2023 桃源國際藝術獎

Pull Up employs a minimum amount of material and is a work in which two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality coexist. The piece is cut from a grey elastomeric foam surface of the type used for gym mats. The character's silhouette, in a pulling posture – as if exercising on a fixed bar – appears in negative, and its disproportionately long legs stretch out for several meters. It is held in place only by two drawing pins attached to the building's structure and inhabits space through the suspension and unwinding of an 8 mm-thick surface. Its graphic dimension emerges clearly through the cutting and planeity of the support while acquiring a sculptural aspect from the deformation of the material.

The artist's creative practice has long centered around integrating the body with sculpture and drawing methods. Suspended in space, the foam contours, defining the character's torso, sag due to gravity and the matter's weight, giving volume to the cut as well as an athletic tenor to the body. This 'pattern' of the torso with raised, bent arms comes from a set of sketches that the artis has digitized, enlarged, and then transferred onto different surfaces.

This process allows Pouillé to preserve the irregularities of the original lines, as well as the drawing's intuitive, dynamic, and lively quality. Dissociated from the structure – a fixed bar – which appeared in the original sketches, this simplified form of a headless body in a pulling posture opens up fields of interpretation which include both the sporting and the spiritual. To explore all possibilities, the artist has been drawing on this reserve of sketches for two years, and they have become the basis of the pieces she deploys according to the spaces where she is invited to exhibit. The notion of exhaustion is at the heart of the project. While the voided figure of the suspended body displays full physical exertion, its 'positive,' puny counterpart lies wrecked on the ground, conveying a sense of derailment or crash.

Human hair, soil, fabric, and food are some of the materials that the artist uses in her works. Their common principle, universality and possibilities of identity formation induce her to investigate their potential as facilitators of collective experiences. These materials keep an inherited history that the artist explores through installations, performances, videos, objects and collaborative works.

Migran-t, first skin: Nostalgia integrates a series of works where the artist explores embroidery with human hair on bedding and canvas. In China, hair has been used in embroidery since the Tang Dynasty. In the 19th century, Victorians embroidered family photos with their member's hair as a way to preserve and honour their memory. The artist started embroidering with hair when she moved from Argentina to the UK. The sense of displacement led her to look for actions that would allow her to transmute the feeling of nostalgia. Using the hair she collected from bathing and combing her hair, the bedsheet was a record of embroidered texts that she wrote in the format of an intimate diary, drawings and extracts from books, songs and conversations with friends.

Belén Santamarina believes hair can dissolve distance and transgress time. She considers hair to be embodied archives that keep stories; personal and genealogical. Its vital nature of regrowth makes hair a symbol of renewal and she manipulates it as an alchemical material. By exhibiting intimacy through language and graphisms, the artist shares these experiences and imagines the sheet as a portal, a psycho-magical act that unites worlds and migrants.

The artist reappropriates techniques she inherited from the woman in her family, usually relegated to the domestic sphere and considered as 'low-end', imagining interactions between embroidery, geography, time, and space. She envisions its traces through migration, endowing it with a new viewing approach to embark on a material and spiritual dialogue.

Yan Jiao started with word searches on China's website for missing persons and discovered it is filled with harsh terms, such as hunchback, depression, mental retardation, and stuttering. The frequent appearance of these pessimistic terms seems to imply that the wordings are exclusive to missing persons. This work explores the power structures behind the seemingly normal social phenomenon. The groups of people on the website for missing persons bid farewell to their social identities and disappeared from the world. Some of these people have pictures, others do not; some don't even have names, leaving ambiguous descriptions to carry traces of their existence.

The artist contemplates ways to document these individuals and reintegrates the torn, burnt fragments, and how the individuals became missing persons, then numbers in statistics, and finally history that is wiped away. The artist includes herself in the images, re-enacting the images of the missing persons and setting off on the photography project using an anthropological image approach. By including herself in their lives, they can eternally exist in the images both fabricated and authentic.

