Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Optical Trick 2012: Project for the 10th Taishin Arts Award

Dates: May 16–June 22, 2012
Monday to Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Location: Taishin Tower, 1st Floor, No. 118, Sec.4, Renai Road, Da'an District, Taipei

Optical Trick 2012: Project for the 10th Taishin Arts Award is a work made specifically for the 10th Taishin Arts Award. It documents 12 of the individuals and groups that comprise this year's 15 finalists. The artists Tu, Wei-Cheng has acquired a lot through brief and fascinating instances of contact with interdisciplinary groups in the visual and performing arts, and he would like to wholeheartedly thank these finalists for their support of his work. This is a particular project from him to pay tribute to these finalists and also to thank the Taishin Arts Award for their support of contemporary art in Taiwan.

Optical Trick is Tu's own visual and urban archaeology project. It scours the city for stories of the humanist spirit. It consists of three parts: Image Museum, Image Bank, and Body Measurement. Its methodology is based in visual history and urban investigation. Through his own eyes and with the participation of local residents, it blends “anecdotes of the strange” with optical gadgets, or surveys with the format of games which enlist staff and audiences, using people, collective bodies, or scenes of subatomic cities, and putting them into a kind of humanistic style of contrast and complement. This exhibition recreates the atmosphere of an image history museum, whose images can be seen through optical gadgets designed for animation, wooden projectors, and similar visual media equipment that takes the shape of antique furniture. Suddenly, the images below possess historicity as well as the textuality of images. Within these handmade optical gadgets, images of humanity are infused with a local humanist spirit. Using creative work as a method of visual anthropology, it searches the database of collected urban images and vestiges of the humanities in order to perform a humanistic massage on the city at large.