Caged Time／extract（2017）

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Premiere：November at Parking Venue of National Theater, Taiwan
Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group
Produced during the Artists residency at the National Theater & Concert Hall
Nominated for The 16th Taishin Arts Award (Season 4)

In the summer of 2014, having wrapped up my residency at the Water Mill Center, New York, I found the time to visit Dia: Beacon in New York’s suburbs with my friend before heading back to Taiwan. At this newly renovated arts compound and a former cookie box printing factory, I had my first encounter with the iconic works of Japanese contemporary artist On Kawara. His Today Series features acrylic on canvas of various sizes and a whole collection of Date Paintings. Each painting comes with a self-made storage box containing a cutting of a local newspaper of the day on which the painting was created. All news stories, whether big or small, international events, sports, weather or obituaries, were treated equally, like time.

Today Series was created by Kawara over a course of 30 years, starting from 1966 to the year before his death. It was Kawara’s unique way of recording time and communicating with the world and speaks of an artist who led a solitary life – never had interviews, never showed up at his own exhibitions and always kept a low profile. The artwork takes the form of concept art and adequately addresses the curatorial proposition about time and human existence. The creation of Caged Time was deeply inspired by Karawa. Caged Time combines other series with titles such as I Wake up, I Met, I Walk and I Am Still Alive, and raises the question of “how we perceive time”, “how we memorize the moments of life”, “how I connect with the world” and “how we weigh the value of life”.

As parking lot was chosen as the performance venue, the site specificity of Caged Time reflects how modern people perceive time. French anthropologist Marc Augé used “non-places” to refer to transitional places that connect “real” places. Examples of non-places include parking lots, airport halls, elevators, intersections and overpasses. Augé believed these places incited no sense of belonging, had no place in history and only existed to generate experiences of instant perception. “Temporality” becomes the keyword. Time stops for no one. And the ever-changing landscape of parking lots carries the traces of the lapsing of time. People come here to meet, assemble, pass one another and disassemble. There is no meaningful connection or affectionate exchange, only constant movement, anonymity and blurred faces.

The spatial experience in a parking lot reminds people of Facebook Timeline. We indulge ourselves in our Facebook walls, swiping through friends’ statuses. In one post, we pray for a huge disaster. In another, we laugh hysterically to some online pass-around joke. We cry in one moment and titter in the next. We click likes, share links, follow others and add a comment. We seemingly don’t care, but actually do care. We are creating the proof of our presence, although we are actually absent. Daily and major events, collective and individual memory – all things are interwoven and juxtaposed with one another in this virtual sphere. At times, they even permeate each other. Narratives become fragmented and discontinued, leaving direct display the only means of presentation.

This time round, we are joined by virtual artist CHOU Yu-cheng, who proposed the concept of “picnic and shelter” to construct the dynamics of the theatrical space. Between the audience and performance, connections are built by passing down bottled water, cushions, flashlights and telescopes. This art piece is a continued exploration of landscape narrative in which the motion of performers, deployment of props, sequencing of events and utilization of space deliver a mixed picture of normality and anomaly, present and past, sight and spectacle, reality and representation, and, overall, a theatrical space and a reflection of social events. Parking lot provides us with the backdrop to define, utilize, perceive, redefine, misplace and interpret the locality of intermediary places. As we reevaluate time and space, we are rediscovering the geography of our daily life.

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