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The South : An Art of Asking & Listening


DURATION: 2017-06-03 ~ 2017-09-17
OPENING: 2017-06-03
VENUE: KAOHSIUNG MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
ADDRESS: 80 Meishuguan Road, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
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For a long time, Kaohsiung, or the whole southern region of Taiwan, has been in the South, not only in the geographic sense, but also in the political sense of being disadvantaged in the national and international power distribution. Historically, the political south can be broadened to cover the southern countries colonized by the West during the early modern period. It can also refer to the Third World, unequally developed during the period of post WWII modernisation, or the so-called ‘Global South` formed under the globalisation of late capitalism. The South thus represents a social minority, namely the sub-altern, whom development programs have silenced, sacrificed and stripped of social mobility for the sake of the majority. The exhibition explores issues related to this invisible subject named the South in modernity. The first chapter, “Your country does not exist”, looks at how the modern state, provided its promises of human rights, justice, and people’s sovereignty, has relentlessly and structurally disenfranchised certain groups of individuals as the south. Alternatively, some choose to stand in the opposite side of the state, using artistic and other strategies of resistance, of imagining a state beyond the state. The second chapter, “Ask the south”, scrutinises how modernity programs exploit the environment, other species and the earth itself; rendering them into the position of the south. "From Xiao-Yao-Yu (逍遙遊) to the aesthetics of scale”, the third chapter, proposes a new theory of aesthetics to explicate recent art works related to ruins, environmental disasters, and large-scale human interventions into the planet and beyond. Based on the idea of the south, these works refer to various scales of time and space. Though similar to the traditional Taoist aesthetics in which non-anthropocentric perspectives play an essential role of art, the modern aesthetics of scale relies on our knowledge of technology embedded in human perception and understanding of things, and thus also provides a critique of modern technology and its world-views. Artists: Libia Castro+Ólafur Ólafesson; CHANG En-man; CHEN Po-i; CHANG Yung-ta; Yannick Dauby; HWANG Huann Jang+CHAO Jui-Kuang; James T. Hong+Yin-Ju CHEN; HSU Yung-Chin; JHONG Sheng Syong+HSU Chen-tang; LIN Bo-liang; Idas LOSIN; LIN Sheng-xiang+CHUNG Yung-feng; LAI Yi-chih; LIN Tay-jou; Minouk LIM; Oliver Ressler; PM2.5 Action Group; WANG Hong-kai; YANG Shun-fa; YAO Jui-chung + Lost Society Document + Sandy Hsiu-chih LO