It’s-a Me, _____!
2025 Absolute Space for the Arts Taiwan-France-Germany Action Rally Project – Paris
Curator： LIAO Chien-Chiao
Co-curateur：Joseph CUI
Artists：CHEN Yen-Yi | HUANG Yi-Min | LAI Chih-Sheng | NI Xiang | TSAI Tsung-Yu
July 03th – 26th 2025 （Wednesday. – Saturday.）2pm – 7pm
Opening：July 3th (Thu) 6pm
Performance ：Diane Chéry
When a teacher says to children, “Alright, go ahead and play,” most of them will quickly pick up something from the ground that interests them and start creating their own game. But when a teacher says to university students, —“Well, go ahead and play!”—a series of questions such as “What game?” “How do we play?” “What can we play with?” and so on. Before starting a game, we usually need rules. otherwise we don’t seem to know how to begin a game. Similarly, before drawing, we require a theme; before singing or performing music, we need a score; before dancing, we find a center; even before thinking, we need to elucidate a concept or established knowledge. It seems like the act of play is inseparable from its corresponding rules. In this sense, the game and its rules exist in a relationship of mutual subordination. We ultimately end up mastering the way of playing, but hardly establish new rules or personal rules through the act of play itself. In this case, how can we walk away from this restraint and limitation?
In terms of art creation, breaking the rules of a game is undoubtedly considered a form of critique, often with classical irony. But, Platonic irony (l’ironie platonicienne), happens through dialogue, where the player defines themselves in relation to an opponent. This is a distinct difference from the Pre-Socratic philosophy of satire, which aims to dismantle the rules. Therefore, the breaking of rules often becomes the dialectical focus between opposing players. Therefore, the breaking of rules often becomes the dialectic orientation or theme through the opposition between players.
More precisely, the destruction of rules or the metamorphosis of game preexist in the improvisation of games. These improvisations precede the existence of any confirmed players. This is not a process whereby a subject (player) invents a new game, nor is it a hierarchical (subordination) relation between subject and object. For this case, the game is already defined since its rules and players are in place. On the contrary, “to play” pre-exist the games itself, it is in a state of undetermined, virtual without rules, “to play” always precedes before the actual beginning of any game.
When irony, as a form of critique, becomes too influential, too great in this generation, ignoring the political issues, becomes the easiest and banal attitude. In that case, if contemporary artists search themes only within a certain current political discussion — and not in a political event themselves, — even when searching themes rooted in collective memory, the critical form will appear weakened. By contrast, if the contemporary artist seeks to move away from the most destructive method of ironic critique, a critical approach of humor and perversion makes a world possible shaped by contemporary art. It transforms the sense of this world itself. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once stated, “To ground is to metamorphose.” （Fonder, c’est métamorphoser.）
Text by LIAO Chien-Chiao
Curatrice : LIAO Chien-Chiao
Ph.D. at L. L. C. P. at University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, the title: Now and the Body — Emancipated Thought in Sartre and Deleuze, under the supervision of Didier Moreau. During doctoral research, she translated Deleuze’s book, “Difference and Repetition” into Traditional Chinese, with her colleague Chien-Hsin Chiang. This book is the first time translated into Chinese, and released in 2019 in Taiwan (ISBN: 9789863843825). By the end of 2025, her second translation of Deleuze’s book, “Logic of Sense,” will be published in Taiwan.
ARTISTS
CHEN Yen-Yi
With humor, the world created by Chen presents a natural, yet fictional world transformed from a restrained society. Surveillance screens of the streets are replaced by the gaze of birds, with avian eyes being the surveillance cameras. Yet this bird for camera substitution is not a metaphor, but a disjointed illusion, both critial and poetic in its fragmentation.
HUANG Yi-Min
In 2013, Huang co-founded the Absolute Space for the Arts in Tainan. Based on his long-term immersion in the temple culture of Tainan, Huang uses the temple-related cultural anecdotes he collected or imagined as his research subjects. In Huang’s works, the composition of a boat or a fictional animal can either be based on individual developments, or a fusion of elements instead of the perfect image of a united whole.
LAI Chih-Sheng
For me, there is an intrinsicity in painting. It’s not merely about the contents, but the traces behind the paintings. — Lai Chih-Sheng
Here, Lai’s not saying that contents do not matter. Emptiness, or the lack of content rather serves as a solid subject in his paintings. What Lai introduces is never sentimental, but always calls for senses. This includes the creases, holes, lines, noises, etc., which he sees and paints with the soul of a child.
NI Hsiang
For Ni Hsiang, excess implies shortage. Ni distributes and arranges historical elements according to his own sense of order, which either unfolds through his instinct, or is randomly assembled without a fixed function.
Pity Man is neither presenting a space for memories, nor a collective consciousness or shared life. Instead, it invites the audience to reconstruct fragments into various units with their individual imaginations.
TSAI Tsung-Yu
With a Ph.D. in Art Theory from National Taiwan Normal University, Tsai’s works—such as Golden Horse and Take Off—convey a latent visual tension between serious political subjects and naïve terms of expression. Instead of relying on metaphors, the artist boldly presents symbolic imagery of certain authoritarian figures, such as fighter jets and statues of power, with his distinctive sense of humor.