Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

Instead of describing Time Splits in the River as a "film" co-created by four young artists, WANG Yu-Ping, LEE Chia-Hung, HUANG I-Chieh, and LIAO Xuan-Zhen, I would rather say that the production of the film is an event that spans two generations as well as individual and collective memory. The script evolves around SHI Ming-Zheng, a political activist in the fields of literature and painting, but the actors are the fathers of the young artists. As the children, the artists conduct dialogues with their fathers to create a drama film. However, the fathers are neither professional actors nor political victims, and cannot help but expose their identities in the process. When the performance digresses and gives space for other narratives, the actors become fathers again, and the narrative cracks not only reveal the past of their everyday life, but also become the most precious thing in the entire project. (Commentator: JIAN Tzu-Chieh)

Artwork Introduction

Time Splits in the River is a collaborative movie project created by four artists and four families. The conception of the project originated from the artists’ involvement in a social movement. While taking part in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, the four artists realized that their families are quite hesitant about today's social movements despite them being in agreement with Taiwan’s modern democratic progress. Furthermore, although their parents grew up in the 1980s when social movements flourished, they had never participated in any. The four artists then decided to use filmmaking to trace back to this period in time with their families and to use the opportunity to communicate with each other. They have created a screenplay by adapting a novel by writer and political prisoner SHIH Ming-Cheng, with dissidents from the martial law period portrayed by members of their families. As the plot advances, their families also begin to slowly become entangled in their own past, with the film capturing the recollection and introspection of their own lives. The process of the families’ interactions is then ultimately presented in the film.

The project employs film as a communication platform to subvert relations in life and to spark dialogues that have been avoided in the past amongst the artists' families. On the one hand, through reenacting these social minority’s experiences, the film reintroduces conversations between the social majority and dissidents; on the other hand, it exposes the impossibility of internal family communication.

About the Artist

LIAO Xuan-Zhen was born in 1993, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

HUANG I-Chieh was born in 1992, Tainan, Taiwan.

LEE Chia-Hung was born in 1992, Taichung, Taiwan.

WANG Yu-Ping was born in 1993, Taipei, Taiwan.

Being classmates, the four members all graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, and are now based in Taipei, Taiwan. Since 2013 onward, they have initiated several artistic projects with their peer artists and family members, attempting to develop in and from these projects a more communicative creativity that enables dialogues with "dissidents." Their works range from performance art, film, to art project, including: Project on Fire: Families’ Migration, Graveside, Time Splits in the River, Chinatown Theater, etc.