samad et al. (2019) demonstrated that discrepancies between virtual lift height and physical movement directly alter perceived weight, revealing that the human brain estimates an object’s weight by roughly 82% proprioceptive input and 18% visual cues during lifting tasks6. While this ratio varies by task7, VR fundamentally exploits it.\nGiven the impossibility of fully inhabiting another’s body, I propose a shift in perspective. Rather than framing VR as sensory deprivation, I suggest it functions as a mechanism that amplifies visual cues to recalibrate experience. For instance, think about how visual manipulation alone can induce the visceral distress of a mobility-impaired person who falls. Furthermore, I argue that this forfeiture of proprioception can be utilized to choreograph the audience, prompting them to actively enact a physical response to compensate for the missing somatic input.\nI experienced this compelled self-choreography during a specific sequence in the VR journey. As the swarms of drifting white light points coalesced into long, streaming trajectories, forming a massive, swirling vortex that rushed toward me, my body reacted, following a naturalistic, gravitational logic. Though seated in a stationary chair, I felt an undeniable urge to tilt. Heels dragged on the floor to generate sensory friction. Body twisted to align with the visual flow. Muscles tensed against a phantom force — a reaction, in reality, to the actual gravitational pull induced by my own leaning. That was a “star-flight” experience transcended the visuality of the dots. The VR system did not provide the physical inputs of motion, yet upon receiving the visual flow, I found myself needing to perform the missing physics. This is what I identify as a choreography from absence. The VR medium conditioned my environment to force a somatic response.\nThis brings me to a final reflection on Sensing Dark Matter. On one hand, the visual choice of white dots remained tethered to the generic, failing to offer a new lexicon for the unknown. On the other hand, my experience of the VR revealed a structural resonance that perhaps exceeds the work’s conscious design. Dark matter is defined by its absence from our sensory spectrum; it pervades the universe, yet we only know it through its gravitational effects. In the VR chair, with my heels dragging against the floor to resist a phantom current, I was enacting a parallel existence and reacting to a force that was physically absent, mediated by a technology that relies on sensory gaps to function. I sensed something, not because the artwork made it visible, but because the void of the medium, or the conditioned conditions, activated my body to fill the gap. This medium specificity of VR — utilizing the absence of somatic input to provoke active engagement and a unique form of self-choreography — precisely mirrors how dark matter, despite its imperceptibility, elicited a response from the dancer in the deep underground. The structural nature of the VR echoes the very essence of dark matter.\nTsai, S. (2025, July 31). 地底一公里，一趟重建感官的探險之旅. 臺北藝術節. https://tpac.org.taipei/festival-taipei/2025/posts/470 (Accessed December 12, 2025)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nBarad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nThis refers to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where an object exists in a superposition of all possible states until measured by an observer or instrument. This interaction forces the object to “collapse” into a determinate state.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nAn agential cut is a boundary-making practice that enacts a resolution of inherent ontological indeterminacy within a phenomenon, delineating “object” from “measuring agency” to make objectivity possible. (Barad, 2007, p. 175)\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nScientific authority often rests on what Bruno Latour calls a ‘chain of reference’ or Peirce’s concept of indexicality — the assumption that an instrument provides an objective, causal trace of the phenomenon. In this view, a sensor reading is a ‘fact,’ while a dancer’s movement is merely an ‘interpretation.’\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSamad, M., Gatti, E., Hermes, A., Benko, H., \u0026amp; Parise, C. (2019, May). Pseudo-haptic weight: Changing the perceived weight of virtual objects by manipulating control-display ratio. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–13).\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nSimilarly, Bergström et al. (2019) influenced size estimation by adjusting the grasping aperture, while Bouzbib et al. (2023) manipulated the degree of visual compression to alter the perception of stiffness.