The Imagination

Exhibition is a stage without anyone's presence. People not knowing what it is about are invited to play. The obscure stage scene is not complete yet, only jargon and blueprints are around. But the script on the wall is one of the stage properties; it seduces you to read it but refuses to be understood. The audience's "watch" is a performance, and under the conventional ideas about etiquette, actors must avoid one another's eyesight, so they miss the most marvelous parts of the performance.

This place is filled with stories that had been read partly and jargon that never had been understood but always worshipped. There are also crosstalk actors who perform crosstalk with their mobile phones(Please notice in the basement mobile phones hardly get signals), and artworks whose embodiment never go beyond the phase of blueprints, or historical scripts that always mismatched times, characters and incidents.

In a murky corner, a huge machine taps the tempos of ancient Beijing opera. It faces its master who wears a mask, and all the mistakes in the tempos will be replanted in people's mind with jargon in order to maintain the authority of the institutions.

Artist's Statement

I enjoyed dismantling watches when I was a little boy. To me, each watch contained a miniature universe and had its own time. I loved to observe the structurally linked operation of gears, escapements and hairsprings. And what I enjoyed even more was to reassemble every component back in place. Although most of the watches I had dismantled and reassembled would be inaccurate, I thought they must have found their own times before they were isolated again by water-proof rings and airtight glass. My collection of watches with different times was carefully stored in a cookie box. Looking at the hands making different circles, my little mind seemed to experience the mysterious rituals in paralleled universes.

As I grew older, I came to be very fond of stories. Stories are like those watches of my childhood. Each story is a universe with its own timeline and spaces, and each character, each scene and each stage property can be compared to the balance wheels, escapements and springs in a watch; their roles are closely connected. The best way to present stories must be theater. On the stage an independent universe is formed, and the valves, escalators, and sandbag-balanced curtains, among other devices, are the components supporting the proceeding of this universe. The lighting for different scenes and the storage for stage properties or costumes are also essential to the universe of theater. A stage is a machine for narratives; each actor follows the formula of gravity developed through the scripts and starts this or her own rotation and revolution. The exhibition of "The Art of Mortal Apparatus" is an attempt to express the beauty of such parallel universes, or the stages within stages. Several digital sculptures of complicated gears and layers of prints present ears, eyes, noses and mouths floating on the illusional stage made up of nothing but blueprints. They represent four stories: One Thousand and One Nights, Hall of Longevity, Imperial Concubine of Fragrance, and Tower of Maze. These stories have been rewritten and displayed. The exhibition venue is a larger stage, and the audience is composed of unaware performers. The texts on the walls are scripts composed by the collage of jargons.

The interactive installation "Read My Lips" is a machine for reading scripts. It is placed in a ritualistic space for the audience to worship. The interactive installation "Expression Chassis" combines Beijing opera, opera masks and large projections of gears, which are activated and changed by the expressions of the audience. From the hole on the wall, the audience will see a giant machine-constituted mask of Beijing opera return his or her gaze.

In this venue, please pay attention to other visitors since they are part of the exhibition.

Statement of curator Chen Yung-Hsien >

Page by page, the script surrounds the venue, leading the audience into the atmosphere of the exhibition.

The Scripts in the Venue

The Guest book in the venue is transformed from the script.
The Visitors can chose the empty role to fill their names into.