Taiwan 2.0: Broadcasting The Island's New Media Art to the World

Schizophrenia Taiwan 2.0 is a touring exhibition of over a decade’s worth of Taiwan’s new media art. Next stop is Transmediale, Berlin’s art, culture, and technology festival. Late 2013, the exhibition hit Russia’s Cyberfest and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. After Berlin, Schizophrenia Taiwan 2.0 will make a final stop at Instant Video in Marseille, France in late 2014.

On occasion, we may see the work of Taiwanese new media artists, in galleries or by way of online coverage; but, Schizophrenia Taiwan 2.0 seems to be the first of its kind—a menagerie of some of the country’s most significant new media art. It’s also an opportunity for Westerners to see just what’s been brewing on the island nation, since mainland China tends to dominate art and technology headlines.

The works included in the touring exhibit are mostly videos or installations. The artists aren’t enamored with some of the current digital art trends of the West—GIFs, glitch, pixel art, or web art that looks like Geocities home pages on acid. The artists, in one way or another, made works that comment on Taiwan’s unique national schizophrenia: an island nation that is part of but distinct from mainland China, while also a member of the global community through its tech economy, yet somewhat removed from the international affairs of the wider world.

“Taiwan’s schizophrenic nature will be diagnosed under the following lenses: a condensed symbol of world history, a powerhouse for global digital economy and an ambivalent national status,” reads the exhibition’s website. “Part of the world and at the same time apart from it, like a satellite, Taiwan observes, orbits, and transmits messages to this world. These messages coincide the challenges and potential of globalization and cybernetics.”

In all, fourteen artists are exhibiting works in Schizophrenia Taiwan 2.0. We’ve highlighted a few of the country’s new media artists to keep an eye on at Transmediale or, later, at Instant Video. If you can’t make either of those exhibitions, be sure to follow the artists online.

好思家旅行箱 Good-to-be-home Luggage from Lin, Yen-Ju.

Yen-Ju Lin is a 24-year old artist from Taichung, Taiwan, currently studying for a Masters in New Media Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts. Her mixed media installation, Good-to-be-Home Luggage, features single-channel video projected onto a wall, with fabricated suitcases situated nearby, inspired by the type of housing that was common in her childhood.

“Dwellings have become my objects of attention,” Yen-Ju Lin wrote of the project.“Taiwan’s housing is like the recombination and collage of multicultural symbols. Affected by the impact of globalization and colonialism, most housing of many Third World countries has showed this strange and organic collaging status, and I attempted to find out Taiwan's unique collage aesthetic.”

Li-Ren Chang

Hailing from Taichung City, Li-Ren Chang is interested in consumerism and marketing’s effect on Taiwan and beyond. Battle City is about entering into a programmed existence within a capitalist city, where he sees everyone engaged in a type of battle (economic, existential, etc.). To that end, Chang built a scaled model of a city, and reproduced video of marketing materials and other city footage to mimic life in this programmed city. However, the Schizophrenia Taiwan 2.0 exhibit only travels with just one of these city buildings.

Pei-Shih Tu

With a title like The Adventures in Mountain Yu V (From Michel Foucault to Our Glorious Future), how could Pei-Shih Tu's video installation not be interesting? Composed in collage in a way that simultaneously approximates South Park's animation, Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls, and even Yuri Norstein's work, Pei-Shih attempts to take hundreds of years of Taiwan's history and dislocate it from any context.

French philosopher Michel Foucault makes an appearance as a character, lost in thought on a green mountainside. Then a procession of other characters move in and out of colonialist scenes. Within Pei-Shih’s charmingly irrational survey of Taiwan’s colonial past, which she calls a “lost history,” there is an ecological component, which can be seen in the lush, green landscapes populated by her characters.

The Unconscious Voyage from CHEN Wan-Jen.

Various ghostly pedestrians walk endlessly back and forth along a horizontal continuum in Chen Wan-Jen’s The Unconscious Voyage. As the artist states, there is no axis of time and space. Everyone keeps going because there is no time to stop and do anything else.

Chen created this piece in 2008, so he’s moved on to a number of works in the years since, from the first person shooter-esque To Hell With Your Future to White Shadow, You Are Time Carving Future. Most of of his work features digital manipulation of video or straight-up computer-generated imagery.