Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Encorpsdages: Embodying Ambiguity reflects the artist’s experience of living abroad, and represents her unique observations of life, nurtured by cultural differences and exotic environment. The Encorpsdages series in the first room and the hallway combines body performances of the models with a braided rope. This series shows diverse interactions between human body, mind and the red rope, creating a space of ambiguity because the artist captures the models’ spontaneous reactions like an observer. In other words, she allows the models to speak with their own bodies and demonstrate their feelings and reactions towards the restricting adversities. Her work mixes ambiguous circumstances such as resistance, submissiveness, co-existence and collaboration, and reveals diverse possibilities of facing the vicissitudes in life. Viewing the series, audiences might as well ask themselves: if in their lives, there were difficulties or dilemmas like the red rope in the artworks has symbolized, how would they react physically and psychologically? As they ask themselves this question, the audiences’ and the models’ positions would switch and enrich the meaning of this series. The Fetishes series is a group of sculptures that manifests intangible emotions. The artist uses a type of red plastic string extremely common in Taiwan, and conducts a conversation with herself. Traditionally speaking, fetishes are used as tools in African rituals by shamans to resolve misfortunes for people. The artist has made 60 fetishes, of which the sizes range from 50 centimeters to 2.5 meters. For her, each fetish tells a story of his or her own since the beginning of the binding process, just like each person is molded into individual being through different circumstances in life. Together, all the fetishes form a special community in the exhibition, observing the visitors while being watched at the same time, enabling a dialogue particularly designed for this exhibition. In her two-month residency at Grass Mountain Chateau, the artist created many artworks in the mountains. The photos in the second room mirror her relaxing and carefree state of mind in the woods of Taiwan. The five pieces of the Ghost in Grass Mountain series foreground the blurry image of a flying red rope like a forestry spirit. The fourteen pieces in the Play with My Rope series capture the spontaneous interaction between the models and the rope. Overall, the exhibition echoes the concept of the Golden Mean. Presenting the three states of binding, struggling and dancing with the rope, the artist shows her interpretation of the rhythm and dynamics between the balance and imbalance in life.