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","date":"2026-03-24T00:00:00Z","image":"/post/the-choreography-from-absence/sensing-dark-matter-cover.jpg","permalink":"/post/the-choreography-from-absence/","title":"The Choreography from Absence"},{"content":"(This article was produced for the 2025 KCCA Art Writing Workshop. )\nIf you have graph paper at hand, or imagine one, pick up a pen and draw a casual arc, preferably with some width. Some squares are filled by the brush, while others are only partially covered with color. Do the half-filled squares count as colored or uncolored? The blocks on graph paper, like the pixel array of a screen, can hardly fully capture the free, real brushstrokes. Especially lines with uneven ink, and the fractured texture caused by friction and scratching, the uniform squares on screen struggle to interpret intermittent brushwork.\nThe “Snake” series draws inspiration from early handheld “Snake” games, where Yu Chih-Han realized how the snake’s flexible body was constrained by digital blocks. The biological form and smooth movement were limited by the aesthetic symbol of “stuttering,” transforming the long snake into a straight bar, advancing with jerky steps (Figure 2).\nUsing masking tape to mark out grid territories, Yu Chih-Han thickly applied acrylic paint within the squares. The thick application of paint creates a sense of weight, generating kinetic energy in the color blocks; the almost overflowing surface of the paint, like the rim of a cup filled with liquid, seems on the verge of spilling. The artist utilizes acrylic to unleash the potential of painter\u0026rsquo;s brushwork, yet the desire for fluidity is confined within defined squares. From a distance, Yu Chih-Han’s paintings appear as neat as a digital screen, but up close, one feels the impactful force between the color blocks. At first glance, Yu Chih-Han’s painting method mimics a screen composed of clusters of minimal light points, the smallest unit forming the image, but in deed each tiny color block on the canvas still retains the life of brushstrokes.\nBeyond the physical properties of paint, the vitality of the painting also comes from the arrangement and composition of the color blocks. “Pixel.02” (Figure 3) features brightly colored squares that simulate the luminous pixels on a screen, with its green, red, and yellow blocks neatly arranged into a regular grid. If we pretend that there are dashed lines marking the boundaries of these colored squares. The black squares Yu Chih-Han places in the image awkwardly traverse these boundary lines. Sometimes the exact center of a black square overlaps with the intersection of dashed lines, while at other times, one side of a black square adheres tightly to a dashed line. Digital screens lack the ability to render these black blocks because they cannot be fully contained within the grid, just as graph paper cannot precisely capture our casually drawn colored strokes.\nThe black squares in “Level.01” (Figure 4) provide a contrasting function; these black blocks are neatly arranged, helping the viewer visually define the grid boundaries. What breaks this boundary are elongated cross-grid color blocks, gradient color blocks that a single pixel cannot render, and diagonally perspectival rhomboid stripes. “Round 3” (Figure 5) subverts screen through interfaces with differing textures: the neat planar surface created by a brush and the wrinkled skin printed by a roller, along with varying paint thicknesses, challenge the uniform, fully illuminated surface of a digital screen. Sometimes, outlines appear within the color blocks, such as the head of a boxer, with areas above and below the lines filled with different colors, also exceeding the expressive capability of a single pixel.\nThe digital color blocks remind me of artist Justin Armstrong from the Savannah College of Art and Design, who is deeply influenced by the visual style of 90s Game Boys, CRT screens, and Pokémon holographic cards. He uses tape to mask off neat strip patterns, applies acrylic paint, and upon removing the tape, reveals the covered holographic vinyl — a plastic that shimmers with different hues depending on the viewing angle (Figure 6). Justin Armstrong mixes the texture of acrylic with the luster of holographic vinyl to create a sensory experience of simultaneously viewing a Polaroid photo and a glitching screen. This “digital screen/painting” comparative action is precisely what Yu Chih-Han’s work explores: the contrasting relationship between paint texture and digital imagery.\nFurthermore, both artists’ works require the audience to be present. Justin Armstrong emphasizes the necessity of on-site viewing since screens cannot convey the dynamic light and shadow shifts of holographic vinyl on site. Similarly, the sensory experience in Yu Chih-Han’s work is not easily transferred by a screen; you must be present to appreciate the artist’s intention in manipulating the paint, the thickness and stillness of the painting, and how the visual experience of a digital screen is solidified into a material entity.\nAlthough both artists share similar visual approaches, I want to specifically point out that Yu Chih-Han does not merely recreate the painting plane to explore the contrast between paint and screen; the bodily sensations generated during the creative process also reproduce the non-visual differences between digital screen and painting.