Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

“The simplest rhythms, then, such as those of alternate expansion and contraction, of ebb and flow, in humans as in animals, were the first rhythms of all. We find them again in the rhythmic expansions and contractions of breathing. All forms and designs stem from these primary rhythms.”
—The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander

This project by Wang Yi-Ting began in 2020 as the Coastline Project - Field Research of Imaginary Deterritorialization, which was presented in 2021 at the Treasure Hill Artist Village, with the objective of exploring Taiwan as an island nation and the shifts and changes related to territorialization and deterritorialization that are happening along its coastline, as well as the fantasy mapping manifested from its internal and external transformations.

Wang conducts field research and creates visual records of various coastal landscapes in Taiwan, which she uses to gauge the realistic distance and the ambiguous areas between people and the sea. The notion of territory is not simply just about geopolitical inspections but also involves inquiries on the seascape’s notable changing nature and its reterritorialization into a scape of spirituality, which leads to questions such as: What kind of scenery do people expect to see by the sea? And what sort of expectation, solace, and reflection do people wish to obtain from it? Real sceneries are presented inside a quiet and secluded manmade indoor space of an art museum, and gradually, they shift into a sort of unrealistic existence that is continuously fluctuating and transforming, and it is here that geography of spiritual quality is redrafted.

Sea Rhythms imagines the space as rhythmic organic forms that are carriers of a plethora of oceanic hues and tones in countless temporalities. Through the spatial collaging of time and geography, temporal and geographical barriers found in reality are surpassed, with rhythm breathed into the imagined scenic melodies to form a narrative that is richly rhythmic and flows between time and space and also between reality and imagination. The exhibition is comprised of installations, videos, sculptures, and prints, and through three-dimensional dissection, displacement, overlapping, repetition, and replication of objects and images, objects are used to mark the existence of form and also to mark the tones and expressions in the adjusted space, allowing their respective melodies to unfold in different temporal dimensions, with the richly rhythmic oceanic musical movement imagined by the artist thereby reconstructed.