• Broken Spectre   YU Wei + ET@T 圖版提供©台北市立美術館
  • Broken Spectre   YU Wei + ET@T 圖版提供©台北市立美術館
  • Broken Spectre   YU Wei + ET@T 圖版提供©台北市立美術館
  • Broken Spectre   YU Wei + ET@T 圖版提供©北市立美術館
  • Broken Spectre   YU Wei + ET@T 圖版提供©台北市立美術館
Broken Spectre  
YU Wei + ET@T
Date：2017/7/1 - 9/17
Venue：E Gallery, Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Comments on the finalist artworks

Broken Spectre

is a multi-faceted curatorial project developed by ET@T, an important private research institution, and the research/curator, YU Wei. Focusing on the digital video archive of ET@T, the curator invited three artists, HSU Che-Yu, SU Hui-Yu and YU Cheng-Ta, to read and interpret the historical archive and create brand new works in response to specific Taiwanese art movements and cultural archives in the 1990s. The three artists employed individualized image vocabularies as well as installations to demonstrate their imagination of the history and cultural environment they never have a chance to experience. At the same time, derived from the archive study, Broken Spectre has also ushered in a multi-dimensional mechanism of cultural production, which consisted of new artistic creation, production of meaning and institutional collaboration. (Commentator: LAI Hsiang-ling)

About the Artwork
Artists HSU Che-Yu, SU Hui-Yu, and YU Cheng-Ta were commissioned to create three new large-scale installations that comprise Broken Spectre, based on ET@T video archives and in response to three archives of cultural history from Taiwan in the 1990s, including the Taipei Broken Life Festival at the Erchong Floodway in 1995; early productions of the Taiwan Walker Theater; and an essay on a discussion of the history of the queer body. These archives that seem at first glance to be disparate, disorganized projects, inadvertently coalesced as a certain hybridized, playful, disruptive corporeality of the masses that stood in stark contrast to the eloquent, systematized narrative that was simultaneously occurring in the contemporaneous milieu of mainstream culture.

Through personalized contemporary images, the three artists guide us on a re-visitation of cultural practices based on bodily functions at the end of the last century, in regards to corporeal depravity, sensory transgression, and unrealized Utopias. This exhibition represents a reflected aura of the history of the broken body from Taiwan in the 1990s, as well as an adaptation, homage, and re-imagination of recent cultural archives.


About the Artist
YU Wei
Art critic, researcher, curator, and former editor-in-chief and special correspondent for Artco magazine focusing on post-war art and visual culture in Taiwan, YU Wei is currently a doctoral candidate in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium of Birkbeck, University of London.

ET@T
ET@T was founded by artist HUANG Wen-Hao in 1995 to observe and develop all art forms of potential, as well as to explore states of ambiguity produced by digital culture.