\nYu Chih-Han first uses digital software to create compositional drafts, defining the elements and grid arrangement of the image. After grasping the general layout, she applies masking tape according to the planned grid and fills the corresponding squares with acrylic paint. Here, two aspects can be identified: first, the temporality of image generation, and second, the fluidity of the smallest unit.\nDigital screens have a refresh rate, which is the number of frames they can display per second. Contemporary technology achieves at least 60Hz, meaning one frame can be displayed every sixtieth of a second. Consider how much time it takes for an artist to paint a small square on a canvas with a brush, and how long it takes to complete the entire painting. This illustrates the temporal difference in image generation between painting and digital screens. We are accustomed to viewing artworks on screens, where paintings constantly appear and disappear with a swipe of a finger. Digital screens not only replace the physical texture of paint but also make people forget the bodily movements required during the painting process and the changes in every moment of the artist’s movement.\nContinuing to the second point, the fluidity of the smallest unit, let’s narrow our gaze from the entire painting to a single square on the canvas. Drawing a square by hand is far more complex than a single pixel on a screen receiving a signal and emitting a pre-set spectrum of colored light. For a square, decisions about hue, brushing, and the force applied are all related to the artist’s state at that moment. In the “Punch Out!!” series, because the boxer’s silhouette crosses different squares, a single square must accommodate different color blocks and patch corresponding outlines based on neighboring images. Taking “Round 6” (Figure 7) as an example, the boxer’s shoelace appears in a single square. The artist cannot simply flat-fill a complete color like a screen pixel but must decide how to paint the shoelace. Here, Yu Chih-Han chooses to pixelate the shoelace again, maintaining consistency in the painting’s style. In addition, the outline of the boxer’s elbow crosses four squares, which is also a complex pattern that a single screen pixel cannot handle, requiring consideration of the logic of elbow shape, and how it connects to the neighbor squares. The artist must actively interpreting the painting within the hypothetical smallest unit of the image, unlike passive and uniform pixels on a screen.\n“Hyperbolic Time Chamber: Yu Chih-Han’s Solo Exhibition” carries a strong digital nostalgia, pulling the audience back into the digital world of the 90s. Game scenes constructed from high-saturation color blocks and humorous boxer poses immediately capture the viewer’s attention. What I appreciate even more is the artist’s extremely subtle planar experimentation, underlying the strong game style and pixel aesthetic. The kinetic energy generated by the layered acrylic resists the constraints of pixel squares. Misplaced, gradient, and obliquely projected color blocks break the limitations of screen rendering. The bodily actions during the creative process imply a refresh rate different between a painting surface and a digital screen. The painter’s choices push against the restrictive framework of single pixels. Visual differences, physicality, sense of time, and the presence of the painter — Yu Chih-Han’s work offers us a new perspective on digital screens, orchestrating multiple concepts to approach.\n","date":"2025-07-25T00:00:00Z","image":"/post/showdown-pixels-vs-brushstrokes/F7-Round6.png","permalink":"/post/showdown-pixels-vs-brushstrokes/","title":"Showdown! Pixels VS Brushstrokes"},{"content":"(This article was produced for the 2025 KCCA Art Writing Workshop and appeared in KCCA mag. No. 4 , pp. 22–29. )\nOn an early summer evening, the basement of the café felt a bit stuffy upon arrival. The two artists had already started the talk,\nHsiao: “At that time, I went to the Nanjing Space of King Car Cultural \u0026amp; Art Center (金車文藝中心臺北南京館) to see your solo exhibition. You used a lot of acrylic for the display. How did it help with the presentation of your work, or what was its role as an intermediary? I was a bit curious to see how others did it.\nThe exhibition Hsiao Yu-Chieh referred to was Fu Sheng-Ya’s solo exhibition, “The Temporality of Attachment (漬的時態)” in 2024, where she used transparent acrylic to support common household folded garbage bags, and often used acrylic sheets to suspend works on the wall or place them at a height, allowing viewers to directly observe various effects of paper.\nFu: “First, its transparency doesn’t steal the paper’s presence. Next, some works are color-separated and printed on different papers, but the colors are only visible when they are stacked together. Acrylic makes them fit more closely while still retaining the paper’s properties.”