● Exhibition Date／2015.12.4(Fri.) —2016.1.3(Sun.) 11:00－21:00 (Closed on Monday)

● Opening／2015.12.4(Fri.) 18：00

● Venue／ Taipei Artist Village, Barry Room

● Curator：HUANG Hsiang、Eva LIN

● Artists：Julien COIGNET、Humberto DUQUE、Kaensan RATTANASOMERK、

Kaya HANASAKI、Yotaro NIWA、CHEN Yun-Ju

Curatorial statement

text/HUANG Hsiang、Eva LIN

Memory is similar to photography. It captures fragments of reality to reconstruct the time and experiences, and is an effective means to gain control of the past. Long-term memory isownership of widely shared experience that even manipulates the will and judgment of the future. Nerveless, short-term memory is not simply ephemeral and transientremains. It includes all the forgotten and inaccessible consciousness and feelings, and makes more accurate perception possible to shape the present reality. This exhibition attempts to re-examine the meaning and reliability of memory whileinvestigating various aspects and possibilities of oblivion to represent the memory that once existed.

Living in the present age predicted by German philosopherin 1843, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, as one that “prefers the sign to the thing signified” the boundary between imagination and experience has gradually become blurry. One could never be certain whether our use of short-term memory is really justified and authentic, or ironically removes the reality to serve our imagination. In I have never written a poem, the artist reconstructs objects’ essence and formally breaks appearances. By doing so, the work creates an unpredictable form to explore more possibilities of imagination (or to expose more of the reality). The outdated news headlines used in Financial Times Highlights Nov. 4 have all lost their original purposes and soon become some meaninglessly ornate words of economic liberalism as demands are determined by the duration and class of memory, and we are all discriminators against memory.

Tu-144 was the world’s first super-sonic airliner manufactured by Tupolev in the previous USSR during the Cold War. Its cooling system was abnormally loud that passengers had no choice but to communicate with written notes. The work, Tu-144, uses the image of this discontinued product and silently conveys the faded experience and message of the time. Purification is a project inspired by a legend. The ancestors of the Maori had sailed across the ocean to New Zealand from a distant island called Hawaiki, which could be Taiwan. Reflecting upon the thousand years before and after us, the infinite time and space renders us transient and invisible as our short-term memory, like some ambiguous existence excluded from memory.

Slowly disappearing from the urban landscape, Yu-Lan the Flower Seller might not have forgotten anything. The scent of the flowers simply evokes a disappeared scene in another city, allowing the past to be represented from a different perspective. Walter Benjamin once said, “The measure of meaning precisely equals the force of decay and death.” Kaensan RATTANASOMERK documented relatives’ chanting at the time when his grandfather passed away. Through memory, the deceased could reunite with the living; and until the deceased is to be forgotten by the world, he or she would die again.

Oblivion beckons at the absence of memory, and memory exists solely for oblivion.