Daily+: A Leap Away from the Dimension of the Netherworld

Text by Tom Huang  (Writer)

Small half-empty frame, spider’s web castle, matchbox, stacked spaceship……, these are the chapter headings from Yi-Chin LO’s Wall Climber, which largely speak to those of us who came to this northern city for school or jobs (or as the catchword of the moment describes us, “northern drifters”) and found our living, loving, and leaving behind here. More precisely, the novel finds inspiration in an old community slowly falling apart in time, where the daily lives of those who still dwell there are transformed into displays of art. What has been evoked by the novelist in his prime, rather than the exiles, disasters, locales, and incidents floating on the surface of his narrative of nationality, is us, the youths who escaped and got lost in the small frames; or rather, is the mythological battle between the colleges of Kainan and Marine Technology, or the love and fear that are always there underneath our daily life.

As a novel, Wall Climber serves as an exhibit in Daily+, the 2nd Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art. The novel is displayed in the tailor-made reading capsule by Chun-Yi CHANG, where the pages are spread open as an object of gaze and limited copies of the books are embedded on the walls. Moreover, excerpts from the book distributed across the three distinct venues of Our Museum, Nine Single Rooms Art Space, and Northern Campus. The literary work is connected to other media of contemporary art like a spider’s web castle and layered on one another like the novel itself, but it’s only a leap away from the faraway dimension of the netherworld.

Let’s start with the most recent and yet also the most distant work in the museum. Charles CARCOPINO reinterprets the final moments in the life of the composer François-Eudes CHANFRAULT. By passing through the visualized passage of sound (which was made possible by converting the entire second floor of the museum), the viewer is like entering the fifth dimension construct after passing the event horizon in the film Interstellar. One gets to experience and regard every moment in time with all one’s senses fired up. Right next to this are the orbits of celestial bodies recorded in Light Standard by Félicie D'ESTIENNE D'ORVES, which makes the act of watching an experience far removed from the normal capacity of human senses.

We’ll get to the Prix Marcel Duchamp laureate Julien PREVIEUX’s For Lana later. He spent seven years with writing Letters of Non-motivation so as to the absurdity of modern businesses’ recruitment system and how we struggle to keep our lives from being rewritten along with our resumes in the process. Interestingly, this somehow reflects Ho-Jang LIU’s work in the Northern Campus. What the artist put on display is the traces of his inhabiting the space. Twenty-five years later, he is looking back at the art apprentice he was in the same half-empty frame and attempting to engage in dialogue with his old neighbors or present passersby through letters.

There is also an example of art production written into Wall Climber: 254 Yen by Joyce HO and Snow HUANG from last year’s Air Plant. Guo-Fang QU, who used to briefly inhabit the deserted space (and who could be an art student or a contemporary cultural consumer just like us), becomes the invisible protagonist of this brilliant piece. And Tsai’s story, which is being narrated slowly in the fictional text, is testament to the aching love and collapsing life underneath as is known to the viewers of those two documentary films.

Not just the more traditional art venue like the Our Museum, other Daily+ exhibition space like the Nine Single Rooms Art Space and Northern Campus, which both used to be abandoned residential space, also features artistic activities as precise and pure. An example is Chih-Sheng LAI’s Drifting Sandbar, where a platform suspended in the room serves as a metaphor of the sandbar drifting among bodies of water, and the white cables are history as well as desire. Or, like Nicolas TOURTE’s I Don’t Know, where reality is made virtual,  protagonist in this work did exist and the pieces of furniture were all taken from Taiwanese daily life. Such is the first layer of Daily+, while the second layer is like Stéphane THIDET’s There Is No Darkness, where a lightbulb is circling around the duckweed in the water, and beyond the darkness, the elders of the community are babbling on about something in time.

