Artists
Photo Credit: NIU Chun-Chiang
LIU Yu
LIU Yu
| Location | USA / Los Angeles |
|---|---|
| Residency | 18th Street Arts Center |
| Year of the Grant | 2016 |
| Work | Gold Mining History |
Project in residency: Gold Mining History
This project originated from my research on vagrants in Taiwan. Based on my frequent interaction with these people between 2015 and 2016, I got to know the Taipei Railway Station, a public space that has become a shelter for vagrants who stay there for its available resources, friendly environment and regional connections. The space of this station is ergo open to interpretation. In the following steps, I will try to adopt the first-person perspective of these people, and thereby re-interpret this public space’s attributes and potentials.
I gained invaluable experience as an artist-in-residence at 18 Street Art Center. In addition to studying the ethnic tension endemic in Taiwan, I not only seized this exciting opportunity to immerse myself in a foreign country’s experience and historical context, but also took an intriguing glimpse at the situations of different ethnic groups in the country. Los Angeles, the host city of my residency, is located in an area with mild climate, rich resources, as well as humanistic and ethnic diversity, which is why it has become the “capital of vagrants,” where the number of vagrants jumped to 26,000 by 2016. The vagrant problem in the United States arises from capitalism and utilitarianism that this country has long espoused, while the immediate cause lies in industry offshoring, inadequate supply of cheap housing, elevated middle-class unemployment rate and soaring cost of living since the 1970s. Unfortunately, the U.S. government hasn’t taken effective remedial measures to date, making many veterans and the underprivileged homeless because they cannot afford the cost.