Duration: 2018.10.06 Sat.-2018.11.04 Sun.
Press Preview: 2018.10.05 Fri. 12:00pm
Opening: 2018.10.06 Sat. 3:00pm
Venue: Liang Gallery
Curator: Yu-Chuang Tseng
Artist: Legacy Lab International、Ming-Chang Tien、Wen-Cheng Lee、A muse、Pey-Chwen Lin、Shih-Ting Hung、Pure Do、Hui-Chan Kuo

Taipei Art District Festival 2018 invited curator Yu-Chuan Tseng to plan this year’s activities around the theme of “Should We Play?” As one of the main exhibition venues, Liang Gallery will showcase works of art by eight new media artists/group of artists from Taiwan under the subtitle of “Transitional Mirage.”

A mid-ground in a hidden space is created while “playing.” Meanwhile, experience and feelings arise from the mutual action between playing and the object of play in an open attempt and exploration. Our perception is neither in the mid-ground nor outside but is in a blurry position between the inside and the outside. It wanders between the real and the virtual, temporarily ignoring the chaos of the outer world. The mind enters the state of dissociation and returns to life outside the forgotten real world, and it jumps out of the constraints of space and time while forgetting the truth.

Should We Play? discusses the memory of “playing,” hopes to renew the expectation and imagination of “playing.” The subtitle “Transitional Mirage” talks about returning to the memory of the game, a fantasy world constructed of action, imagination, and critical awareness, awakening the hidden space that once existed, echoing the emptiness of mixed reality, and leading the viewer into the artist’s mid-ground. In the world created by the artist and shaping the hidden space, the viewers can return to the memory of “playing,” the forgotten, or deliberately forgotten memories through the illusion of virtual reality and by shifting from the subjective world to the objective things. The awakened one is the hidden space that once existed, echoing the emptiness in the mixed reality. This mirage is a metaphor which is not only trying to shape and return but also through the joy and fascination of the mirage to remind us of our ignorance to science and technology and the gradual lack of imagination due to the human-based digital experience, also the life between virtual and real.

Ming-Chang Tien’s The Appearance of Existence and The Three Flowers use an action of the body to reproduce childhood memories that have disappeared long ago. Hui-Chan Kuo’s 3D animations Amusement Field and Lock reshape children’s way of playing and the playground. Both works explore social reality after becoming a grown up in the process of retrieving childhood memories. A muse’s Deep Sea Bamboo Puppet is a spacecraft that leads deep sea creatures and people into a flying fantasy. This dream continues in Shih-Ting Hung’s Viola : The Traveling Rooms of a Little Giant in which a girl is looking for happiness on a strange journey like the one in “Alice in Wonderland” and learns to get along with her future and the past. Ivan Liu and artist group Legacy Lab International’s Water City series of works implies the interaction of urban systems through geometric flowing color segments. When looking at the flow of colors, the viewers’ thoughts enter a dynamic shuttle. I-Chun Chen and He-Lin Luo jointly organized an art group Pure Do. Invisible Direction brings the audience directly onto the fantasy stage. The artist duo strolls in urban spaces and applies invisible ink on the street walls as graffiti and uses light to find them, thus inviting the viewers to participate in a real-life treasure hunting game. Wen-Cheng Lee’s Bearanger and Route 17 is a joyful satire of the adventure video scene, and discuss world’s problems in the illusion of a game. Pey-Chwen Lin’s Making of Eve Clone Documentation I creates document files by using 3D to show the intention of a wise man to become the man of God.