Eastern Messiah
include a single channel video, a series of paintings, installation and document, dimensions variable, 2015
In Kuo’s《Eastern Messiah》work, she created interlinking works — including a video, installations pieces, and a set of paintings — inspired by the imagery of one freeway and one family. She peer out from a historical point of view and see, through a nation’ s imagination, the effects of cold wars and modernization. She wish to refine these specific historical situations through the path of my own politics. She seek ways of molding our subjective experiences, our patterns of desire, and even the gloom politics of modern life.
A Hungarian author who was present during the Korean War described what he witnessed, saying, “All that remained of the towns were chimneys. I do not know why chimneys survived when all houses had collapsed. Passing through a town with a population of 200,000, I saw nothing but a few chimneys.” “Just piles of low, purple chunks of cinder.”
Inspired by this description, She crashed, cut, and re-created her collection of discarded household objects and packaging into images imitating the ruins of war. Through the production process of attempting to link one image to another, and through the material and labor meaning behind the process, she are able to outline the relation between modern material life and past wars.
A set of story-board-like paintings depict a family driving on a freeway. The freeway is Sun Yat-sen Freeway — a road often taken on family trips. Imposing high voltage transmission towers and beastly concrete factories constitute the scenery along the way and became images engraved in my mind. Yet, the forms of these scenes and spaces also seem to represent those who were replaced in the extended process of a country’ s modernization. She borrowed the idea of analogizing one’ s nation with one’ s home, which Patriarchy often indoctrinates, in her attempt to overturn the modernized content of a nation’ s mode embedded in nuclear families. In so doing, we can identify the trauma seen in a nation and in the development theory of a historical point of view.
video link: https://youtu.be/sbtPmmRRcQ4
