What If We Are Baser: Regarding Subzoology, 2020 Taiwan Biennial | Pei-Kuei Tsai

by Critical Asia

by Pei-Kuei Tsai, June 2021】

In the beginning, there is emptiness. It looks like a whale resting in the ocean as floor and a ship offering its companionship.

Hall of Subzoology (Photo: Pei-Kuei Tsai)

Out of the blue, a desire for piercing appears and starts to produce itself. Before long, there were wars, those considered male or aggressive, viruses inserting their genomes into the hosts, and paintings clustering, like father like son, demonstrating their fertility, in their colorful dreams and the art markets.

The piercings thus accumulate and naturally exchange. They trade and form economics, expanding power in all dimensions. 

Prosperous and prosperous as their families turn, they are followed by aging, sickness, and death. This is named destiny or life circle, yet not the end of reincarnation. Reincarnation, illustrated as one white cube after another, is nevertheless where we have to restart. 

So we walk out to encounter illusions, on the hills under the trees, sewed with hundreds of images of zodiac lanterns and the crowd, being festive silently. And we meet in some of the lightboxes, groups of dogs standing in the water, beautifully and peacefully. With animal sculptures looming from the horizons of the grass, we find ourselves with night herons, frogs and dews.

Gentle breezes carrying us toward the end of this gigantic moral book with illustrations so spectacular as to rouse our inside animals, we hear squeals of a pig being slaughtered piercing the air. We run and run, and realize it is a dream. Art is dreaming, and we are dreamed.

Night heron visiting Subzoology (Photo: Pei-Kuei Tsai)


AUTHOR
Pei-Kuei Tsai, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan


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