Since 1990s, the migrant workers which mostly from Southeast Asian have brought and shaped Taiwanese society into a multicultural environment.
For this upcoming show, we focus on the field research among the social groups of Taiwan ABK*.
We will conduct on-site installations with images and sound recordings from Taiwan from a personal and artistic point of view, to highlight the values beyond traditional patterns.
*ABK, an abbreviation of Anak Buah Kapal, which means ship crew in Indonesian, is how Indonesian crew name themselves.
about WORKING HARD:
WORKING HARD is the name of the art collective but also our method of aesthetic practice in order to reconstruct an imaginative space via archival approaches. Abstracting every fragment and reflection of daily life and surroundings, we manipulate sounds, visions, smells and mediums, to examine the relations and extensions among these elements.
We usually applied the form of sculpture to anchor the issues of museum and archive in our previous creations. In the recent works, we explore the connections between audio memories and visual imagination, recompose the script and articulate the city’s past-life into an audio track. The soundscape provides an atlas for visual imagination, also helps visitors to bring back all the lost and forgotten scenes and memories to life.
WORKING HARD is the brainchild of creative duo PO-YU KUO and WEN-YING SHE (b.1989, based in Taipei, Taiwan) since 2015, two artists who gained their MFA sculpture degrees from the National Taiwan University of Arts in 2016. Their works have been exhibited in Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Kaohsiung Museum of Arts among others. They also participated in residency projects in Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand and Indonesia.
WEN-YING SHE is a grantee of the Ministry of Culture, R.O.C. (Taiwan)/ The Taipei Representative Office in the Federal Republic of Germany.
PO-YU KUO is a grantee of the National Culture and Arts Foundation (Taiwan).