By showcasing sceneries that have disappeared, the artist displays to viewers the fragmented stories and trivial sentiments of these people; regardless of whether the memories are painful, everything is beautiful, yet fleeting. These images of people, which are filled with flaws, exist in the blurry state of truth and fiction woven by the artist through the realities of the past and the technology of representation, swaying between the project of collective statistics data and individual sentiment. When the viewer finally becomes aware of the fake images and messages in the works, an ambiguous connection between the artist, society, and the viewer is reflected, allowing us to contemplate the connection between humans and subjectivity, spectacles and society, and the objective and subjective. Furthermore, it allows us to explore the nuanced power structure behind society, where sanctity is a mere illusion, and secular turns out to be the truth.

The Shadow Lands Yonder positions the perspective in early-20th-century Manchuria, featuring the history of escape and repatriation, depicting a mass population movement fueled by war and colonialism at the brink of imperial collapse and the birth of a new nation. Rooted in literature reviews and memoirs, Lee Kai Chung constructs a seven-day space-time using images and creative writing, imagining and reshaping the psychological changes and struggles of refugees during the seven-day escape and repatriation. The artwork investigates the complicated process of identity "transitioning" under abrupt political change.

Agricultural development has become an alternative tool for colonial policies. The new world is constructed on the black land, the "home" built in a foreign nation, and identity abandoned and rediscovered amid a sense of void. Some cultivators insist on their identity as an "inlander," and that the migration to the "new land" is solely for new opportunities, while others view the land of Manchuria as where they belong because the land is the source of their survival and the basis for prolonging their families; this is the most distinct difference between the psychological understanding of "motherland" and "home" that foreign Japanese undergo when they were sent home. The pioneers are trapped in the cycle of "Longing—Establishing—Departing—Staying—Returning—Rejecting," their lives unconsciously wasting away in "the land of the void," leading to a state where they belong nowhere and have nowhere to return to.

Seventy years have passed since the war, and apart from traces of "human" existence that can be traced in spaces and materials, the collective memories, bodily experiences, and emotional heritages of "leaving, remaining" still impact the Northeast China today. Several decades after the establishment of New China, ethnic and regional policies have simplified the highly complex Manchuria region into what is now collectively referred to as the "Rust Belt" in Northeast China. The issue of identity is not limited to the Japanese colonists at the time; the overall sense of local origin was not adequately addressed through policies and public discourse after the war. Consequently, the concealed issues have transcended generations and ethnic boundaries to become a sense of void among the contemporary people of Northeast China. Through participatory photography, the artist inspires a sense of subjectivity and creativity among the local participants, weaving the feeling of emptiness inherited from intertwined history and collective consciousness and confusion about identity in the past and the present moment.

The common IKEA "FÄRGRIK" mug has become a symbol of "universality" and earned a major status in consumer culture. IKEA products have become a "paradigm" in the public's subconscious, representing the ideal style resulting from considerations regarding an individual's financial capacity, personal aesthetics, and sense of social identity.

In the work Productivity by Labor 2023, Yen Ran Wang takes cues from the paradigm through the act of "copying" and extensively produces IKEA FÄRGRIK mugs by hand, contrasting the human body to the productivity of machines, operating the design in a repeating manner to the extent that the project becomes a mindset of challenging international corporations and the production line. Through this work, the artist asks how ceramic artists should position themselves amid the era of global mass production.

Through the absurdity of remaking "ready-mades" through "handcrafting," Wang not only conveys how ceramic artists are at a loss but the work is also displayed as a production line, with large numbers of mugs placed neatly in line. At first glance, the mugs are seen as orderly but show the subtle differences of handmade objects through closer inspection. The work deliberately blurs the difference between "factory produced" and "workshop produced," and the final "product" is sold at handicraft markets, with prices determined by consumers. Through this process, the artist answered the value of labor in a real practice.

