Re-rupture

重新破裂|Re-rupture
Video, Dynamic Installation, Photography, Ready-made
15'19''
2017

This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.

While suspended from a crane eight stories up in the air, a man performs a guitar solo. It's a reenactment inspired by the particular relationship between subculture and political movement in 1990s Taiwan.

In 1995, there was a human-shape balloon on the top of Chongxing Bridge in Taipei, and there was also the attempt of suspending all kinds of items in the air, such as washing machine, boiling hot pot, the statue of Chiang Kai-shek, and sex doll, trying to crash them to the ground. But the plan failed eventually; nothing was destroyed. Before everything started, it ended because of the self-explosion of the human-shape balloon. The same year under Chongxing Bridge, there was also a large scale fight. The people present there that day slashing each other with iron rod or sashimi knife. When the artist found the people invovled, however, they told Hsu it was actually a fight between political factions.
 
Re-rupture assembles two seemingly unrelated historical fragments: "People's Taxi riot" and "Taipei Breaking Sky." Hsu Che-Yu invited five drivers who participated in the fight at the time to return to the event site, while hanging a guitarist Li Na-Shao on the top of Chongxing Bridge to play music.
 




The year 1995 belongs to an era right after the White Terror ended in Taiwan. In this year, Taipei Breaking Sky Festival was planned by the 26-year-old Wu Zhong-Wei. In the many art events that Wu Zhong-Wei planned, there was always a strong sense of anarchism. However, his father Wu Er-Qu was a political artist serving the government. The many sculptures and paintings in Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall were all created by Wu Er-Qu. In the complicated relationship between the father and the son, we seem to be able to observe the microcosm of Taiwan’s social and political history.



The sculpture on the right-hand side was molded by Wu Zhong-Wei’s father Wu Er-Qu. It is said that he only made a couple of these and gifted them to the top officials and elites at the time. I spent 5000 NTD and bought this from an online marketplace. Wu Er-Qu also designed a miniature version of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall with the size ratio of 25:1; in fact, the entire Window on China Theme Park was built by him. Apart from small things, he also painted the biggest portraiture of Generalissimo Chiang in the world at the time, which debuted in the opening ceremony of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in 1980.

More than two decades ago, his son Wu Zhong-Wei had an unrealized plan, which was to hang everything that he thought of—eggs, a running laundry machine, the statues of historical great men, half-finished hot pot—in midair, before throwing them down, piling up a garbage mountain, and crushing them into a huge lump with a machine.

“Because it was never forgotten, so there is no so-called remembering”

After Wu Er-Qu passed away, his son piled up his works on the balcony on the top floor of his old house. When he is free, he goes to the top floor to smoke and drink beer, while cigarette butts, beer cans, and the works gradually mix together and form a small hill. The son said he is letting his father’s posthumous works breath, as they shower in the rain and bath under the sun. 


During the process of collecting materials, Hsu Che-Yu saw a small hill of debris composed of the remaining molds of the Window on China Theme Park, which is still left on that balcony to slowly decay: supposedly irrelevant matters that took place in different times are piled together, becoming a miniaturized national ruin as they are exposed to sun and rain.


Wu Er-Qu, the creator of Window on China Theme Park took a photo of his works in 1990s.


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