Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

Thinking about and resistance to systems of consumption and hegemonic economies are frequent topics for contemporary artists, but these cries and struggles of resistance can lead to unfortunate ends. Huang, Po-Chih’s works and plan for long-term documentation, however, exhibit an extremely poetic and elegant posture. It appears to be a soft revolt, but behind this softness, there is an extremely calculated attitude and aesthetic. Both this posture and the way works are displayed set these new works apart from others that similarly offer thinking about economic networks and hegemonic systems. This aesthetic and attitude more accurately reflect the aspect and attitude of the current era.

Through fakery and ingenuity, a different kind of thinking, one imbued with the character of illicit theft, is smuggled into normally imperturbable economic systems and consumer habits. A poem or a phrase, a latent sense of humor that can be assimilated but not tamed, enters in as a poetic and literary body. Like a secret code or the password of a secret society, these phrases link themselves to fixed, unchanging entities. You may know and I may know. Perhaps it won’t lead to a revolution, but it can nevertheless exist as an underground transaction that creates its own meaning.       

( Committee member/ Lee, Wei-Jing )

Artwork Introduction

Huang, Po-Chih’s group exhibition Soft Revolt took place at the VT Artsalon on August 22 to September 19, 2009. Even though Huang is mainly known as a digital artist, he works as a curator too. For this exhibition, the art on display takes on a form of infiltration, inversion and reversal of the existing economic structures or network systems. Through such acts, Huang hopes to make an alternative gateway out of the system, or rather, to stay hidden within to seek the potential for dialogue.

In works such as PTB’s series of hidden cameras and camouflage gadgets and Dawuyong Tizhi’s [Of Great Useless Constitution] I’m Not Guilty serve as a kind of infiltration into the omniscient social surveillance that monitors us all the time. Shin, Yi-Shan’s Stow Away, Huang, Po-Chih and Huang, Chien-Yu and Tsou, Yi-Ping’s collaboration of “B! Poetry (Be Poetry, Poetry to Beep)” along with Liu, Hsin-Cheng’s pseudo-American beef advertisement can all be seen as ironic acts that comment on consumption activities in the local or global context. Puta Yeah’s Education Is No Waiting makes a humorous parody of the once-standardized textbooks used to serve as militarist propaganda of the past.

The various works are expressed in different forms, ranging from dynamic images, graphic output, installation pieces, blogs, and actual happenings outside the display room. The exhibition is just the first step to an open dialogue; Soft Revolt is a point of departure: what could Soft Revolt do? Any form of resistance, no matter if triggered by any kind of motivation, has its own political legitimacy and complexity. Through Soft Revolt, Huang and the artists ventured to look for a more common or habitual state of constant struggle, an anti-act in everyday life as a form of peripheral resistance initiated by individuals against systems.