Or, in the matchbox of an apartment that Ho-Jang LIU lived in as a youth, there a man in his prime is hanging out the clothes to dry or watering the plants in his undershirt, shapes and forms interweaving and overwriting light and shadow. Soundscapes such as the nonlinear language and musicalized soliloquies in Man-Nung CHOU’s Fever 103°, the sounds of wooden structures coming off and breaking at some unknown junctures in TOURTES’s Tidal Wave, and the audio videos in Olivier PASQUET’s Proxima B are layered upon the dailiness of the human settlement as well as QU who disappeared, HUANG, TOURTE, and LIU who used to be here, and the souls of all those young people who flee by climbing over the wall in the novel. Beyond the field of vision lie different fields of vision.

It is not just watching houses fall to pieces in time. Chih-Sheng LAI planted a tree in the brick wall, and one wonders what it will look like in 25 years. Pierre-Laurent CASSIÈRE’s Moment was made for the locale, and Youki HIRAKAWA even took underground water of Greater Taipei Area to create his A Root for a Room inspired by the locale. The curator Chun-Yi CHANG invited artists from Austria, France, Luxembourg, Japan, and the U.S. to join the collective symphony. Many of them are already important figures in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and are now making their debut in Taiwan. Some of the exhibits were created for the locale Fuzhou and even for just a half-empty frame. The novel Wall Climber, started long before the event, provides an intertextual platform for all the works of art on display.

Inspired by the Nine Single Rooms Art Space and the Northern Campus, co-curator LO wrote Wall Climber, which adds to the community history and locale, forming the common pre-reading text for the 20-plus artists from home and abroad. CASSIÈRE’s Moment, for example, constitutes, simultaneously, a scene from the novel and in the locale. An even more powerful instance of cross-referentiality between the text and reality lies in Jeff DESOM’s Rear Window Loop. The iconic window scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s film are spread out and reconstructed using the original shots, creating a 20-minute loop of holographic images. Looking at the lives in all the windows through day and night, sun and rain, one rises above the dailiness and reaches Daily+. At the same time, one is made aware of being trapped in our own dailiness going through the daily life.

“Every climb over the wall is a desperate attempt to escape from death.” Via the medium of novels, which are fiction nonpareil, Daily+ delivers a cache of virtual reality by turning art on its head where the proposition is the theory is the content, enabling us viewers from the daily life approximate the thrilling, abysmal absoluteness of art. 

The single piece of work that touches me the most is Youki HIRAKAWA’s Vanished Tree. But let’s not forget last year’s Recycling Scenery (which recreates the scenery of Fuzhou, Banqiao, from 70 years ago by using Nanzai Ditch mud, tree branches, and recycled objects) by Kuei-Chih LEE, which is still there, augmented by Wan-Shuen TSAI with stacks and piles of lead type letters and poems. The trees planted by Chih-Sheng LAI, meanwhile, constitute the bright and treasured daily life of the residents. The vines crawling all over the old dormitory buildings, the camphor trees thriving among the ruins of the abandoned complex, and the giant elephant ears (Alocasia odora) favoring the wet darkness all contribute to the dilapidated asphalt architecture and times of yore, even making visible the extremely simple tree stumps of HIRAKAWA’s and the piece of sky seen through the small half-empty frame. It’s as minute as an ant traversing the tree rings and as dim as the sound of waves made by the shaking of tree branches. This dailiness that is bound to go to waste is at the same time happy and sad. And also:

Cheese Rain on Butter House

Outdoors Orangutan Go Hide Money In Fire

Lana Chase Turtle For Peanut

You Bite Machine

Machine Bite You

This is a human language translation of Julien PRÉVIEUX’s For Lana. Compared to the pages that novels are written on, the poet (another identity of Wan-Shuen TSAI’s) displays a great diversity in her choice of lead type letters, the multilingual tracks used in the exhibition, the visual, sculptural, and technological languages, and the artificial language Yerkish created for non-human primates. It far exceeds the reality of right here, right now: Lana chase turtle for peanut; you bite machine and machine bite you. (Translated by Yi-Hsuan CHEN)