Memory Palace in Ruins at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab attempts to position mainstream culture as a form of collective mythology
In his 2009 essay ‘The Anxiety of Silver Halides’, Taiwanese artist Tsun-shing Cheng ventures that the advent of digital photography has fundamentally shifted our relationship to the visual representation of reality. He argues that the turn away from the physical process of developing film to abstract manipulations of electronic data has cost photographs their integrity as tangible documents of specific moments. ‘From the deteriorating wreckages of the mechanical image,’ he wrote, ‘the wraith of the virtual image has slowly risen atop the ruins of the memory palace birthed by the industrial revolution.’ Titled after Cheng’s quote, Memory Palace in Ruins probes at the relationship between physical media, the immaterial narratives and cultures they contain and reproduce, and the possibilities of art to subvert ideologies that have been ensconced in everyday environments. Comprising 27 works from 11 countries, this sprawling exhibition is an expansive, though somewhat uneven, attempt to position mainstream culture as a form of collective mythology.
Kuo Che-Hsi’s Colonial Pine (2023), a series of wall-mounted photographic prints, reveals how even the trees planted in our urban landscape contain historical layers of political messaging. Depicting unassuming, mundane scenery surrounding public buildings in Taiwan, Kuo’s sly compositions address the subtle presence of the same type of tall pine tree present in many locations. Native to Australia, the robust hoop pine was originally introduced to Taiwan by the Japanese colonial government to symbolise Japanese political might. After the Chinese Nationalist government took over, the pine was repurposed as a symbol of state power, leading to robust planting around public institutions.
History can also be captured acoustically. Performing a form of sonic archaeology is dj sniff’s sound installation The Inverted Listening of ‘Explosive Enemy Aircraft Sounds’ (2023), which explores the 1942 Japanese propaganda record Tekki Bakuon-shū, ostensibly meant to train visually impaired Japanese youth to distinguish enemy aircrafts by sound. dj sniff worked with saxophonist Masanori Oishi to transcribe and rerecord the original aircraft sounds within a Japanese bunker. His low, droning soundscape conjures a visceral unease for the air raids they represented – an anxiety uncannily refracted through C-LAB’s own history as a former air force base and Taiwan’s current geopolitical tensions.
Two works further contemplate the mechanics of political theatre. Polina Kanis’s video Formal Portrait (2014) shows two figures rehearsing a series of aerial gymnastics akin to circus acrobatics on a tall pole. The pole is in turn mounted to a military motorcycle, whose presence suggests parades and processions. Captivating and alienating in turn, the peak physicality of these nameless figures and the rote vacuity of their technically competent performance evoke the empty bravura of military spectacle and its gestural vocabulary.
Meanwhile, Hsieh Yung-Cheng’s Hong-ye Juvenile Baseball Team and Teen Images (2023) unpacks how youth athletics can be mobilised as a political tool. During the late 1960s, the eponymous Taiwanese youth baseball team, which was from an impoverished aboriginal village in Taitung County, rose to fame by winning local leagues and eventually beating Japan’s Wakayama team, the reigning world champion. However, this win was eventually plagued by controversies, including accusations that the team used older players who falsified their ages. Within a multimedia installation, Hsieh presents two ways to examine this story. The first, a wall-mounted video essay with his own voiceover narration, analyses the image economy of the Hong-ye’s meteoric rise and fall as an attempt at political projection by the then martial government; the second, a television set within a baseball mound on the floor, plays back archival footage of the team participating in various celebratory ceremonies alongside politicians and state officials. Hsieh’s calm, almost detached, tone belies the incredible violence visited upon indigenous teenagers who had no agency in what happens in their mediatised afterlives.
Picking at the seams of where normative ideals are encoded into everyday culture, Memory Palace in Ruins considers that our shared memories are never really our own to begin with – and that maybe it is time for the memory palaces of yonder to fall into ruins so that another may take its place: this time, something a little closer to life, a little more mundane.
Memory Palace in Ruins at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB), Taipei, 9 June – 13 August
