A media and interactive installation art from Taipei by Chun-Ming Chen
Date:8/10 to 8/31
Artist Talk & One min. Hope Recording: every Fri to Sun, From 11an to 3pm

STATEMENT:
Where are you? It’s a common term in our daily life. Usually the answer always comes out as a geographical location. In this creation, I want to extend the question to the multi-issue of the moment of our life. That could be questions about positions of social status, age, economic ability, life style, or spiritual condition, etc. What is your life should be? Are you satisfy or feeling well with your life? This art project is trying to explore the subject of value system in the entity of reality and the sense of feeling by a multimedia interactive installation which is aimed at sharing an idea of life between people.

I begin this creation from a series of photographs shot in Taipei City. These pictures have a quality of floating motion in urban as the background with some fictitious mirror reflection images. Also, there are always people in the pictures. But it’s difficult to distinguish the person in the pictures. Because, their faces are all just be covered or fuzzy to see. Therefore these images are a symbol of living in an uncertain era. We are living in a rapid world which is not merely in the fast change, but with ambiguity of direction. Has all that is been substituted by fast renewal? This is the result that modernism brings to us.

What is the purpose of our life? We may worry about being vanquished by capitalism, be weak, fear of losing our jobs, afraid that the environment will be destroyed. Modernism dominates our life and turns it into dangerous situations, as seen with the banking system, environmental problem…etc. How do you control your life? Is your life oriented towards welfare? How do you locate your life? Contemporary life makes people feel puzzled. So do you know where are you? And what is your hope? Hope, it keeps us moving into a new future. So everybody needs a sense of hope to move on further.

I am a visual and multidisciplinary artist and also an associate professor from Taiwan. I have traveled a lot around the USA, Europe, and Asia. But this is my first time to come to the Southern Hemisphere and to the beautiful harbor city Fremantle. I come here through the exchange program of Asia Link and to be a resident artist of Fremantle Art Center from 16 July to 9 of September 2012. I have brought 12 of photo prints (80*60cm) and two video art works from Taiwan and will have a show at The FAC, titled Where are You? In this exhibition I will need you to be a participator for my interactive installation which has two parts. One is to write down the feeling of your life on a post-it note and stick it onto an X, Y coordination which has Sad, Happy and Sufficient, Insufficient on a wall. The second part is that I will set up in the exhibition room to talk with the audience about the ideal of life and record a one minute video about Hope with the audience every Friday to Sunday from 11am to 3pm in August. These videos will be shown in Taipei and other places together with other people’s Hope Videos. I hope to collect your HOPE as a gift of art from you. Please come to meet with me in FAC and have fun.