\nIn the same year, Hsiao Yu-Chieh also exhibited her solo exhibition, “There’s Nothing Abstract About That (傾身觀看),” at Chengde Space of King Car Cultural \u0026amp; Art Center (金車文藝中心臺北承德館). In “Untitled (2024),” folded Xuan paper (宣紙) of varying thickness and width was stacked on a transparent acrylic sheet coated with pigment, creating an anger-sensitive halo effect due to the warm transparency of the Xuan paper.\nHsiao: “My idea of using acrylic is somewhat similar to yours; I also use transparent or translucent mediums to highlight certain characteristics. But for me, the interaction between acrylic and paper is different from yours. I care about how the characteristics of paper are emphasized, so acrylic in my work is more like an auxiliary to present different aspects of paper.”\nFu: “[Indeed,] Acrylic can maintain a certain lightness, or gently support something in suspension, which is why I use it a lot. But I actually still treat acrylic more as a way to highlight the paper material itself.”\nNow looking at both artists’ works again, I find that acrylic is visually almost non-existent, leaving only a certain “scent”. It actually still comes back to paper as a material, which was the reason for the two artists to be invited for this conversation. Fu Sheng-Ya does not reject so-called stains, or the marks left by human touch on paper, which signify relationships. On the other hand, for Hsiao Yu-Chieh, it’s more detached; she uses spray cans or other methods to reduce human brushstrokes.\nFu: “Most of my works indeed contain a private story, or hide something. Like thermochromic ink, it takes a few seconds of touching for it to change color. The time delay from touch to viewing, I think, is also a very important process. As you touch it, you’ll feel that it seems to start with an event that an object generates warmth by you.”\nHsiao: “Sheng-Ya’s works retain more traces of human events than mine; our creative concepts are fundamentally different.”\nThe ice in the coffee crackled due to the room temperature.\nHsiao: “I care about purely expressing the material, so I try to minimize human traces, which to me is simpler. I try to maintain a certain distance from my own work, to be able to evaluate and examine it in a relatively objective way.“\n“Reducing human traces is largely because I want to keep it in a gray area. Some people say my work is Eastern because of the paper and ink, while others consider it Western due to its form. Walking the line between both genres, I hope to resists easy definition of my works; that state is what I find most comfortable.”\nFu: “I can imagine the feeling of Yu-Chieh’s using ink spray compared to drawing directly by hand. My works are more about a scene or an event, a photograph, then undergoing another layer of transformation.”\n“Does it have anything to do with your printmaking experience?” I couldn’t help but interrupt and ask her. Fu Sheng-Ya is very willing to leave her own texture within the work.\nFu: “Yes, for example, the text fragments on the paper in my work is actually legal documents from a family inheritance lawsuit. Breaking up the text and reforming it into the paper carries imagery or experience, like in handwriting or letters.”\n“In ‘Paper Folding of Home,’ the laser-engraved shrimp shells patterns and garbage outlines, I actually use the image of leftover from family meals to discuss a certain sense of domesticity. It might look soft and cute at first glance, but the underlying meaning is certain fragmented experiences.”\nThe café owner came downstairs for a quick check and then went back up. The air conditioning had made the room much cooler, but the conversation became more lively. I was curious about Fu Sheng-Ya’s mention of transforming life experiences, because in her artworks, there is no direct correspondence between life experiences and materials. For example, with the family folded garbage bags, one would instinctively associate them with calendar paper, advertising paper, or newspapers commonly used by Taiwanese in households, but the paper chosen by Fu Sheng-Ya does not deliberately link to that scene.\nFu: “I usually buy paper at a paper-making studio on Songjiang Road.”\nSpeaking of the purchase of materials and the characteristics of various paper products from different manufactors, the two artists launched into an enthusiastic sharing of experiences. After a while, Fu Sheng-Ya continued,\nFu: “One of their papers incorporates a slight amount of plastic, making its texture slightly tougher. Some of my spatial installations use this paper, so they are not affected by weather changes and environmental factors.”\n“Or the ink I print needs light to develop color. When printed on very thin paper and stacked together, when exposed to light, you’ll see a slightly gray shape inside, carrying the implication of impending damage, or only visible at specific angles. This is a manipulation I like to play within my work.”