Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

KOH Choon-Eiow is one of those rare artists who possesses a demonic vision. In 2013, he co-wrote and co-directed A Gambling World with MOK Sio-Chong, which delineated a picture of different kinds of people in the city of gambling and captured a series of caricaturistic existence in Macau. This year’s A Gambling World IIhad an even larger scale. It minutely portrayed people in casinos in the capitalist age, represented the self-exploitation under market competition, along with the chronic suicide committed in the act of self-exploitation, and finally completed an ecstatic, hellish tableau. From the ambling pace that was stable and steadfast in the opening, to a tricky balance on the rough passageway in the middle, to the falling imagery at the end, through the visible changes in physical movement, the outstanding design of the chorus corresponded in various ways to the mechanical rhythm of the public in society, its irrational acceleration, and the inevitable, uncontrollable final fall. With the possessed body, A Gambling World II has portrayed a contemporary hell. (Commentator: KUO Liang-Ting)

Artwork Introduction

The story of A Gambling World is inspired by a strange event of a person falling from a building in Macao: a Chinese tourist was sightseeing through the telescope at the Fortaleza do Monte, and saw a woman standing perilously on the balcony of the old Hotel Grande on Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, who jumped off the ledge after a while. Investigation shows that the deceased was a middle-aged woman from Taiwan, and no suicide note was found onsite. The police believed that the woman somehow entered the deserted hotel and fell from the tenth floor of the building. The news, like many others, was soon forgotten by the media. Who was this woman? Why did she come to Macao and leave in this way? The old Hotel Grande has always been surrounded by many tales. It used to be the most advanced and eye-catching entertainment venue in the local pier area. Being called “entertainment” was to avoid the word “gamble.” This did not stop the hotel from being the venue of several death incidents. Many gambling outlaws who were at their wits’ end eventually ended their lives at the hotel. The hotel itself has also undergone a vicissitudinous life in the history of Macao, having hung the national flags of the Republic of China, then Portugal, and finally the People’s Republic of China, until it was closed down in the 1990s and has never been rebuilt since. 

About the Artist

“approaching theatre”is an award-winning avant-garde theatre based in Taiwan, co-founded by Koh Choon-eiow (Malaysia) and Cheng Yin-chen (Taiwan). Their work focus mainly in questioning how Asian people drift and survive in history, post-colonial politics and capitalism power. Meanwhile, they continue their interest in developing the methodology for training contemporary performers, transforming the fundamental core of Chinese traditional aesthetic into a living physical and mental mechanism with serenity.