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‘On Fluid Street’

  • Date:2018-05-26
‘On Fluid Street’

Zygmunt Bauman coined the term liquid modernity to describe “a contemporary world in such flux that individuals are left rootless and bereft of any predictable frames of reference.” Extending from Bauman’s concept, this artwork, Liquid Streetscape, uses digital imaging technology to showcase liquid images that converge and overlap a historical old street with elements of humanity and culture. Echoing with the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock, a “gazing” perspective is used to examine the structure of the streetscape from being without order to being orderly, with a sense of continuous liquid emotion evoked.


Bearing this in mind, the artwork is based on my own dwelling place, Xichang Street in Taipei’s Wanghua District, as I observe the historical street around Longshan Temple from day to night, paying special attention to how through shifting times and social changes the area has become a place of contemporary faith and where hawkers, sex workers, migrants, and tourists linger and gather.  


Many cultural traces and marks from the historical street’s past as a dock are still embedded within, and today, countless overwhelming shifts and changes take place here daily, with only “connections” not “relations” formed between people and also between people and the place. Therefore, I have chosen to use panoramic audio-visual components to gaze at this urban area’s bustling features, with people moving from day to night, using aerial photography to scan this area that has been left behind by history, as I witness and reflect on Wanghua, a historical town that has been dragged by reality into an unavoidable liquid state.


With this, the temporal possibilities for regionalism is no longer restricted to topographical explorations, with a sense of “post-region” distinctively belonging to the given moment inversely created and order replaced by liquidity, as a transference of site under social cognition is suggested by the disheveled streetscape.


‘On Fluid Street’