Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist 

KAO Chung-Li endlessly explores the forms of cinematic production, the ways of image formation, and the prototype experience of human visual perception. Through remaking and reconstruction of existing and standardized equipment, he aims to expose how a cognitive mechanism of the image is imperceptibly embedded in individual lives as well as our collective consciousness throughout the imperialist and capitalist expansion and the long-term conditioning of an image production system in Taiwan. Meanwhile, he employs left-wing thinking and a theoretical introduction to “Third Cinema” to construct a cold and accusative image/sound language to criticize the structural origin of image production. Persisting with the idea of “winning our own image machine,” his work is a resilient statement about and an endeavor to construct a viewing/image subject that is our own. (Commentator: HUANG Ya-Li)

Artwork Introduction

The exhibition revolves around the history of and production relationship between humankind and audiovisual technology. With its Chinese title, literally translated as “life determines consciousness” and drawn from a penetrating, essential quote from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels about historical materialism, this exhibition represents the life politics that spanned the four decades following the artist’s debut solo show, involving the sudden emergence of cyberspace after the fall of the Berlin Wall; the wars of images since 911, the ensuing anti-terrorist military operations, and incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison until now; the breakout of a war game in Ukraine at the eve of the exhibition’s opening, due to a conflict escalated through NATO's eastward expansion and about whether war is the glory of a nation’s sovereignty or its agency; as well as the Gaza humanitarian crisis after the exhibition ended and the deployment of an AI target-creation system called “the Gospel,” all of which constantly remind of the immediacy of war at “present”～A postwar generation “At Present.” The English title of the exhibition “Re-Present” precisely refers to an ontology and an existentialism based on self-criticism, which remain faithful to Kao Chung-Li’s initial attempt: “the most rigorous, precise repetition is the sameness based on a correlate with the self with the difference of the maximal vector.” The artist has long been carrying out a critical archaeology of the relationship between Enlightenment violence and the evolution of industrial temporal objects (naked eye, machine-eye, and eye-machine) as well as a continued examination of the paradoxical prospect and terror of production means based on imitation, reproduction, simulation, and cloning. Constituted of and upheld by various technical retentions, this exhibition is an attempt to opening up a space for temporalizing spatial perception (vision) and spatializing temporal perception (hearing). As figure and discourse about the form of labor, the audiovisual is represented as machine-based image determined by an image machine ─ images of reality liberated through image-based reality ─ images of war judged through war of images ─ the everyday of war memories liquidated by war of memory. In this exhibition, dialectics and struggle in an age of life politics unfold through media, history, and memory.

About the Artist

Born in Taipei in 1958, Kao Chung-Li belongs to the generation of baby boomers (born from 1946 to 1964, a period that involved the Cold War, with CRT electron guns shooting worldwide). His work demonstrates historic dialectics between perception and audiovisual technology. On the basis of media archaeology and modernology, the artist explores the power structure in the evolution of audiovisual devices through multiple perspectives with the continued pursuit of liberation for media ecology and art production at present. His practices on the form of individual audiovisual labor include the Photochemical-Mechanical Live Image Projection Device series (a practice using a general human faculty, hand-eye coordination, as the means to understanding and approaching technical images), Camera Lucida Cinema (a practice on signifier, involving artificial, visible signifiers), Slideshow Cinema (a practice on identity politics regaring individual audiovisual culture), Patent for Optical Toys as Teaching Materials (a practice on teaching as a form of proactive learning), Object Book Based on Reflection Materials (a practice about how pre-optical intuitive viewing of objects can be possible), 24 × 18 Half (a practice that explores the conditions for synchronization related to moving images in terms of difference, intermmitance, and suspension of frame or succession), Binocular Optics Destroyed the Object: Haptic-vision Technique of Retouching (a judgement practice about representational agency). The artist has held his debut solo photography exhibition at the American Cultural Center, Taipei in 1983 and has won 7 Golden Harvest Awards in the categories of 8mm experimental film, animation, and documentary five years in a row (1984-1988).

Production Team

Director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum｜Jun-Jieh Wang

Exhibition Supervisor｜Tsun Ling Liao

Artist｜Kao Chung-Li

Curator｜Wei-I Lee

Exhibition Coordinators｜Kat Siao, Ju-Hsuan Kao

Exhibition Designer｜Hanyu Chih, Huei-Ming Chang 

Graphic Designer｜Guan-Ming Lin

Production Associates｜Ping-Chun Yen, Min-Hua Shao, Kun-Han Ho, Po-Ching Chou, Hsiang-I Yang, Chor-Kheng Lim, Huai-Hsu Su, Yung Hao Liu, Ming-Yu Li, Li-Ling Yeh, Chen Yi-chu, Yi-Wen Huang, An-Shun Cheng, Wei-Sheng Chang

Display Associates｜Cheng-Hsien Li, Chao-Wen Tseng, Shang-Hua Yu, Tung-Yen Li

AV & Lighting｜The One Production, L’atelier Muxuan