Liqueered
2019
Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts
Curator: Yu Cheng-Ta
Artists: Betty Apple, River Lin, Wu Tzu-An, Huang Din-Yun
We just finished a party here last night. Did you miss it? At exactly 23:47 exploded into the microphone meaningless screams through her lips with thick, pretentiously applied layers of lip gloss; her instantaneous emotional shockwave almost made her pink wig that was intended to cover up her shaved head drop on the floor. Her left hand, without missing a beat, simultaneously turned the effects unit up to the max. The man with tattoos on his arm in charge of onsite control behind her played along with her emotion, and switched the lights in different colors to rapid gleaming…He really did not understand, but he knew this was inevitably a climax. Humm…the sound was too loud, it gave me tinnitus, and the pupils I relied on were being constantly re-exposed; like projections, cognition entered a rheological state. Then, the place was covered in red light, and, all of a sudden, A tenderly said: “We are all girls now.” This command suddenly made me confused with whether we were online, or offline….
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Liqueered is an exhibition at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in 2019. Exploring the concept of “Performing the Museum,” we worked together, to experiment in re-imagining the space, timeline, exhibits, educational function, and narrative of the museum through different performative scenarios. We were interested in exploring the possibilities of performance structures that could liberate the museum space by giving it a queer and fluid identity.
Fucking-Super-GirlfriEND Crash Party
2019 ©Betty Apple
Watermelon Sisters Go Camping in Paris
Performance Party
CND
2019 ©Zito Tseng
My Body is a Queer History Museum
2019 ©River Lin
Don’t, I don’t
2019 ©Wu Tzu-An
CRISPR in the Intertidal Zone
2019 ©Huang Din-Yun
Sound and performance artist Betty Apple opened the exhibition with their “Fucking-Super-GirlfriEND Crash Party”, which transformed the museum into a live-stream techno party. The performers simulated online images of pornographic female sex robots performing the various aspects of the “perfect female” on the screen in cyber space. “Crash” in the title relates the context of live performance to the idea of “趴體 (lying down on belly), which is the Chinese transliteration of “party,” and refers to the physical state you experience after partying like crazy. The performance presented the idea of “errors” that are outside the “perfect” framework of technological patriarchy.
In the expanded cinema performance “Don’t, I don’t,” artist Wu Tzu-An combined and recycled various found images. The performance was a revision of history and archived audiovisual media that re-used various archived visual and audio materials to produce various media that could be projected. Tzu-An attempted to rewrite and modify the canonicality of these materials from his personal perspective.
The notion of performing archives as interpreting historical accumulations in a museum setting shapes the performance of artist River Lin, “My body is a queer history museum”, in which an individual body as an embodiment of history can be transformed into a spatial narration, an archive, and even a history museum. The work performs fluidity and the identities of gender politics through drag, dancing, story-telling, singing, workshops and conversations as a group and individually. Audience members are invited to visit and participate in a series of temporary gatherings, together entering the museum's body as well as the fragmented memories of one’s own body, to map out what has arguably shaped the current queer scene today.
“CRISPR in the Intertidal Zone” by artist Huang Din-Yun is based on his theater piece, “Chaos in Chronicling,” from 2016. He attempts to facilitate the continuous transformation of this performance by randomly assembling many daily objects, and sounds related to the idea of “island” through the process of rehearsals by the performers. By misplacing, misusing, and collaging many daily objects and behaviors, “CRISPR in the Intertidal Zone” intentionally confuses the inter-referencing between behaviors/objects/symbols and rejects the rigidity in the use and deployment of symbols in the conventional theatrical language.