From the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese-occupied period to other various colonial eras, the development of Taiwanese fine arts over the past centuries is as diverse as the multiple colonial experiences it has experienced. Whether people moved for education, work, business, emigration or war, migration, contact, fusion and conflict are inevitable when artists travel between different countries. This exhibition is titled “Painted Identity of a Homeland” and Chiayi is set to be the spatial endpoint to explore issues such as art mobility and cross-cultural communication between painters from Taiwan and China from the Japanese-occupied period to the post-war period. At the same time, it analyzes how the artwork highlights the ambiguous land identity of "hometown" and "foreign land" when time and space interact during the time while identities are blurred or overlapping, and what kind of mixed national identity is presented. The exhibition includes two major categories: (1) Taiwanese painters from Chiayi who went to China during the Japanese colonial period, and (2) Chinese painters from various provinces who crossed the sea and settled in Taiwan after the war and worked in Chiayi. It also involves (3) A few Chinese painters who immigrated to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period or came to Taiwan for travel and art exchange. When living in Chiayi, this “homeland” or “foreign land”; the complicated interpersonal networks are also formed between host and guest/ insider and outsider. These people were teachers and government employees, or they made efforts to creative works and promoted art education activities, making huge contributions to Chiayi. Through communication, group consciousness was formed, maintaining one's own cultural attributes or expanding ethnic connections, highlighting complex identity characteristics of different eras, generations, regions or origins, forming a phenomenon of interaction and correspondence in style and spirituality. According to the relationship between different groups, the six subtopics are: "The Other Land of The Shore", "Transgressing the Boundaries of Time and Space", "Images of Residence", "Typical Culture", "Inherited Art of Ink Painting and Calligraphy" and “Elegant Gathering”, displayed by comparing each other through multiple viewpoints. Through the connection of cultural theories at different stages from colonial, post-colonial to trans-colonial periods, this exhibition examines the diverse aspects of the development of art in Chiayi from the Japanese-occupied period to before and after the lifting of martial law and analyzes the contemporary significance of migration, mobility and the intersection of space and time in the artworks of different groups. At the same time, under the special political situation, the exhibition expresses what kind of cultural negotiations are entangled between the nation, homeland, group self and a place, what kind of conflicts and media are used to reconcile the contradictions and differences between Taiwan, Japan, China and the West, and then finds the answer of the reconstruction of self-image and self-identity.  

The Displacing Gaze  is an exhibition that offers a curatorial perspective based on “inheritance” and “dialogue.” In addition to their close cultural and geographical connections with Chiayi, the six artists also formed bonds with each other because of marriage, education, and art.   Chang Yi-Hsiung (1914-2016) and Chiang Pao-Chu (1917-2003) represent the development and imagination of the progress of modernity in Taiwanese art, as well as the time when people aspired to be “painter” and viewed it as an ideal career. The life of Chen Che (1937-) and Hou Chun-Ming (1963-) interweaved due to high school art education. They both render body images in their works, which display distinct creative ideas and natures, indirectly projecting two completely divergent thoughts on the system. Lii Jiin-Shiow (1953-2003) and Ho Ming-Kuei (1978-) formed a relationship through their works purely by chance. Lii’s surreal and unconscious series with black patches implies her anxiety for life, religion, and family on the brim of college graduation, which later became a successful series that marked her signature style of that phase. Ho’s works are composed of scripts of past existence, present life, and fate, which form an intriguing connection and resonance with the religious views embedded in Lii’s works.   This exhibition is not so much based on the intersection of relationships (husband and wife, teacher and student, and generations) but rather on the interactivity and the difference derived from these relationships. Through the rules of art and among the flesh, substance, field, and form constructed by the works, the meaning of artworks is thus displaceable and interchangeable, becoming the comments of each other and reversing each other’s gazes to open up dialogue.  

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.