Clement Town is based on a secluded town in Uttarakhand, North India, which was established during the Cold War with financial aid from Taiwan. It was allegedly designed and built by local intelligence officers who once worked for Taiwan. Archives discovered in Taiwan suggest that similar towns were believed to be as numerous as over twenty within the Indian territories bordering China. In the latter part of the Cold War, those who traveled from South Asia to Taiwan for education or vocational training were more or less associated with these towns.

Before the 1990s, Taiwan was involved in a series of international political actions in South Asia, encompassing what we now recognize as India, Nepal, Myanmar, and China. Initially, the primary purpose of these operations was to collect intelligence. However, as time went on and the international landscape shifted, these transnational projects slowly morphed into opportunities for migrants living along the borders who were seeking better living conditions or ways to improve their lives. For their own benefit, they hired members of border communities, asking them to dress in representative clothing of both regions for staged photographs. This resulted in a multitude of images and falsified documents.

In this project, the artist sifted through the files from that era and selected three sets of images produced through staged photography: commemorative photos taken in a photo studio, group photos taken at Keelung Port, and photos of girls taken before they traveled to Taiwan to study. The artist invited performers to meet the people who were directly or indirectly involved in those projects and special operations along the borders. At certain original shooting locations, such as Wharf No. 2 on the west side of Keelung Port and a school that has now become a parking lot, performers reenact scenes that occurred ten seconds before the original images were captured, creating moments that oscillate between reality and fiction.

Yu Sheng Lin attempts to transform the field into a "car" by recruiting resident artists from all over the world through an NGO residency institution that the artist established. The project allows the "car/art village" to drive on the motorways of Taiwan and invites resident artists to conduct "infinite" creative works in limited spaces, encouraging them to embark on nomadic creative projects worldwide while rethinking the relationship between space and time.

The "village" in Car Artists Village is a journey without turning back. The process is an accelerated advancement, as if chasing something, while the artists in the car remain still, suspended. Lin invites creatives with different backgrounds and nationalities to collaborate in practicing various projects and for them to enter different creative settings, endeavoring to change the social turn of contemporary art through constantly changing display methods.

After the 19th century, public spaces are designed for people to pass through, not for them to spend time. These spaces are for people to move from one location to another, and people are often silent during transit. Most roads of today are public spaces that prohibit people from pausing. The artist attempts to break this fate. The art village which can "move" roams between different realms, and the participatory "art event" attempts to change movement in inevitable movement, pausing in the realm of the everyday in a different form, allowing "art events" to take place in public spaces. As a result, citizens will inevitably come into contact with art that is taking place, and public spaces are transformed into the artist's studio. The people, incidents, and objects of the studio all interact with art, allowing each member of the "event" to discover their own position. Displayed in this exhibition are every car residency project that has taken place (from highways National Freeway 1 to 6) and every residency exhibition.

Waterproof Garment, Kinematic Cache, 9'15" is a spatial sound installation that includes three connected components. The work was inspired and is a segment of the early stages of YL Hsueh's 2021 project Lost Ethnography of (post) Mountain and is based on the field investigations and regional context related to Hsuehshan Tunnel. As for the attributes of the tunnel itself, the space is like a peculiar portal that allows passage while being enclosed at the same time. From the perspective of the mountain, what humans see as a passage is its hollowness.

The artist adopts this perspective and simulates the waterproof cladding of the tunnel space, removing the concrete lining to create a space using a steel bracket framework and wires as the basic structure, fixing the space from inside and outward with non-woven fabric, which is then wrapped with a waterproof covering. Different from water(rain)-proof coats worn by humans, the materials and structure of the work are used to prevent leaking from the tunnel itself. This waterproof covering is a clue to the mountain's silent gushing of water. The sound installation includes excerpts from the soundscape work "Kinematic Cache," and the five sound chapters, "Anecdote," "Rock," "Disappearing Mileage," "Biotope," and "Murmurings" are used to depict the movements of the region.

Through cutting off and curves, the artist deliberately creates a tape loop with unstable analog audio, shaping sound as a route and an infinite form for landscape depiction. Viewers can freely listen, operate, and even overwrite it with new recordings, attempting to depict the meaning of landscape movement through sound.

