About the Artwork
My Body is an Air Quality Monitoring Station began with a public hearing where victims exist as sacrificial lambs without governmental protection, like laboratory mice using their bodies as evidence of environmental pollution in the place of the ineffective monitoring of the air pollution index.   

This “anti-aesthetic” art exhibition is also an exhibition of air pollution, and may be regarded as a promotional exhibition on environmental protection, or an exhibition of images of environmental protest. LIN Tay-Jou references and extends the petrochemical industry jargon for the refining “cracking” process in his work with the implication that the petrochemical industry has qualitatively altered the environment and human beings and caused it to fissure and fragment. Confrontations and the breakdown of communications between the victims versus government and industry are physical expressions of the nature of this polarization, conflict, and contradiction.  The artist’s practice of split edits in the film responds to the Collision Montage suggested by Russian director Sergei Eisenstein – constructing a new concept and significance by juxtaposing two disparate images, while also presenting the film grammar of the Third Cinema (social activism film), using a dialectical system of jumps, breaks and irrationality to “split process images within a documented event”.
 

About the Artist
LIN Tay-Jou
With a Masters degree in Film and Television Production from Napier University in Edinburgh, UK, LIN Tay-Jou is currently a university instructor. He has devoted himself in recent years to the documentary and production of environmental images, and regards documentary images as an instrument of the citizenry for supervising the state. He is a recipient of prestigious accolades including selection by the Venice Film Festival New Territories category, the Shanghai Television Festival Magnolia Award for Best Asian Documentary, and Taipei Art Awards Honorable Mention. He has been engaged in environmental activism since 2015, with the formation of the PM2.5 Action Group, and was involved with in the video activism project entitled Take off the Hygiene Mask • Seek Out Blue Skies with image workers in the Southwest Coast National Scenic Area.

PM2.5 Action Group
The PM2.5 Action Group is a project began in 2015, driven by LIN Tay-Jou with directors Jimmy FENG, TSAI Tsung-lung and MJ LEE. The three directors assisted in aerial photography and planning for the exhibition of the My Body is an Air Quality Monitoring Station at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.