Landscape as a mobile form of everyday lived practice. -- John Wylie, Landscape (2006)     “Human” is the key to the possibilities of moving through the urban landscape such as walking, seeing, taking a ride, or driving, which are acts of observation.   The four artists/art collectives envision the city's future based on the 320th anniversary of Chiayi. By merging the landscape of Chiayi’s past, present, and future, they employ different approaches to explore the body as lived and the perception-in-motion in Chiayi’s landscape, engaging the audience as “mobile observers” to unlock a greater ability to perceive the ubiquitous landscape in everyday life.   Participating artists | YU Ya-Lan, HUANG Shao-Ying, Sara WU, 2ENTER    

Pu Tien-Sheng believes that “the human body is a microcosm of nature, and every part of nature can be found in the human body”. His lifelong devotion to figure sculpture has made him a renowned master of modern realistic sculpture in Taiwan. In 1988, he was struck by the beautiful balance beam movements of Romanian artistic gymnast Daniela Silivaş on television. With the fluidity of the balancing movement, Pu blurred the solid surface details of the sculpture and transformed the sculpture's volume into movement, creating Exercise Series, which demonstrates the extremes and beauty of the body's flow, balance and movement.

Group exhibition Everyday Performing originates from a simple question: how should we approach contemporary live/performance art, as visual art evolves? Or the various abstract terms born out of needs for in-depth discussions, such as performativity and liveness, which straddle increasingly open and interdisciplinary boundaries? Should we perceive it as a medium of art making, or a form of art? Should we consider live/performance art in terms of what it is not? Looking back, art historian RoseLee Goldberg traced live/performance art back to Futurism in the early 1990s Europe, and more closely to conceptual art and new media between 1968 and 2000. If we examine past works within the context she has framed, it could be said, in response to the aforementioned questions, that the works from the past to the present parallel in a universal, intrinsic force, which is a cultural strategy at the core to create a space that is otherwise excluded from the existing context, a means for an artist to transform a work into what is known as live/performance art. This exhibition invites the viewer to focus on this shared internal force, to use it as an entry point to engage with, participate in, and reflect upon the exhibition and works on view as a whole.   While “cultural strategy” sounds like a broad term, here it refers to a practical realm where change is enacted and ideals are shaped in a cultural system. An open, constantly morphing state, it allows narratives and contexts to mutate, altering the shared space and rules that constitute culture. Throughout the history of visual arts, cultural strategies associated with live/performance art are often defined by a sense of refusal or rebellion, mirroring a reality that extends beyond the confines of artistic mediums or subjects, to encompass the redefining of art, the interplay between art and life, the passive/active role of the viewer, even social, societal, economic, and political communication. A museum, as a public space and part of the cultural infrastructure, serves as a domain where these arts events (cultural activities) occur, connect, and dwell.   The Chiayi Art Museum, as a public space where Everyday Performing is on view, sits at the center of Chiayi City in Southern Taiwan. Adjacent buildings steeped in history in the neighborhood transition into the present and future. The museum’s mission statement declares that it aspires as a “living room within the city,” an idea Everyday Performing aims to galvanize into life. To reconfigure this public space into a performance that transforms into a cultural strategy, which morphs into a vehicle for the participating artists to respond to issues personal, artistic, social, and environmental.   This group exhibition conveys an array of voices, from the sovereign force of the work itself, the artist’s adaptation of external circumstances, to the subjective perception of the viewer. This formative process encapsulates the different stages of a work of art. In today’s world, where boundaries have been broken, live/performance art — no longer marginalized — basks in the limelight, its rebellious strategy to confront the system tackling the risk of being packaged into an intense, entertaining experience. This exhibition attempts to create a parallel space that maintains just enough distance to connect with the real world without being easily swept into the established system, while fostering a sense of open-ended uncertainty. Ultimately it embodies not only a performance that facilitates communication between the viewer, the museum, space and time, society, and nature, but effectively a cultural strategic approach to the real system.