Madeleine Moment: The Technology of Memory and Sentiment Part III

After the opening of Madeleine Moment: The Technology of Memory and Sentiment Pt. II in Taichung, TheCube Project Space is pleased to collaborate with Hong Foundation, to co-present Pt. III of the exhibition series at Hong Foundation in Taipei.
The exhibition featured site-specific works by Taiwanese artists Hung Tzu-Ni and Lai Chih-Sheng and ran from 12 August to 6 October 2023.

Madeleine Moment: The Technology of Memory and Sentiment is a research-based curatorial project being undertaken by the team at TheCube since 2022. It takes place in three phases over two years. The first and second phases consisted of a series of thematic forums and a four-day sound and performance event. The third phase, launched in 2023, presented an international exhibition of the same title, featuring eight artists from Taiwan and abroad.

▍The Exhibited Works

Linger Around, Hung Tzu-Ni

If we tuck ourselves away in a corner and carefully observe our immediate surroundings under the guidance of subtle auditory perception, our subconscious will help us navigate through the cracks in our quotidian existence and leisurely stroll amidst the sounds of wind, raindrops, running water, and room—the potential rhythms created by the urban civilization of humanity.

The consciousness can meditate on its grandeur by virtue of ears and acute hearing. This process is inextricably bound with the expansion of the sense of vastness in the body. Such a state tends to be constrained by the rigmarole trivialities of humdrum routines. Nonetheless, the consciousness will be raised again when we are all by our lonesome, and it will lie elsewhere once we stay still.

Linger Around comprises the sounds recorded by the artist during her shuttling between Incheon, South Korea, and Taiwan that serve as the day-after-day environmental memory of the circulatory system of human civilization. The artist utilizes the intersections of the installed pipes, cables, and visitors to establish a center of multichannel hearing, seeking to make the sound objects meet one another at the front end of the installation and meanwhile interact with the visitors’ ears and the environment.

Linger, Lai Chih-Sheng

This is a project that evolved out of the original state of a space.

I try to work with some of the given conditions on site. In terms of the border, for example, there are various hanging points arranged on the ceiling previously, translucent, removable walls that surround the exhibition venue, some invisible spaces retained behind the walls, and even the natural daylight outside and the detectable movement of people nearby.

This project first of all imagines the related objects and traces on site from bits and pieces. Then I create my work by sorting out from them the relations between inside and outside, light and shadow, lightness and heaviness, virtuality and reality, as well as dynamics and stillness, expecting this work to manifest such a state of creation in the original space.

▍About the Artist

Hung Tzu-Ni

Born in Taichung, lives and works in Taipei.

Hung Tzu Ni is an artist based in Taiwan, whose work explores the reciprocal relationship formed between light and sound. Her practice in installation art primarily concerns the surface, structure of light, how an image can be physically (de)constructed, and how visual or spatial components of a work can be made responsive to and interactive with environment.

As each element is respectively constructed and embodied in a given space, she explores the boundaries of what audio and visual work can be, as well as how such work can interact with its environment. Her sound performance was active in the experimental sound scene.

In recent years Tzu Ni has worked with several theater directors and visual artists, she is currently a resident artist at HKCR (Hong Kong Community Radio) hosting a bimonthly radio show.

Lai Chih-Sheng

Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1971, lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan

Delicate interventions in space and the landscape, Lai Chih-Sheng pursues a practice that plays with tension, the everyday and personal encounters across multiple mediums in particular installation and sculpture. There is a playful minimalism in the way he observes detail and creates relationships between different parts of a room, engaging the viewer’s sense of body and presence. During the 1990s, Lai was a member of the conceptual art group National Oxygen, presenting his early work in disused structures, which often involved seemingly futile labor. As such, there are certain pervading traits throughout his work: an affinity to environment and space, a sense of expanse, a lyrical delicacy that engages our curiosity.

Interested in self-reflexivity and how it applies to the tradition of conceptual art, Lai engages with 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 also draws on his personal experience of working for 13 years as a professional bricklayer, using this as a foundation to comment on labor and consumption.

▍About Hong Foundation

Since its founding in 1971, the Hong Foundation had invested in promoting education and fostering culture in the fields of literature, history, philosophy and music. It has established the iconic “Shu Ping Shu Mu Review of Books and Bibliography,” the Hong Foundation Audiovisual Library, the Culture for Business Academy and Minlong Forum, leading the way in cultural and educational innovation at the time. After 2000, the foundation broadens its scope to contemporary art. Through commissions and direct sponsorships, the foundation provides sponsorship programs of varying scales to artists working at various stages of their careers.

In 2023, the foundation collaborates with Rijksakademie, the international artist residency, to establish scholarships for Taiwan art projects. Through initiating global networks, the foundation aims to extend its central tenet of fostering a ‘Culture of Creation’ and continue its mission to energize the art ecosystem.

▍About MADELEINE MOMENT

The title and the conception of Madeleine Moment make a direct allusion to À la recherche du temps perdu, a masterpiece of stream of consciousness by Marcel Proust. In this novel, the taste of a madeleine dipped in black tea evokes not only the protagonist’s deep awareness, but also his memories and sentiments that do not emerge through rational “recalling” in his daily life. Based on this story, psychologists had already coined the term “Proust Moment” or “Proust Effect” to describe the process of such involuntary evocation of memories and sentiments. It is noteworthy that the fashionableness of the shell-shaped cake had much to do with the prevalence of metal baking molds and the growing popularity of cookbooks in Europe (roughly between the 18th and 19th centuries). The theme and the conception of Madeleine Moment appropriate the “Proust Moment” and shift the focus from the literal aspect of a perceiving subject back onto the “media (objects)” that evoke memories and sentiments.

Therefore, Madeleine Moment seeks to penetrate into the “Proust Effect,” insofar as to reveal that the implantation and representation of memories as well as the emergence and transmission of sentiments are bound up with the hidden “invokum/operations of perception.” It is probably thanks to the collective empathy developed through the madeleine that the famous plot in À la recherche du temps perdu has many resonances for the readers in different places and times. From the perspective of medium/technology, the intermediary of “mold-based baking” and “printing” affords the rapid and massive production of this dessert in similar shape and taste wherever it is, which makes it a source of power for “perceptual transmission” in the modern world. It on the one hand creates private experiences for individuals, and on the other hand forges collective cognition about things for a generation. Recognizable though, the role of medium/technology therein is often concealed and ignored. Treating this thread of thinking as the point of departure, Madeleine Moment explores the technology and the politics of the construction of contemporary perception and identity.