Driving at 90km per hour, the 12.9-km-long tunnel takes about 9 minutes to pass through, connecting the capital Taipei with Yilan in the east, just as the title of the image installation entails. By viewing the landscape through navigation positioning and geographical information system algorithms, the work investigates the topological and spatial relationship of the Beiyi Freeway and Hsuehshan Tunnel existing in the same mountain through visual disparities created by the continuous toggling, zooming, and relocating between the simulated landscape from maps and the actual terrain. The project also attempts to view the space as a "historical site," deducting, inquiring, and imagining through existing movements of human and non-human communities and the geographical context and meaning.

"Mapa Mundi" (World Map) is a hand-stitched textile that gathers hundreds of industrial labels coming mainly from clothing but also from household utensils such as towels, sheets and blankets. With labels from more than 40 countries and territories. Most of them, besides informing the brand of the garment and the ideal washing conditions, inform the country where the garment was made, sometimes even bearing its flag or some geographical or identity reference printed on it. If observed more closely and in a critical way, many labels reflect characteristics of the country they come from, marking different geographical, political, historical, cultural, and sociological aspects of these places: their strategies for self-affirmation and identity consolidation, echoes of colonialism, vulgarization of the English language, their territorial conceptions based on geography, their relationship with the landscape, and their culture.

The work is called "Mapa Mundi" for an analogy to cartography, because in its geography, ideology, and politics converge. Of fundamentally ideological origin, maps are foundational instruments of the history of nations, they are fictional constructions – as much as nations themselves. Maps can be understood as a type of language used to mediate a particular view of our world.

When viewed in this way, they can be associated with certain 'cartographic discourses' or persuasive and rhetorical applications, and not just as something intended to name and locate. These discursive mechanisms of maps – and their modern representatives, such as the very labels with which I construct the 'map' – show how they have become a political force in our society. The work proposes that the labels can act as another element of the ideological rhetoric of state and nation ideas of each country, sometimes as the very flag and propaganda of that territory. Together, they allow us to tell stories and make relations between them, being a geopoetic alternative of territorial representation not based on the geographical and a starting point to reflect on geopolitics, history, colonialism, imperialism and so on, also thinking about the many countries that are not represented in the work.

Yunyi Liu's recent works involve ongoing projects on wounded landscapes, starting with sites in Kinmen and Matsu and proceeding to World War Two landmarks across various nations, investigating how warfare shapes and alters landscapes, and how artificial landscapes seep inward into our psyche. The landscapes reflect the wounds of history as sites of memory. Memory, landscape, and architectural space are intimately connected. Through the hidden traces within landscapes and architectural space, the traumas of history that were not personally experienced and are distant and silent, yet they still haunt us endlessly through time.

he national anthem of East Germany from the last century, "Risen from Ruins," reflects how human beings yearn to leave the ruins and proceed into the light. However, history inevitably repeats itself, and the cities that humans built will ultimately become ruins. Inspired by the anthem, Liu created the "Failed Architecture" painting series, presenting failed architectural blueprints to reveal dysfunctional, invalid military buildings.

Through the photography installation of "Delayed Trauma," the work encodes and decodes space, repositioning and connecting the images taken in the photography investigation. This map investigates the identification and transformations of historical trauma, overlapping and connecting micro and macro, external and internal sensor systems to construct a space to remember traumas. The work also uses this process to see how trauma seeps into the consciousness and impacts the generation, delving into the cycle of historical trauma and violence, and how the transfer of this destructive force impacts the overall spatial system. These memory stages deliberately arranged by the artist allow the ruins of the military architecture, landscape, rock formation, and defense weapons to all become embedded into the landscapes, featuring silent memories of trauma.

