TAIPEI.- MOCA Taipei is presenting Liquid Love, an international group exhibition curated and co-organized by TheCube Project Space. This exhibition project is under the sponsorship of the 2018 Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts from the National Culture and Arts Foundation. The exhibition is open until 24 January 2021.
The Liquid Love curatorial project comprises two joint exhibitions: Sound Meridians and Liquid Love. Tackling their respective subjects, the two exhibitions reflect on our modern society and history. Presenting both archival documents and research-based artworks, Sound Meridians is curated by four curators from across Asia: Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. Situated on the first floor, it recounts stories of modern sound cultures in the four countries and territories.
The international group exhibition Liquid Love, located on the second floor, presents seven artists. It aims to explore how todays telecommunication society, which is dominated by the synthesis of capital and advanced technology, influences our daily life in the general environment where algorithms, Big Data and infoxication have a ubiquitous presence.
Sound MeridiansCultural Counter-mapping through Sound: Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia
The title Sound Meridians owes its inspiration to the concept in traditional Chinese medicine, claiming that human life is sustained by the energy circulating around the meridian system in the human body. Invoking such a view of corporeality as an imagery metaphor, this exhibition presents sound cultures in Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia and explores how these cultures can become the media and materials for a topology of history that responds to the historico-cultural development endemic to a place.
The Taiwan section features Rainy Night Flowers and the Evolution of the Sound Apparatus in Taiwan, curated by Jeph Lo. It consists of three parts, including Talking Drums Radio, a chronology of modern sound development in Taiwan, and artist Chao Ming Tengs ongoing work After All These Years, aiming to portray the coevolution of sound technical objects and human minds.
The Philippines section invites scholar Dayang Yraola to present her project Taginting, A Resonant Community of Sound Practice, which illustrates studies on the history of modern experimental sound in the Philippines with audiovisual archival documents.
The Singapore section foregrounds Melantun Records Pop up: Electronic Dreams of Tsao Chieh, curated by musician Chee Wai Yuen. Singaporean artist Ujikaji is invited to represent his work Melantun Records, which introduces the oeuvre of electronic musician Tsao Chieh, otherwise long since consigned to oblivion.
The Malaysia section highlights Silver Noise: Sound Circuits of Peninsula Malaysia in Parts, on Exile, curated by artist Sow Yee Au, showcasing the emergence, rheology, and different versions of Malaysian national anthem.
Liquid Love
Curated by Amy Cheng, the group exhibition Liquid Love presents seven Taiwanese and international artists: Hassan Khan (Egypt), dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Japan), Hito Steyerl (Germany), Hao Ni (Taiwan), Yu-Chen Wang (Taiwan/UK), Chi-Yu Wu (Taiwan), and Chung-Han Yao (Taiwan). The exhibition seeks to explore how networks, algorithms, big data, and massive messages profoundly affect modern peoples life in todays telecommunication society dominated by the flow of financial capital and advanced technologies.
The title of this exhibition is derived from the book by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in which he analyzed the nature of telecommunication in network society, using liquidity as the concept to describe the post-industrial modern world, the evolutionary new interpersonal relationship, as well as the new relationship between humanity and the world.
In the liquid modern world, people relish the merits and sense of speed brought by technological development. However, due to the boundary-blurring of the real and the virtual, people also needs to continuously adapt to the new situational volatility both physically and mentally.
In the age when the relationships between individuals and groups are flowing, liquefied, ephemeral and unstable, this exhibition treats artistic creation as an alternative way for communication between individuals by encouraging ruminations on this liquid world, envisaging the future with which we are about to confront.