\n“I hope the material is not easily directly identifiable. For example, in ‘Folded_Storage,’ toilet paper is folded and stacked into a column. The audience won’t identify it as toilet paper at first glance, but through the edges of the material during viewing, they will realize what it is, and then approach that familiar life experience, form, and its era.”\nHsiao: “I think visual artists share this characteristic: they don’t want their ideas and expressions to be seen too directly. For me, if I want to purely understand the material, maximization of the artist’s detachment is relatively effective, otherwise it will affect the view.”\n“Sheng-Ya deals with many experiences originating from life, but I don’t want my own life story to be overly prominent in the visual presentation of my work. Generally, the story in my work is not easy to be discovered, but many people still want to ask, to understanding my works through stories.”\nAt this point in the interview, I gradually discovered that even though the two artists’ approaches to paper were different, their attitudes were remarkably similar. Fu Sheng-Ya and Hsiao Yu-Chieh both hope that the audience will generate feelings when facing the paper first, and then proceed to understand their work. Paper is always the foremost element.\nFu Sheng-Ya mentioned that although there are events in her works, they are always suppressed to be extremely faint during presentation, becoming some indiscernible traces within. During our conversation, she shared many choices regarding materials and techniques, but I recalled her exhibition statement, which heavily described the sub-theme of life experiences. “After the audience reading it, it was like, ‘Oh, so this exhibition is discussing these stories,’ and then all your craftsmanship and material concerns disappeared,” I raised this question.\nFu: “I might prefer to discuss material, or wait for audiences to respond my artwork, the details of techniques, and why these approaches occur.”\n“[for example] Special inks like thermochromic and photosensitive inks can only be seen at specific distances, light, and temperatures, and there will be differences when installed indoors or outdoors. My recent works all start from material characteristics, thinking about how to create specific viewings. I think this is my trajectory this year. Others usually talk less about this material part when viewing my works.”\nBystanders in the coffee shop looked at us with curious eyes. At that time, we were discussing how audiences tend to view Hsiao Yu-Chieh’s works from the perspective of formal aesthetics and spirituality.\nHsiao: “Everyone talks about spirituality, but how to express it, or where does spirituality come from? For me, perhaps it still needs to rely on actual behavior and direct touch through physical objects to feel. Especially touch, if you don’t touch it, it’s relatively difficult to feel what’s happening around you.”\nIn fact, many interactions between paper and ink occur during Hsiao Yu-Chieh’s creative process. For example, Xuan paper is used as the base, covered with another sheet of paper, and after ink spraying, the top paper is removed, leaving straight edges on the Xuan paper.\nShe will carefully keep those removed, ink-stained waste papers that do not belong to the current work, but will become materials again in the future.\nHsiao: “I focus on material expression. Although these waste papers initially serve as auxiliary roles, their essence is still Xuan paper after being used, so I keep them. Or, if paper fibers got wet, they cannot be folded flat and will have a curved thickness. People might consider this a defect, not stable enough, but for me, how to use this characteristic is a very important thing.”\n“I feel that papers in my hands create with me, and what happens in between, let’s call them side quests, actually develops into their future appearance.”\n(All images in this article are provided by the artists.)\n","date":"2025-07-25T00:00:00Z","image":"/post/unfolding-the-folded-page/paper-folding-of-home-2.png","permalink":"/post/unfolding-the-folded-page/","title":"Unfolding the Folded Page"},{"content":"Stepping into C-lab Art Space III, one is immediately struck by the atmosphere that the exhibition title, ‘Ghost in the Sea,’ evokes. The space is quiet, cold, and dimly lit, with a few spotlights scattered throughout, creating the impression of being in the depths of the ocean with only a few spots of light. Following the Maritime Silk Road and tracing the labour trade route that 19th-century Chinese coolies took from southern China to Mauritius, Africa, the artist Musquiqui Chihying leads the audience on a journey to explore the hidden networks of imperial control in the contemporary Afrasian Sea. ‘Ghost,’ the other key word in the exhibition title, represents the often-overlooked Chinese coolies who played a crucial role in globalization, as well as the surveillance data that flows through the submarine cable network deployed by China’s smart city initiatives in this region.