THE ROCKING DREAM: Au Sow Yee × Chen Yow-Ruu Solo Exhibition

 TheCube is honored to invite Au Sow Yee and Chen Yow-Ruu to present their solo exhibition The Rocking Dream. Au Sow Yee and Chen Yow-Ruu are members of artistic duo Her Lab Space. The Rocking Dream is their first joint Solo Exhibition.

The exhibition is extended from a commissioned work entitled Bad Dream Rocking a.k.a The Rocking Malay(a) by Singapore Art Museum in 2024, for Lost & Found: Embodied Archive. The work explores the unstable situations of identity borders through a Malay folklore Si Tanggang, opening up complex transformations of folklore, memory and politics. While The Rocking Dream utilizes hybrid elements such as video, sound archive and miniature model. Si Tanggang tells the story of the protagonist cursed by his mother into a rock after he renounced his mother in search of wealth, hierarchy, new identity and new ethnicity. Integrating interviews of stateless children in Malaysia as well as their re-narration and imagination of the folklore, Bad Dream Rocking a.k.a The Rocking Malay(a) explores the many iterations of Si Tanggang through re-enactment, adaptation, deconstruction, news report and metafiction. Her Lab Space re-interprates Si Tanggang into a work with multiple and dialectical yet ambiguos dimensions of inside and outside, natives and outsiders etc, through deconstruction and construction of the story. It is like an occassional bad dream , a rocking machine.

The Rocking Dream is a play o the word “Rocking”. Its root is Rock, and rock is something that is stable. While “Rocking” indicates an unstable and swaying state. This exhibition is a metaphorical voyage of the complex politics on the construction and deconstruction of identity.

About Her Lab Space

Her Lab Space was establish by theater maker and artist Chen Yow-Ruu at Kaohsiung in 2016. Since 2017, she collaborated with Malaysian born Taipei based artist Au Sow Yee in numerous works and projects, presented in ambiguous and hybrid forms of theatricality, performative video installation, theatre and performance.

About the Artists

Au Sow Yee

Au Sow Yee was born in Kuala Lumpur, she now lives and works in Taipei. Her works integrate mixed formats of moving images, conceptual art, installation and theatrical settings and creates artworks intertwining an unique sense of space/time montage. She explores and extends perception on image and image making, and its relationship with history, politics, and power. Sow Yee recent research includes resonances of post-colonialism and the Cold War as well as folklore, popular culture such as alternative film history, genre films, music and the undercurrents of historiography. Au Sow Yee’s works utilize humorous, poetic and sometimes fractured ways to construct dialectically complex fragmented narratives and changes in time. She is a recipient of Honorable Mentions in 2021 Taipei Art Award, and a finalist in the 2018 Asia Pacific Breweries Signature Art Prize. Sow Yee’s works were exhibited in 2023 Sharjah Biennale, 2022 Busan Biennale, Singapore Art Museum, MMCA (Seoul), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), HKW (Berlin), Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, BACC (Bangkok) and various other exhibitions and screenings.

Chen Yow-Ruu

Chen Yow-Ruu was born in Kaohsiung, she now lives and works in Taipei. Yow-Ruu is a theatre director, performer, photographer and aerial yoga teacher. She received her MFA degree in Directing from the Taipei National University of the Arts. Her works often integrate the local environment, using sound, video, installation and live performances as creative tactics. She likes to use a mixture of forms and sound for developing themes in her performative works. Her theater directional works include Rock Rock Crafting A Streetcar Named Desire, Studio M Hedwig, 2022 Taipei Arts Festival Glory Hole. Yow-Ruu’s collaboration with Au Sow Yee were included in group exhibitions such as 2024 Singapore Art Museum Lost & Found: Embodied Archive, 2023 New Taipei City Art Museum Interweaving Travelers, 2022 C-LAB’s The Unrestricted Society, 2017 Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s Arena etc. In 2023, together with Au Sow Yee, she was invited to be the artists of residency for G7 Theater’s SYNTOPIA project in Mannheim Germany.
 
 
 
 
Organizers: TheCube Project Space, Her Lab Space
Sponsors: National Culture and Arts Foundation, Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government