NATIONAL TAIWAN MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS EXHIBITION
DARK CITY
Press Release
Inauguration: Thursday, 11 September 2008; 6:30 p.m.
Preview: 11 – 13 September; opening hours 10.00 am – 7.00 pm
Exhibition dates: 14 September – 23 November 2008; opening hours 10.00 am – 6.00 pm
Venue: Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello 4209, San Marco, 30122 Venice, Italy Curators: Chaolee Kuo / chaoleek@gmail.com / Ke-Fung Liou / cosmoliu@yahoo.com
Exhibitors: Kris Yao, Victor Y.C. Su, Jay W Chiu, Kyle Chia-Kai Yang, Albert I-Li Ho, Shi-Chieh Lu Supervisor: Council for Cultural Affairs, Executive Yuan, Taiwan, ROC Organizer: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Commissioner: Pao-Shia Hsueh Vice-Commissioners: Yu-Ching Huang, Shu-Ping Shih, Paolo De Grandis
Executive Institute: Chaoyang University of Technology
Construction Manager: Hsieh-Chunh Huang Project Manager: Fu-Chen Chen Exhibition
Assistants: Nina Yu, Wan-Yu Su, Yu-Ching Lin, Chih-Kai Tseng, Kuan-Huan Liu, CheMing Wu, Chiung-Chen Chen, Chu-Fen Hu, Hsiao-Wen Lee
DARK CITY
Most of the cities are bored and dull at daytime, but loosened up at night. City people are liberated at night and dared to dream for utopias. Taiwan’s cities are no exception, even more passionate and fascinating, as so subtropical. Their vivid and colorful night life-styles distinguish themselves from those hangouts and night life in the western cities. However, local architecture and urban design usually target on day life of the city, night city is invisible and anonymous. Therefore, we challenge this ignored and absent-in-malice myth of the night by inviting six creative young architects to re-think, and re-present the imagination, dream, and voice of the Taiwan’s city people at night with some unique art works. Hopefully, these projects will light up the darkness of the city life, and shape up the shadows the people’s minds between the day and night, and form in the twilight zone of the city people’s souls by night. They will be a “representation of time-space” of Taiwan city culture. “Representation of time-space” of city night life could be another created utopia beyond the aesthetic issue of architecture or urban space in the city, the philosophic debate on theories, but a compromising process among time, space and city people. We learned from our previous living experience of Taiwan city that the clear-cut division between day and night brought in result our cities uninterested, even alienate with “unreasonable reason.” So, with the initial idea of rejecting this division and restoring the creativities of city people, we propose this exhibit for expressing our beliefs that new liberation and freedom of dark space, such as gray, instead of black and white, ambiguousness is more welcome than clearness, fragmentation could be a substitute for wholeness, disconnection is not an evil for continuity, floating is acceptable than settlement, periphery could be a replacement of center, alienation does no harm to commonality. All at all, these might be a new foundation of city creativity, a real and vivid world of Dionysus. If we agree that the purpose of architecture exhibit is to communicate with people, produce new meanings of social culture, then, architecture should be equipped with the essence of “meaning transformation”, distinguished themselves from other art works. However architectural works can’t leave actual sites for exhibit at museum. Then, media to connect the architectural art work with the museum is needed to handle the floating meanings between them. In practice, we came up with a concept of “meaning set” to compromise different architect design works in one system as a metaphor of the ambivalent dark culture of Taiwan city. The exhibit halls control the sense of speed, change of sounds and lights that produced in Taiwan’s cities at night. Viewers will be guided to tour the exhibit with unique experience of the darkness, and they may explore the floating meanings and plural essence of city culture.