\nLocated on the second floor, the video work ‘The Link’ implements theatrical lighting and sound effects, along with a three-channel arrangement of hexagonal screens to tell the economic and historical stories that the artist discovered in Mauritius. In a documentary style, it depicts the knowledge and historical research on coolies (Chinese indentured labor) and the smart city project, including interviews with local people, a visit to the Coolie Museum, historical sites, and an explanation of China’s Smart City. It also includes a dance that combines sci-fi style characters and Chinese opera dancers to convey the entangled narratives of past and present converging in Mauritius. ‘The Link’ is the most important work in the exhibition. It underpins the main theme that the entire exhibition seeks to say.\nBack to the 19th-century, Mauritius was the first stop for Chinese coolies on their way to Western colonies, and also the forefront of Western colonial maps. Based on the knowledge at Coolie Museum and interviews with Chinese descendants, ‘The Link’ establishes an image of the Chinese coolies of that time. Mauritius was the first place in which Britain deployed photography for colonial control, taking large-scale photographs of Chinese coolies for archival purposes, replacing the previously unreliable written records of their physical appearance. Then, the film takes a turn to explore China’s contemporary smart city plan to build a ‘Safe City’ in Mauritius that is fully monitored by CCTV and data network. Here, ‘The Link’ cleverly links Britain’s imperial control to China’s contemporary use of the information technology, both deploying a form of colonial control in Mauritius with state-of-the-art technology.\n‘The Link’ provides evidence to support the argument that both of the instances of imperial control are likely to be questionable. In the past, Britain used photography to record personal data on Chinese coolies, but it was only used to control them. In terms of labor contracts, it was never actually implemented on the individuals to whom these records corresponded. Ultimately, the fate of the coolies was no better than that of slaves before. Today, the artwork raises another question: is comprehensive surveillance under a smart city scheme really what a small tourist island like Mauritius needs, let alone Mauritius has one of the lowest crime rates in Africa. For smart city, ‘The Link’ points out that a collection of privacy data under comprehensive surveillance and digital control might be the real reason that the empire still attempts to haunt this island.\nThe video work ‘The Link’ presents a compelling argument that ghosts of the empire are still roaming the Afrasian Sea. In order to further understand the issues highlighted by this exhibition, I researched the current political and economic situation in Mauritius, as well as news articles about its smart city. Surprisingly, a different truth in Mauritius was revealed. First, the Mauritius government did have an active role in making the decision to introduce smart city surveillance systems to maintain public and tourism safety, supporting that the idea of Safe City in Mauritius is not entirely only advocated by China. Second, speaking of cyber security, Mauritius is one of the 15 countries out of the 55 member states of the African Union that has ratified the ‘African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection’ (Mauritius ratified the convention in 2018).1 Furthermore, to support the capability of the Mauritius government to fulfil the Convention , according to the Index of Economic Freedom, Mauritius is commented as:\nhaving a sound and transparent legal framework strongly upholds the rule of law, and the country’s efficient regulatory environment and open-market policies encourage broad-based and diversified economic development.2\nWhile its government integrity rating is 52.3 points, it has a high judicial effectiveness score which is 81.2 points, and both scores are above the world average. These evaluations and descriptions of Mauritius paint a picture of a proactive, autonomous, and decision-making entity that is totally different from Chinese coolies in the 19th-century. In research-based exhibitions, more than often audience are positioned as docile learners. In ‘Ghost in the Sea,’ the audience cannot see this active role of Mauritius, and not everyone would delve further into such research. The discursive formation created by ‘Ghost in the Sea’ leads the audience to believe (or only see) the aspect of the imperial ghost continuing to haunt. By linking modern Mauritius to the image of a colonized and submissive Mauritius in the past, it prevents the audience from realizing the fact that Mauritius itself is rendered passive within the exhibition.