Opening Ceremony：2023/03/14 10:30
Exhibition Period：2023/03/14-2023/04/29 (Tue-Sat)
Exhibition Hours：10:00-17:00
Venue：Art Center

Co-organizer：Department of Cultural Affairs, Taoyuan

Special Thanks：Grand View Culture & Art Foundation, Artist Tu Wei-Cheng

Exhibition Statement

Vibrantly defined since the 16th century, the so-called cannibals refer to the difficult ones encountered by the coloniser, the 'inhuman beasts’ resisting and provoking foreign merchants and settlers. To the coloniser, it was no excuse that incidents of cannibalism occurred in the shallow mountains residing armed Han people. In the exhibition, the realm of cannibalism refers to the invasive cultivation of land and historical migration of the Han people from the subtly critical perspective of the indigenous on the other end of the border. But that's not all.As a part of the The Beheaded Stream Art Project, previous papers and works published by artist Liang Ting-Yu include The History of Anthropophagy (2018, Zone Art) and Memories of Savage Flesh Eating in Longtan and Kansai Shallow Mountain Regions of Northern Taiwan (2019, the 10th Hakka Cultural Inheritance and Development Academic Conference). Through reinterpreting Chinese, English, and Japanese historical texts and retracing sensory memories of sight, smell, and touch based on oral history, the artist observes the anthropophagus narrative between the Hakka, the Min, and the indigenous, and the flesh-eating rumours surrounding the shallow mountains of northern Taiwan. In the form of film and installation, Liang’s work investigates the live recounts and subjective views of the local Min and Hakka involved, as well as the non-human objects such as flesh chunks, skulls and skeletons. As a historical activist, the artist drafts a historiographical compilation exploring the interconnection between phantoms of local geographies, the cannibal history, and the colonial thinking of residing settlers.

Artist

Liang Ting-Yu is a graduate of the Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts at the National Taipei University of the Arts. His research and artistic creation focus on the methodology and the problematic formation of project-based art and ghostly discourse, the development and practice of related topics, as well as on the issues of transitional justice, animism in the trend of the tradition to the ‘non-human’ in contemporary history and the writing of indigenous history. His current project mainly focuses on the integration of interdisciplinary local studies in the forms of project-based art actions and mixed media, collections of moving images, research and inspection of death, spiritual encounters, mapping and writing. Liang’s research is published in seminars, workshops and essays in journals and discussion forums in cultural studies, history, anthropology and other related fields.