Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury’s Comments for the 22nd Visual Arts Award Winner

Through the remarkable energy of re-enactment, Ký Túc Xá (Dorm) acknowledges the subjectivity and human rights of migrant workers. It employs a respectful attitude to look at various cracks in the real world. The creative approach via workshops fosters a playful environment where the struggles of life are expressed within a distributed creation process. By engaging private spaces, it inspires public awareness and dialogue. The project becomes a vibrant tapestry of interwoven voices as the art forms, chosen to resonate with the project's perspective, illuminate the potential for translation, communication, and negotiation in everyday life. Ký Túc Xá (Dorm) brings to light the challenges and opportunities faced by contemporary Taiwanese society.

Comments on the Finalist 

The practice of Your Bros. Filmmaking Group has long engaged in issues related to laborers and transnational migrant workers in contemporary times. Through open calls for performers, ongoing private book readings, and workshops, their work embodies the idea of decentralization and engages collaborators in extensive discussion and sharing sessions to slowly co-create the narrative texts of videos and films. This work builds upon their previous film, titled Ký Túc Xá(Dorm), and converts concerned topics, co-created materials, and unfilmed sites into a spatial installation. The characters in the previous film are also turned into those working behind the camera to further extend the team’s work processes into a dual scene through a plastic approach, which can be both read and perceived in the same space by the audience. (Commentator: LIN Yi-Hsiu)

Artwork Introduction

Ký Túc Xá (Dorm) is inspired by an incident that took place in Xizhi in 2018, when more than one hundred Vietnamese female migrant workers initiated a strike due to insufficient dorm space, lack of enough bathrooms, and other living problems after having repeatedly reported these issues to their supervisor without seeing much result. The entire process of the strike was live-streamed online. However, the strike itself was not only filled with accusations and shouts but instead woven with the female workers’ bantering and playing. During the process, their complaints and appeals were debated amidst the dormitory beds, and new meanings of people, space, and objects emerged. The idea of a “dorm” is “translated” again, making it not only a physical space for daily rest and work life. While basing the work on this particular event, migrant workers, agents, and new residents were also invited to a film studio (an unused factory) from their own workplaces (other factories) on holiday. They joined various workshops during a period of six months to take part in reenactment and the adaptation of the work, producing content for the film and the script to uncover more stories and desires about people and space. After these workshops, individual lives, identities, and work types from different places eventually became separated from the initial incident as the stories and characters in the dorm began developing in their own way. Thus, the completion of the film is not an end but encompasses the entire process of preliminary work, workshops, and filming. 

About the Artist

Your Bros. Filmmaking Group is an informal filmmaking group formed by three amateurs: SO Yo-Hen, TIEN Zong-Yuan, and LIAO Hsiu-Hui, who come from different art fields, including contemporary art, architecture, and art history. They believe that immaturity is what makes their films uniquely peculiar. They focus on field research during the filmmaking process, creative workshops, unforeseen circumstances, and narrative structures that can be flexibly edited and altered in different situations. Using filmmaking as their method, they re-interpret reality, endowing it with aesthetic meanings and transforming it into a medium of thinking.

Production Team

Director: Your Bros. Filmmaking Group

Producer: Liao Hsiu-Hui

Co-producer: Tran Thi Bich Trang

Cameraman: So Yo-Hen, Tien Zong-Yuan, Chiang Chung-Lun

Production Designer: Tien Zong-Yuan, Liao Hsiu-Hui, Tsai Pou-Ching, Chen Yi-Ru

Sound Recording: Tien Zong-Yuan, Liao Fei-Chao

Music: Fangyi Liu

Interpreter: Tran Thi Bich Trang, Lucy Dan

Chinese Subtitle Translator: Tran Thi Bich Trang

English Subtitle Translator: Renee Tsai

Sound Mix: Nigel Brown 

Display Design: Your Bros. Filmmaking Group