Dream of Amber─LIN Yi-Chi Solo Exhibition
LIN Yi-Chi
Venue：FreeS Art Space
Comments on the finalist artworks
Dream of Amber
Taiwan’s collective pathos is related to multiple historical contexts and reasons, including colonial and national regimes, industrial and economic forms, as well as families and generations. LIN Yi-Chi comes from a rather unique family. Her grandfather was a missing intelligent agent. Because of the grandfather’s dedication, the family was able to live in a military dependents’ village. However, their Taiwanese background caused the family to live in an isolated state and they were eventually forced to move out of the village. Lin’s father was adopted into the family, and the artist once lived a wandering and even anti-social life with her father. Through a successful construction of the paternal past,
About the Artwork
Inheriting the exploration on the relationship between personal history and the shifting ideology regarding nationality, Lin’s latest project “Dream of Amber” focuses on the state of self being a container of memories and the forgotten. The exhibition includes a multi-channeled video installation: Requiem for the Realm of Father, a series of photo stills, the exhibition demonstrates the dialectical process of struggles between reality, hallucination, and reconstruction.
Through direction and mise–en–scène, the reality and the fictional scenes are intertwined, therefore the context of childhood has been re-captured. By this way, memories and oblivions connect again, which can be seen as the resistance of destiny, and the requiem for the family. The self-psychoanalysis in “Dream of Amber” suggests that the memory is more realistic than the reality, while a dream is the shelter for both memories and the forgotten, which is like the meeting of warm and cold ocean currents, where the so-called “cult” energy sprouts, blurring the banality of ethics and desire, love and death, violence and pureness, and existence and loss. Through this dizziness, they have temporarily forgiven each other.
About the Artist
Lin Yi-chi was born in 1986 in Taipei. Lin’s video works, experimental cinema, and performance have focused on transforming the image making process into a necromancy-like ritual that summons the marginal and unofficial memories to facilitate the re-enchantment of national and family history, while recreating the realities that surpass reality at the same time. Furthermore, Lin has been rethinking the relationship between analog and digital images, and exploring to capture the fragmented nature of imagery. In addition, her regular performances in her own works are seen as body involvement that practices the cross-disciplinary embodiment.
Lin has been invited to several international residency programs and her works have been exhibited in many curatorial projects and film festivals, and also been awarded many times for the unique ambiance and subversiveness in her works. Lin’s works are known for the unique ambiance and the subversive experimental spirit.