Driftless embraces the ocean as an open and public site for artistic interventions. In this video installation, a performer travels across large bodies of water while drifting away in a precarious raft that references makeshift strategies for border crossing. This cinematic and performative journey across the globe creates a visual narrative. Felipe Castelblanco's navigation across multiple waterscapes resembles the epic scenes under Romanticism painter Caspar David Friedrich. The vast and majestic scenes not only accentuate the frailty of man but also suggest an aggressive seafaring stance that borrows from migration stories and renders the ocean a fluid territory through acts of radical seafaring.

In 2012, the artist attempted to build the smallest boat that could hold only one person's weight. He devised a precarious way to navigate through large bodies of water using a raft and a chair, while sitting and contemplating the landscape from within. This became a performance and then a film, which started in Lake Wesserunsett in Main (Northeast of the USA) and then has been re-enacted in places like the Pacific Coast of Colombia, Mexico, California, England, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Philippines, and Australia.

The film 'wanders through' this vast form of public spaces and explores nationhood as a form of contemporary confinement, while engaging with the ocean as a realm that allows unlikely eco-political encounters with nature and notions like citizenship. Through a derive that blurs borderlines and even the hydrological features of radically different locations around the world, this journey traverses not only space but also systemic divides by exposing the complexity of a political system that restricts human movement while expanding its networks for transportation of goods, or allowing contemporary artists from the Global North to traverse borders, moving from one territory to another but in constant precarity.

'Ard is a three-channel video projection that creates a 270-degree landscape. Moving across three walls, the film's Arabic narration echoes throughout the room. The installation creates an arid landscape of an ever-changing and uncertain reality.

During a series of audio interviews with Syrian refugees based in Athens, Sara Naim asked individuals to recount their journey from Syria to Athens. 'Ard projects one of these monologues and pairs it with mismatched imagery: a video magnifying the artist's skin cells, captured through the Scanning Electron Microscope. The abstract imagery leaves the viewer in a state of displacement, scanning the skin's terrain in search of the sample's boundary. The constant reloading of each frame from the SEM scans connotes the repetitive images that are seen, which shape one's socio-political and existential perspectives.

Investigations of the cell are governed by Naim's interest in the smallest building blocks of life which, together, create the largest elements. By creating an illusion of a landscape from something minute, the viewer and narrator find themselves shifting perspective, as a single person in an enormous situation or as a small encounter within the larger picture.

Making parallels of the cell to a pixel and the body to an image, the installation unconventionally responds to photography, referencing 'the frame' as a source of truth but one that is often ignored.

The pastel shade of pink, belonging to both the room's carpet and beanbags, suggests a light-hearted and playful scenario, inviting the viewers to watch in the comfortable position of passivity. The context in which the video is watched mirrors the dynamics in which viewers often encounter the news, where one becomes desensitized through repetition. The installation confronts this idea of comfort and discomfort through the distancing and examination of the speaker's story, the skin cell's terrain, and the viewer's position within the room. The abstract progression of the video work alludes to the refugee's position in Europe, in limbo between Syria, Athens, and beyond.

This work is structured with two parts: "Silhouette Portrait," composed of anthropological portraits of Austronesian groups in Taiwan, and "Map Images," created with ancient maps of Taiwan. Silhouette portrait references Mori Ushinosuke's Atlas of the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan (published in 1915). The inner spaces of the portraits are filled with cyanotype prints of contemporary images of the island taken by the artist. The "Prussian blue" that appears from the cyanotype prints process serves as a metaphor for the origin of life, and as a symbol for the intrinsic oceanic qualities of Taiwan, which is surrounded by water on all sides.

The artist uses paper-cutting methods to portray the silhouettes of the photography portraits, while the inner spaces of the islander portraits are filled with cyanotype prints of contemporary images of the island and vegetative records. This creates an overlap in contemporary events and historical text, its meaning seeping into one another. Set against a golden background, the islanders resemble "icons" of Western religion, and added with golden hues and oval frames, the insignificant individuals, incidents, and events are set amidst the tradition of Western portrait art; however, these classical painting frames are from a global homeware brand from the West, and the frame is created with synthetic resin and plastic, materials commonly used in contemporary industrial production.

