Art Residency Program
In the 3rd year of “+1 Art Base Program” of Chiayi Art Museum, the art residency theme of the year “Mapping the Sound and Landscape” encourages creative workers in sounds and visuals to submit their projects that absorbs the local culture, history, or natural context to unleash their creativity on the basis of the museum and urban spaces. The topic for the artist residency exhibition is “Add A Missing Place.” The artists are LEE Li-Chung and “You Don’t Know Me At All.” “Add a missing place” is a function on Google Map. Any user can add a place on Google Map as long as it passes the review by Google.
With a long take, Lee revisited and searched for the Red Hair Well in Chiayi City. “You Don’t Know Me At All” angled along the Bazhang River and recorded sounds at different places. Both of them used Google Map to search for places that were common, regularly visited, or famous. Nevertheless, in the process, they found places that had been there all along and yet rarely visited or known to the public or had a name. Just as the participating artists described, “we’ve all been to these areas generally; however, with different keywords used in the search, we always have something missing. Precisely because there’s always something missing, we can retrace those we overlook yet are always there time and again.” Through the reminder of the resident artists, we come to realize that there is always something new to be found in Chiayi.
Artist Statement│Lee Li-Chung
Lee Li-Chung is fond of the homing instinct of racing pigeons, even to the level of obsession. Nonetheless, he is personally curious about where did pigeon that was not an indigenous species of Taiwan come from? After combing through a plethora of historical materials, Lee was thrilled to learn about Pontanus, an employee of the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) and searched for traces of pigeons over the Batavia route the Dutch vessels set sail east bound back in the days.
The project revisits the routes of the Dutch and Spanish colonizers in the seventeenth century as well as the Formosan communities. Through the re-view of the historical scenes, it studies the history and the contemporary via the perspective of a nobody in the Age of Discovery, along with some methodologies and sections of critical topography with intertext of writing and images. In the meantime, it searches for the valuable yet undervalued silhouettes of pigeon (study of the history), while caring for the development of urban settlements (study of the contemporary).
To put it more bluntly, it is a story of a quest for the artist’s beloved pigeon. Following the imperial specter through the exotic scenes like a time travel drama, we shall jointly roam through the splendid Formosa, reflecting upon the present that exists in reality and fantasy alike.
Artist Statement│You Don’t Know Me At All
What we did was rather simple. It was to deploy an underwater microphone from the upstream all the way to the estuary, plain and simple!
However, it was full of challenges as it turned out! It happened to be days of raining for the first time the team assembled, so Chukou was as far as we could reach for the upstream. If we wanted to go to the sluice of Renyitan, it was controlled by the Water Resources Agency. Not only was it filled with tall, barbed wires, but also surveillance cameras (shivering).
You thought we could just deploy our recorder by the river? NO～NO～NO～ Technically, we could only do so by the bridge over the river. It was “easier” for us to go along the road of civilization most of the time, considering there were muds, cliffs, control measures, and many more obstacles that kept us away from the stream.
Plus, we had limited equipment. The telescopic rod could only go as far as 2 meters from the bank vertically, and our 10-meter cable was nearly not enough.
Nevertheless, we recorded sounds to our surprise! They are melodic as if they were vibrant sounds of another realm, coming from the filthy, dirty pond and canal filled with wastes. The estuary was sublimely beautiful. Yet…
Yes, we were recording by the Bazhang River and await you to listen to the sounds at the acme of Chiayi Art Museum.