(2023) Exhibition of Multi-channel Video, Ambisonic Sound Installation, VR, and live performers.
Produced by and Exhibited at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Film and Artworks by Chia-Wei Hsu, Ting-Tong Chang and Hsien-Yu Cheng.
Sound Director of the Exhibition, Original scoring for Sugar-made Instrument, Shamisen, and 24-channel Sound Electronics Music, Sound, System, and Acoustic Design
Program Note
There is Another Capital Beneath the Waves is a collaborative work between The Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] and artists Chia-Wei Hsu, Ting-Tong Chang, and Hsien-Yu Cheng.
Individually, each of the artists is an internationally operating and reputed artist who has won major art awards in Taiwan in the past, and has participated in art exhibitions around the world. In recent years, the three of them have been collaborating on a project exploring the memory of modernization and historical relations between Taiwan and Japan, inspired by aspects of industrial sugar production in Taiwan during the time of Japanese rule.
There is Another Capital Beneath the Waves is a work that was realized as part two of Crystal Seeding(2021). It is set in Moji, a town in Kitakyushu where a sugar mill is still operating today. The exhibition looks from various angles at the memory of the two towns, which seem to be mirroring each otherʼs fate within the history of modernization in East Asia.
There is a sugar mill also in Moji today, which used to be operated by the same company that also operated a mill in Huwei, Taiwan. This is how the two towns have been connected through sugar. Both were strategically important bases during the war, and they both suffered severe damage in air raids when the war intensified.
In this work, the memories of war and modernization in Moji and Moji Port are portrayed by means of Japanese traditional joruri puppet theater, CG animation, music and live performance, while also overlapping with the famous local tale of the Heike clan. The title is in fact a line from the Heike Monogatari that describes scenes of the Battle of Dannoura.
The movements of the puppet masters and puppets, performers and avatars, symbolically suggest the complexly tangled relationship of “controlling and being controlled.” What exactly is the driving force that has repeatedly generated this relationship throughout history? This is the question that this work inspires the viewer to explore through a mixture of traditional and contemporary styles, while moving back and forth between the real and the virtual world.
“There is another capital beneath the wave Live Performance” held on C-lab and Hong-gah Museum
Tak-Cheung Hui 