Ministry of Culture-Performance Venues & Architectural Heritage

How do we describe the reality in the digital era? Can reality be created, and how can it be customized? The participating artists examine ways in which the human, the material and the conscious world exist in the age of digital, using various art forms including video images, installation, VR installations and interdisciplinary performance.

When entering modern society, we transform traditional social life with technical methods, disenchanting those illusion generated from mythology and religion since pre-historic period. German sociologist and philosopher, Max Weber described the rationalized mentality, which excludes those mysterious phenomenon from our lives, as “disenchantment.” However, our society does not evolve in merely one way along the disenchanting approach. Especially, in the spectacle era when visuality takes full control, artists sophisticatedly manage the interactivity of digital media and the aim to create virtual space with imagery, grafting virtual limbs to the viewers’ bodies. In this sense, artists take visuality as the extension of human’s mind, perception and body, and further enable the viewers to gain real perception. In other words, ‘seeing is believing’ no longer holds true in the highly digitalized and virtualized reality of the contemporary world. For the artist, any exploration of ontological questions about the nature of contemporary existence and the essence of humans and things need to be carried out in a virtual or augmented environment, as that most closely reflects the current nature of our own reality.
 
14 artists/ groups from Taiwan, China, Japan and Australia participate in this exhibition. Through means of imitating and representing the reality, artists invites viewers into a virtual environment; imaginary limbs are grafted onto their body and visual awareness is used to extend the sense of both mind and body in a unique sensory experience. The lure and enchantment will cause participants to reconsider the nature of humans and other objects in the digital era.

Artists

Lin Pei-Ying, Hu Ching-Chuan, Yuan Goang-Ming, Zhang Xu-Zhan, Chang Huei-Ming, Hsu Chia-Wei, Tao Ya-Lun, Lu Yang, Liao Chi-Yu, Liu Yu, Hiraki Sawa, Plugin HUMAN

‘Customized Reality: the Lure and Enchantment of Digital Art’

• Date: Feb. 2 – June 3, 2018
• Venue: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
• Address: No. 2 Wuquan West Rd. Section 1, West District, Taichung City, Taiwan (ROC)