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Photo Credit: Ze Wei
Wang Yao-Yi Solo Exhibition: Co-production
2024/10/15
Location：Soulangh Cultural Park
Wang Yao-Yi
Born in Tainan, Taiwan, Wang Yao-Yi graduated from the Department of Communication of National Chung Cheng University and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.
He has explored his art practice through producing experimental modes in film and cinematic installation. In his works, fiction and non-fiction stories are intertwined and narrated in a non-linear manner. Wang has focused on writing about the past that has long been neglected and comparing it with contemporary events in order to show how history has the tendency to repeat itself.
His artwork won the Honorable Mention of 2019 Taipei Art Awards and was nominated by the 22nd Taishin Arts Award. He has held solo exhibitions in both the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Pier-2 Art Center, Kaohsiung. His works have been exhibited in Taipei in Taiwan, Chicago in the U.S., and Yokohama in Japan.
Exhibition:
In 1907, the Japanese, Toyojirō Takamatsu, embarked on his tour around Taiwan for filming the moving image, An Introduction to the Actual Condition of Taiwan, which displayed the progress of Taiwan under Japanese rule. It was deemed the first film ever made in Taiwan. At the end of the 20th century, the film industry in Taiwan was declining. Making “co-production” films through introducing transnational capital with low-cost technologies was how Taiwanese film industry had managed to keep producing films during its recession.
The artist juxtaposed these two events in his exhibition “Co-production”. It was a narrative of a Japanese filmmaker visiting Taiwan for “location scouting” and “set design”, which were respectively used to discuss the relationship between being useful and being, in the context of colonialism and globalization. “Location scouting” indicates gathering information from the front to send back to the rear base, whereas “set design” implies repurposing the site. Through the comparison, the artist intends to highlight how colonizers discovered, and then reconstructed the colonies. Only the useful were given the privilege to live. Only the ones included in the frames were valuable enough to be preserved.
When the scene is ready, only awaiting the director’s arrival, the ghost of Toyojirō Takamatsu will be summoned to the filming site once again. Is he going to find out, that everyone at the scene is still trapped in the dream of modernity created by him?
More Information: https://soulangh.tnc.gov.tw/index.php?inter=exhibition&id=109&type=1&kind=current