Under the limitations of painting frames that resemble "viewfinders," the view of islanders, the island, and vegetation symbols resembles gazing at this "southern island" that we depend on to survive through the imperial gaze of capitalism, modernization, and globalization.

At the center of the exhibition space lies a group of deconstructed and reconstructed maps modeled according to the compositions of paintings by painters from the 17th-century Netherlands, the Qing dynasty, and the Japanese Rule. The maps are Formosa Island and The Pescadores, China, Kangxi Taiwan Map, and A Bird's-Eye-View of All Taiwan, each intimately connected with the colonial history of Taiwan, reflecting the island under the imperial gaze of the West, the Qing Dynasty, and Imperial Japan. The artist deconstructs and rearranges the map through 18 grids, and adopts a historical perspective that juxtaposes different views to reflect the current status of the island's civilization.

Rooted in her multifaceted experiences and positions in the workplace, family space, and creative context, Li Chuan Tseng initiated a nine-year-long project documenting what she eats daily. The project was inspired by the experience of the unending labor of preparing meals as a new mother, which the artist thought resembled navigation without end. The artist also re-contemplated the performance art of "self-existence and value," through which she transformed the kitchen into a workshop through photographic images and used food ingredients as her creative medium to convey a woman's sentiment toward her family. Perhaps there is a special dish, taste, or flavor in the memory of each person that specifically represents "mother."

The elongated and variable dimensions of Youth Diary are a replica of the kitchen that the artist uses on an everyday basis and includes a family dining table. The artist uses the kitchen as the realm for her creative practice, presenting female labor as a nine-year field investigation. Menus, diaries, receipts, and photography works become the artist's documents, while a series of actions that apply the spirit of research in the cooking and recipe is also included.

Through this work, Li Chuan Tseng presents the silent but leading operations, atmosphere, and developments of motherhood, as a subtle portrayal of feminist power. Tseng contemplates the role of the housewife and how family meals cooked with effort and time quickly dissipate into a mess in the sink, proudly displaying the results saturated with reference to the youth of women and featuring the contemporary scene of the family dining table. This work preserves fleeting moments of labor, and through constructing this spatial image installation in the context of the kitchen space, the artist creates an ode to the visualization of women's youth and cleverly responds to the "standardized assessment" of the labor in our times using a method of archival arrangement.

Architectural Digest investigates the idea of food as a spectacle, eating rituals as the staging of power, and their relation to architecture and ceremonial aesthetics to expose colonial legacies through strategies of humor and fiction. It proposes a series of pieces cast in chocolate and sugar that seek to create a survey of "powerful" structures, monuments, symbols, and elements found in public spaces, such as ornamental architecture. The work reflects on how public spaces are marked by symbols of power and domination and reflects on possibilities to reappropriate and resignify them. At the same time, the project acknowledges the historical realities of ingredients used in cake and confections (such as sugar and cacao), which were products of extraction intrinsically linked to colonial exploitation and slavery.

This re-enactment of symbols of power seeks to play with their meanings. Andrea Ferrero imagines untouchable and permanent colonial structures that have become fragile and obsolete, and they are transformed into remnants of chocolate architecture created with molds.

The "classic pillars" are crafted with black chocolate and edible glitter and playfully placed in a fridge, awaiting to be taken by the public. A sticker is placed on the fridge and says "Please open only after you've made your decision, thank you" in Chinese, humorously inserting the idea of picking desserts at the bakery or supermarket.

The exhibition wall is painted in "Scheele's Green," also known as "Victorian Green." The color became popular during the Victorian period of the 19th century. Before the invention of Scheele's Green, no stable shades of green were available, and the invention of this cheap, stable, and beautiful shade of green became a popular trend and was used in wallpaper, toys, and clothing. However, it was later discovered that the color was deadly poisonous and led to the death of children and women. The artist plays with the concept of power and symbols by presenting the vibrancy and toxicity of "Scheele's Green" to echo the approach of presenting classical colonial pillars into fragile edibles.