Breaking Ball - 2nd PALAFANG Hualien Art Festival

Landscape of Fragility

This second Palafang revolves around the study of local history and the Anthropocene Epoch. In looking at the topic of locality, mobility is a common theme. When you look at a 16th-century Portuguese map of Taiwan, the island is divided into northern, central, and southern sections. In the foreseeable future, humans will inhabit the moon or Mars. We have even experienced something superlatively remote and untouchable as global institutions released humanity’s second image of a black hole this year.

If you slightly expand your horizons to take on a global perspective or stretch your timeframe a bit, you will gain a broader view of what is in store for humans now and in the future. In line with the name of this year’s event, Breaking Ball, the sub-exhibition Landscape of Fragility reflects the frailty of the world as seen recently with Covid, wars, and climate change. We live on a planet whose surface is basically as fragile as an eggshell and is continually being pushed toward the breaking point.

In response, Landscape of Fragility aims to open up people’s imaginations via three pieces: Trail, Hunga Tonga, and Delta. Just as described in Slavoj Žižek’s studies on interpassivity, the viewer and the art switch roles: the imagery takes the place of the viewer as the agent and directs the latter’s line of vision elsewhere while remaining inside the mechanism that produced it, staggering the real with the fabricated, the viewer with the viewed. The imagery seems to encompass the commonly simultaneous acts of disintegration, generation, and dissimilation, stimulating imaginative thoughts on today’s existence.

Period: 2022.10.22 - 2023.01.02
Venus: Stone Sculpture Museum, Hualien
Artists:
Trail / Te-Mao Lee, TAI Body Theatre, Chen Yu-Jung
Hunga Tonga / SUPERFLEX
Delta / Sandrine Deumier