Traversing The Fantasy

Curated by Amy Cheng, Traversing the Fantasy is an exhibition that includes the work of French artist Julien Prévieux, the art team of Allora and Calzadilla from the US and Cuba, the Danish art collective Superflex, Taiwanese video artist Tsui Goang-yu, Wu Chang-jung and photographer Liu Ho-jang. Works for the show will include video installation, digital prints, documents and multimedia installation.

The theme of Traversing the Fantasy focus on various visible and invisible living systems, and how they condition and influence the individual. From the perspective of different artists’ work and the topics they explore, the exhibition will also attempt to examine how we imagine and cope with reality.

Within the vast construct that is a society, there exist all kinds of systematic norms which allow it to operate smoothly. Members of a society base their identities on its cultural values, which are formed by nationality, legal frameworks, consumer behavior, mass media as well as ever-present customs, beliefs and traditions. While norms create order by regulating individual lives and establish a common basis for communication and the sharing of values, they often penetrate a society more deeply than these apparent surface intentions, producing subtle forms of oversight, collective will and latent ideologies. Therefore, this exhibition explores the following issues: how modes of perception, communication and behavior are produced and defined in people who live in contemporary societies and assent to the regulating processes of cultural identification; and how different individuals within a society manage to coexist harmoniously with one another, or adapt to one another when harmony cannot be achieved. Those who stray from norms, or attempt to transcend ideologies that maintain order in society, are often considered confused or discordant, and perhaps ignored. These individuals, however, represent a vivid and organic aspect of the human experience and therefore deserve our attention.

Traversing the Fantasy does not focus on sweeping ideologies, but rather operates from the perspective of everyday life to examine societal connections built by identity formation processes both in the physical and philosophical worlds. The exhibition not only attempts to critique certain global forces that have entered our daily lives, but also, by encouraging reflection on capitalist and social mechanisms, to present how artists subvert, resist or submit to these forces with humor and wit. More importantly, the artwork presented in this exhibition has the potential to set our imaginations in motion and allow us to think more freely about contemporary life.