\nIn the video artwork, ‘The Banknote,’ the artist has a conversation with the principal of a local Chinese school about the figures depicted on Mauritian banknotes. Each banknote features a prominent person from Mauritius. Unlike figures representing other ethnicities, Sir Moilin Jean Ah-Chuen, the only famous figure of Chinese descent, appears on the lowest denomination banknote, implying an invisible ethnic inequality. In the conversation, the artist asked: ‘Have you ever felt discriminated against as a Chinese person in your life?’ The principal firmly answers no. Although the response was contrary to the theme of ‘The Banknote,’ the artwork doesn’t delve deeper into this answer from the local resident.\nBeyond text and knowledge, the way that an artwork installed also shapes the audience’s way of thinking. ‘The Smart City’ displays various images related to the smart city project on a light box table, and five commemorative coins are placed on stands for the audience to examine them closely under a magnifying glass. The artist created these commemorative coins for each city in the Afrasian region that has joined the smart city project, including Mauritius. Commemorative coins are ‘deeply symbolic, and recalling China’s history of state-issued commemorative coins, they function as expressions of sovereignty that also construct an ideology’ (Wang, Ru-Xuan, 2024)3. Once again, this is a response to the reawakening ghost of the empire. ‘The Smart City,’ sets the images and coins in the way that the museum displays, suggesting the objectivity of the knowledge it presents. As Gillian Rose (2001) notes in the book, Visual Methodologies, a London street map dotting the areas where the poor population of East London lives ‘seemed to lay the East End bare to a scientific gaze that penetrated what others described as its darkest recesses.⁴’ By placing the images of the construction projects within petridish-like containers and on a light box used for observing biological specimens, ‘The Smart City’ suggests a scientific sampling of the real world. The act of sampling itself implies the existence of a ‘truth’ (the real world) from which samples are taken. The magnifying glass, acting as a symbol of the act of reviewing evidence, further emphasizes the credibility of the reality expressed in ‘The Smart City’ because objects or facts that withstand scrutiny can inspire confidence in their truthfulness. This, in turn, strengthens the sense of truth that the installation conveys to the audience.\nIn ‘Ghost in the Sea,’ Musquiqui Chihying weaves a narrative through video and installation, alluding to the ghostly remnants of an empire beneath the Afrasian Sea. The artist’s meticulous fieldwork provides a solid foundation for this exhibition, with each artwork intricately linked to the overarching theme. While the results of the fieldwork are undoubtedly significant, it is the artist’s compelling aesthetic expression that lends this exhibition a persuasive power. The exhibition sparked my curiosity, leading me to search for other related materials. These additional sources offered a narrative that differed from the exhibition’s perspective. While this new information doesn’t undermine the message of this exhibition about the ever-present nature of the imperial control, the alternative narrative, however, allows for the voices of those absent to be heard, potentially opening up another discussion.\nThe different actions taken by docile and active audiences in response to the discourses presented in exhibitions reflect what Gillian Rose has described that the credibility of the exhibition:\ndepends on the visitor’s prior faith in the accuracy of the anthropological knowledge used to make the display.4\nI am not trying to question the credibility of this exhibition here, but rather to point out that it is more likely to form an effective knowledge development for the audience to actively engage in dialogue or even confrontation with the viewpoints proposed by an exhibition while accepting a set of arguments from the exhibition. Despite this, ‘Ghost in the Sea,’ still provides us with a meaningful exploration and fieldwork, revealing a narrative hidden beneath the sea.\nhttps://au.int/en/treaties/african-union-convention-cyber-security-and-personal-data-protection\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nhttps://www.heritage.org/index/pages/country-pages/mauritius\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n王襦萱. Wang, Ru-Xuan. (2024, May 3). 全球視野下舉步維艱的鬼魂強權迫使移轉的生存技術：致穎個展「鬼魂與深藍海」. Struggling Spectres Under Global Gaze and Transferring Survival Techniques Forced by Power — Musquiqui Chihying’s Solo Exhibition ‘Ghost in the Sea.’ Art Emperor. https://artemperor.tw/focus/5985\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\nRose, G. (2001). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. SAGE Publications.\u0026#160;\u0026#x21a9;\u0026#xfe0e;\n","date":"2024-05-18T00:00:00Z","image":"/post/imperial-hauntings-and-the-absent-decolonial-subject-in-the-afrasian-sea/The_Banknote_cover_jpg.jpg","permalink":"/post/imperial-hauntings-and-the-absent-decolonial-subject-in-the-afrasian-sea/","title":"Imperial Hauntings and the Absent Decolonial Subject in the Afrasian Sea"}]