Lai Chih-Sheng Solo Exhibition CLEARING

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of TheCube Project Space, we are honored to announce that artist Lai Chih-Sheng, known for his dialogic and interventionist practices with space, will collaborate with the TheCube to create a new work, Clearing. This work explores the concept, social role, and status of “independent spaces” today. The exhibition will run from June 15 to July 21, 2024, at TheCube Project Space. On the opening day, TheCube invites sound art pioneers Tengal from the Philippines and Elvin Brandhi from the UK for a live performance. This special performance not only marks the exhibition opening but also serves as the Taiwan stop of their Southeast Asia tour.

At the same time, TheCube announces the launch of a special crowdfunding campaign. This initiative aims to raise operational funds for the next two years and invites those who are concern about the future development and direction of nonprofit independent art spaces to participate.

About TheCube 15th Anniversary Crowdfunding Campaign

Since its establishment in 2010, TheCube Project Space has been committed to the forefront of artistic and cultural development. As a self-organized nonprofit space, TheCube has experienced and witnessed the changes in the art and cultural environment over the past fifteen years. It has accumulated a wealth of content, ideas, and practices in the aspects of independent curation, avant-garde local creations and performances, and international connections. Now, as we celebrate TheCube Project Space’s 15th anniversary, this crowdfunding campaign is not only to raise operational funds but also to explore and define the future possibilities of “independent spaces” again, discussing their role and importance in contemporary culture. We hope to open up broader room for thinking and imagination with your support.

In order to show gratitude to donors, we have prepared gifts, including: commemorative tote bags, first-day and three-day tickets to the second Sonic Shaman Music Festival, limited-edition vinyl records signed by musician Lim Giong, and conceptual works Clearing specially created by Lai Chih-Sheng for this exhibition at TheCube, limited to 30 editions.

We sincerely invite friends who are concern about the artistic and cultural scene to participate in this crowdfunding art campaign. Your support is not only an endorsement of TheCube Project Space but also an active participation in creating the future of independent art spaces and their role in contemporary culture. As TheCube Project Space celebrates its 15th anniversary, global politics, economy, technology, climate, and artistic creation are at a critical point of transformation. In this era, what else can independent spaces do? What other potentials do they have? We hope to invite everyone to think and explore together through this crowdfunding opportunity.

This campaign is scheduled to officially launch on the crowdfunding platform Wabay (https://wabay.tw/projects/thecube-future) on June 15 and will end on August 31. For English version of the crowdfunding platform, please click here.

About Clearing

By Lai Chih-Sheng

To work here, an empty space is the key, no scenery to distract, no clutter to see.

Especially in the administrative areas adjacent to the exhibition venue, where the atmosphere is dense and crowded, the only way out is probably to find a new site that maintains a sense of openness or appears more spacious.

I’m going to do some adjustment work, which includes real and unreal, empty and filled, tilted and horizontal. While making the physical and visual sense of the scene out of sync, the floor underfoot should also have a slight sense of expansion.

Lastly, I’d like to hang a small seascape.

About Lai Chih-Sheng

Lai Chih-Sheng carries out delicate spatial interventions—tightened wires, drops- gathering apertures or wall-breaking branches—pursuing a practice that deals with tension, the everyday and the personal across multiple mediums, in particularly installation and sculpture. There is a playful minimalist tendency in the way he observes detail and creates relationships between different parts of a given space, engaging the viewer’s sense of body and presence. As a member of the conceptual art collective Nation Oxygen in the 1990s, Lai in the early stage of his career frequented abandoned buildings and architectural ruins on the outskirts of Taipei, exhibiting artworks that concerned the idea of invalid labour. Deeply site-specific, his art is marked by an environmental affinity, a strong expansiveness, and a gentle, poetic quality that is in direct conversation with the audience’s curiosity.

Interested in self-reflexivity and how it applies to the tradition of conceptual art, Lai is engaged in a practice that is aware of its own “artificiality” or absurdity. He consciously creates atypical realities within everyday circumstances that have a site-specific quality. In line with this consciousness of absurdity or atypicality, he explores minute perceptions.

Lai Chih-Sheng also draws on his personal experience of working for 13 years as a professional bricklayer, using this as a foundation to comment on labour and consumption.

Lai Chih-Sheng has exhibited internationally. His recent solo exhibitions include: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2020); Kirishima Open-Air Museum, Kagoshima (2019); and Observations Society, Guangzhou (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: Tainan Art Museum, Tainan (2022), Chiayi Art Museum, Chiayi (2022), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2021), Aichi Triennale (2016), Lyon Biennial (2015), OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2014) and Hayward Gallery (2012).

About the Opening Artists

TENGAL (The Philippines)

Tengal is a composer, media artist, curator, and cultural advocate. His art practice is based on research, creating projects that connect art, technology, and society. Initially a musician and composer, Tengal has a passion for game theory and algorithmic structures. His compositions, such as the Gangan Series, have been performed across Europe and Asia. Since 2005, he has initiated multiple projects in Manila and throughout Southeast Asia.

Notably, Tengal founded the art organization SABAW Media Art Kitchen, a curatorial platform specializing in sound and media art. He served as the guest director for the Self-reflexivity: Thinking Media and Digital Articulations” exhibition and co-created the international platform NUSASONIC. NUSASONIC explores a broad range of experimental sound and music cultures in Southeast Asia, fostering dialogue between Asia and Europe, with participation from entities like YES NO KLUB and the Goethe-Institut.

Recently, Tengal moved to Berlin, where he serves as a curator at Art Laboratory Berlin.

* Recently performance recording: Acoustics Lab, School of Design, Kyushu University Fukuoka, 2018 https://youtu.be/rpUYShwmy7M 　

Elvin Brandhi (UK)

Elvin Brandhi is an improvising lyricist and beat producer. She drives improvisational projects that create a chaotic, circus-like overflow of socio-aesthetic intent. Her artistic education is shaped by contextual shifts and collaborative forms, serving as alternatives to institutional micro-mythological frameworks. Her practice includes performing, creating sound essays, videos, and theatrical public hacking. She views sound and image as an expansive language that evokes expressions and emotions. She has been a resident artist at Haven for Artists in Beirut and Nyege Nyege in Uganda, and participated in the Mingling for Chimera project initiated by the performance group Young Boys Writing Club in Sicily, Italy, as well as collaborated with the Cairo-based label Hizz.

* Recently performance recording: Auditório CCOP, Portugal, 2022 https://youtu.be/p4La49tXEis