24 Sep Taipei Art District Art Festival “It’s SHOW Time”
Curator/ Yu-Chuan Tseng
Living in the digital age, we are immersed in a theater of interwoven virtuality and reality, in which the relationship among main characters, supporting characters, sceneries and props is always fluid and uncertain, defined by an extendibility stemming from their mutual interpretation. These elements co-construct an indescribable performance of the post-internet era without a clear distinction between the real and the unreal. It’s SHOW time discusses the fundamental elements of theatrical performance—people, object, scenery and viewing, utilizing four sub-topics – “Body System,” “Object Consciousness,” “Fluid Scenery” and “Interactive Relation” – to explore a theater characterized by both virtuality and reality, through which the definitions of people, object, scenery and viewing are all blurred and destabilized. With the interplay and dialectics of virtuality and reality, the featured artists employ entanglement and the dialectic process as strategies to manipulate secondary, random actions or objects previously used as foils to create the stage scenery. By doing so, the artists transform the main and supporting characters as well as the scenery and props, decentralizing the characters, creating actuality that does not equal reality, immersing the viewers in emotions that push them into and beyond the action of viewing while reconstructing our perception and imagination of things.
It is SHOW Time「Body System」
In a bodiless state based on the human body as the subject, the disappearing body constitutes fluid “Body System.” “Object Consciousness” reinforces the meaning of narrative, co-creating a stage of fabulation with “Fluid Scenery” and “Interactive Relation.” “Body System” discusses the systems of body and object created by messages and symbols that are more real, exploring their varying aspects in the sites of virtuality and reality.