In 2006, the Centre Pompidou presented an exhibition on Jean-Luc Godard, the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) director, which launched a tide of intimate integration between film and contemporary art, a movement that had begun with the British concept “Artist Film” in the 90s. The result was the acceleration of the intertwinement between film research and art history. Under the prophecy of Moore’s Law of integrated circuits, the rapid development of digital formatting also resulted in the complete merging (and blurring) between film and contemporary art in the 2020s. Looking back, the fact that director Huang Mingchuan, a pioneer of experimental film, was the recipient of the first Taishin Visual Arts Award in 2002, seems more significant now than ever. With this, “Tokusatsu Screening Room” presents an interesting means of reflection: we attempt to interpret Taishin Arts Award winners’ moving works and their extensions over the years from the perspective of artistic film, even expanded cinema, future cinema1, post-cinema, as well as the viewing experiences of universal film and television. This exhibition section investigates the historical significance and driving force from a “filmic”2 perspective and uses the Japanese film term “Tokusatsu” (特撮/とくさつ, denoting works that involve special photographic effects) to allude to phenomenon in contemporary art, such as exploring new technology, assembling new alternative routes, or creating new production systems.

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Through this lens, it seems that we are better able to comprehend the insight of the winners over the years. As mentioned earlier, the works of Huang Mingchuan, the winner of the first Taishin Arts Awards, span from documentaries and experimental films to other realms of art-related subjects (one can even say the latest embodiment of Huang’s artistic concept is the establishment of the Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival). The recent works of Hsu Che-Yu, winner of the 11th Taishin Arts Awards, are often presented as projects in the dimensions of both video installation and film. Hsu’s new work for this exhibition drew on the concept of lecture performance but developed into an essay film due to the pandemic. The works of Hsu Chia-Wei, winner of the 16th Taishin Arts Awards, have always shown traits of “meta-film” and “post-cinema.” Hsu’s latest VR work Earthcraft steps further into the immersiveness and images of internet game engines. Yao Jui-Chung continues with his recent approach of combining black-and-white photography with classic slides installation paired with noise, and his Incarnation and Hell Plus series are followed by his new work Muddy Buddha. Wang Jun-Jieh’s Passion (film version) is a video work produced on a cinematic scale and revisits German director Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder’s Querelle. Since the 1990s, Yuan Goang-Ming has developed his unique video production equipment, deployment, and post-production method, presenting viewers with the unlimited expansion of time-space perception and emotions through the underwater explosion in Dwelling. Ting-Tong Chang’s internet film SOAP reproduces the original 2021 internet sci-fi work SOAP, whose narrative and technology is saturated with infinite looping and non-linear concepts, into a single-channel film. Wu Tien-Chang’s Beloved series continues with nuanced 90s themes that ensued with Dust in the Wind, such as photography, film, history, and spirits. Su Yu-Hsien’s Hua-Shan-Qiang, on the other hand, is set against paper-constructed scenes in folk religion and is almost based on the concept of the picture movie. Director Tsai Ming-Liang, winner of the 15th Taishin Arts Award, boldly and successfully transferred his well-known artistic style from film to the unknown in his first VR film The Deserted. It seems that these recipients have secured the answer to “moving pictures as a way of exhausting the possibilities of contemporary art.”

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Moreover, in the latest collaboration between visual artist Cheng Hsien-Yu and choreographer Chen Wu-Kang, a specially designed “AI script production machine” has been developed to perform alongside human beings. Choreographer Yeh Ming-Hwa will adopt (a type of) dance film methodology to revisit Wang Jun-Jieh’s 2008 award-winning David's Paradise and extend the work into a sentimental dialogue that speaks explicitly to the time-space of 2022. These two works will be presented in a gallery designed with special layout that resembles a cinema, stage, or photography studio to break free from formal technology methods (a version of Tokusatsu) to respond to the extreme symptom of the future.

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Viewed from the perspective of the present moment, these new and old works and award winners, more or less, appear to be astonishingly prophetic in their forthright handling of the changes regarding the question “where is the audience of the future?”. Under the restraints of the concepts of the film audience, art audience, the elite and the ordinary, influencers and short films, focus market, a society of Technologism, and Extremism politics, how can artists create images that bring audiences together? This exhibition pulls focus toward these clues and invites artists to present new proposals built on the foundation of their past prophecies.

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As an extension, this section also includes several films with relevant subject matters in its Special Screening Program: Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying’s The Lighting was recently shortlisted for the Forum Expanded section of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival; the work uses film format as an interface and explores discrimination in technological development from an interdisciplinary perspective. Indian artist Sohrab Rura’s The Lost Head and the Bird references the structure of two-channel videos using the two-page spread of “photography albums” and uses algorithms to develop various narratives among the near one hundred photographs to present a picture movie viewing experience. Taiwanese artist Yu Cheng-Ta’s Practicing LIVE invites seven contemporary art professionals to perform in a reality show (the work was also invited to the Forum Expanded section of Berlin International Film Festival in 2014). Of all the works, Chang Li-Ren’s Battle City series is the work that most resembles Tokusatsu. As a further extension of the dialogue, this project invites the Facebook page of the cult film, “Toxic Veins,” to present an intimate film gathering for the audiences of Tokusatsu and the museum. Last but not least, those who crave more from this 21st-century film feature can go to the exhibition’s OTT platform “Giloo” and “view” works including Huang Mingchuan’s Myth Trilogy series, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs, Hsu Che-Yu’s The Making of Crime Scenes, Su Yu-Hsien’s The Chair, Yuan Goang-Ming’s 90s work and recipient of the Golden Harvest Awards, On the Way Home, Wang Jun-Jieh’s Sin City 00:00:00:00, which was (never before) presented as a film, and this year’s recipient of the Taishin Arts Award, Li Yi-Fan’s howdoyouturnthison. Through the online viewing platform, the spirit of the exhibition is transferred to the smart TV in your living room at home, or the laptop perched on your legs before bedtime, intimately shaping the somewhat “future audience.” 

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The works and their extensions mentioned above all contain parts of the award-winning artists’ styles or concepts. Whether in the name of dialogue and intertextuality or as an attempt to lay open the structure of art history, these works inspire us to reflect on the filmic qualities in the Taishin Arts Award and the thinking and movements of art over the years, thus prophesizing our expectations for the next stage: a “moving image space” that gathers more audiences is yearned for and being born.