Liquid Love & Sound Meridians

Co-organized with MoCA Taipei, TheCube Project Space is pleased to present the Liquid Love & Sound Meridians international group exhibitions which will take place at MoCA Taipei. The joint exhibitions, under the sponsorship of the 2018 Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts from the National Culture and Arts Foundation, will open to the public from November 14, 2020 and run through January 24, 2021.

About Liquid Love
Curator: Amy Cheng
Artist: Hassan Khan (Egypt), dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Japan), Hao Ni (Taiwan), Hito Steyerl (Germany), Yu-Chen Wang (Taiwan / United Kingdom), Chi-Yu Wu (Taiwan), and Chung-Han Yao (Taiwan).

The group exhibition Liquid Love invites seven artists from Taiwan and the international world. The exhibition seeks to explore how networks, algorithms, big data, and massive messages profoundly affect modern people’s life in today’s telecommunication society dominated by the flow of financial capital and advanced technologies.

The title of this exhibition is derived from the book by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in which he analyzed the nature of telecommunication in network society, using “liquidity” as the concept to describe the post-industrial modern world, the evolutionary new interpersonal relationship, as well as the new relationship between humanity and the world.

In the “liquid modern world,” people relish the merits and sense of speed brought by technological development. However, due to the concomitant expansion and boundary-blurring of the real and the virtual, people also needs to continuously adapt to the new situational volatility both physically and mentally.

In the age when the relationships between individuals and groups are flowing, liquefied, ephemeral and unstable, this exhibition treats the artistic creation an as an alternative way for communication between individuals by encouraging ruminations on this liquid world, envisaging the future with which we are about to confront.

About Sound Meridians—Cultural Counter-mapping through Sound: Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia
Curator: Jeph Lo (Taiwan), Dayang Yraola (the Philippines), Chee-Wai Yuen (Singapore), Sow-Yee Au (Malaysia)
Artist: Chao-Ming Teng (Taiwan), Ujikaji (Singapore)

The title Sound Meridians owes its inspiration to the concept in traditional Chinese medicine, claiming that human life is sustained by the energy circulating around the meridian system in the human body. Invoking such a view of corporeality as an imagery metaphor, this exhibition presents the sound cultures in Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia and addresses the question as to how sound cultures can become the media and materials for a topology of history that responds to the historico-cultural development endemic to a place.

The Taiwan section features Rainy Night Flowers and the Evolution of the Sound Apparatus in Taiwan, curated by Jeph Lo. It consists of three parts, including Talking Drums Radio, a chronology of modern sound development in Taiwan, and artist Chao-Ming Teng’s ongoing work After All These Years, aiming to portray the coevolution of sound-technical objects and human minds.

The Philippines section invites scholar Dayang Yraola to present her project Taginting, a Resonant Community of Sound Practice, which illustrates studies on the history of modern experimental sound in the Philippines with audiovisual archival documents.

The Singapore section foregrounds Melantun Records Pop-up: Electronic Dreams of Tsao Chieh, curated by musician Chee-Wai Yuen. Singaporean artist Ujikaji is invited to represent his work Melantun Records, which introduces the oeuvre of electronic musician Tsao Chieh, otherwise long since consigned to oblivion.

The Malaysia section highlights Silver Noise: Sound Circuits of Peninsula Malaysia in Parts, on Exile, curated by artist Sow-Yee Au, showcasing the emergence, rheology, and different versions of Malaysian national anthem.

Organizer: MoCA Taipei, Taipei Culture Foundation
Co-organizer: TheCube Project Space
Exhibition Sponsor: National Culture and Arts Foundation (2018 Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts), Tung Ho Steel Enterprise Corp., and RC Culture and Arts Foundation