23｜The Urban Image Treasure Chest Display: The Taishin Arts Award Project
TU Wei-Cheng
2010-2022
Mixed Media
The Urban Image Treasure Chest Display is a project of visual discoveries and urban gatherings by Tu Wei-Cheng. The work imitates the atmosphere of “a museum of image history,” and comprises “visual toys,” “wooden projectors,” or visual installations resembling “antique furniture.” These handcrafted, seemingly historical artifacts of images or visual toys, in fact, form a collection of images of unique people, things, and objects of a place. Through “game,” “body,” and “eventization,” the work enables us to re-understand,
re-discover, and re-connect “city,” “local residents,” and “self.” By weaving together pseudo artifacts/cross-sections of the environment/real events, a visual archaeological approach to a cultural phenomenon is formed to contemplate on the characteristics of Taiwanese culture and other cities’ unique cultural features through the assembling process of multilayered mixture and collage.
The Urban Image Treasure Chest Display: The Taishin Arts Award Project is a spin of the previous work, and showcases multiple Taiwanese visual artists and performing arts groups. It symbolizes Tu’s tribute to these talented artists, as well as his way of expressing and documenting the encouragements to and supports for the creation of Taiwanese contemporary art by the Taishin Arts
Award.
LEE Ming-Chen
Born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 1969, Tu Wei-Cheng holds an MFA from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts of the Tainan National University of the Arts (2005). He now works as an artist, as well as an adjunct assistant professor at the Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan. He has exhibited internationally, including at the Musée des arts asiatiques, Nice, France (2022); Oku-Noto Triennale, Japan (2020); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019); 1st Thailand Biennale, Krabi, Thailand (2018); V&A Museum, London, U.K. (2017); Singapore Art Museum (2013); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2012); Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong, China (2012); Queens Museum, New York, U.S. (2008); Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Napoli, Italy (2007); and Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2006).
Pivoting around the idea of self and system, his work is a hybrid of archeological excavation and contemporary life, where modern technological gadgets are transformed into ancient relics from an imaginary civilization, deeply imbued with an upturned sense of time. Sometimes site-specific, his large-scale installation becomes a manifestation of local folklore and contemporary phenomena, placed in a falsified reality that has crossed paths with the ancient past. The artist contemplates cultural identity, as well as the incongruities and anxieties that ensue, in an effort to reinterpret the Information Age.
The 2nd Taishin Arts Award – Jury’s Special Award｜The Beauty and Mystery of Bu Num Civilization Revealed: Tu Wei-Cheng Solo Exhibition