Buy it, Use it, Break it, Fix it

This exhibition, “Buy It, Use It, Break It, Fix It”, is a reference to the lyrics of the song, “Technologic”, by Daft Punk. In the song, it hints that contemporary meaning of “object” has been extended, became complicated, or even dematerialized. Object, as a concept, has transcended its original meaning and function in this era.

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The concept of the triaque (representamen—interpretant—object) of Semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, has established the foundation of how people perceive the concept of “object”. Later, the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, extended the meaning of semiotic theory and critiqued the idea of object, value, and symbol in the context of Consumerism in the Post-industrial era.

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Nowadays, after the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions, artificial intelligence, data, and open source have drastically exceeded our understanding of the traditional concept of object. Data, media, interface and digital object have became the center of object in the contemporary life. Due to the expansion of these new realm, it provides an unexplored battlefield around politics, economics, and public relationships. How do individuals in this era grasp the physical sense of “object”? How to face the impact of new rights and new relationship with what was regarded as object in the past?

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In this exhibition, four artists’ subject explore the contemporary relationship with daily object. Their concepts integrated with the narrative of the exhibition, and probed into the different possibilities of object. The single-channel-video, “Pet Romance”, by Ming Qian Xu, focuses on the digital bionic lifeform. He started this project by researching online and collecting data about digital pet, and arranged these data in a video essay format. He questions how dematerialized object affects our imagination of the interface of interacting with digital lifeform and how this concept invade our perception of the authenticity of living things. From an opposite perspective, the art projects by Mei Huei Lyu, “A Funeral” and  “Memory Specimen: Sealed nostalgia”, attempt to explore how lifeforms is regarded as commodity to be consume in the market from a perspective of the right of animals, plants and environment. She critiques the absurd state of treating life as a collection, merchandise, or object by showing the audience the endless cycle of capital market logic. Furthermore, she expand this artistic practice to challenge the idea of object’s identity.

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Compare to the concept of the two artists that mentioned above, the other two artists, Yu-Chiao Kuo and You Ning Chen, both attempt to question how human-beings can break free or respond from the limitation of the concept, “object”, under this complex condition created by modern society. In Yu-Chiao Kuo’s series of works, she explore how the bodily experience is being treated as an object in terms of medical science. She began her artistic practice with an abstract narrative model, and tell a narrative around wounds, impairment of body function. These narrative exposed how out-of-body experience is related in medical science and how the patients treated their body as a part of object rather than their subjective experience, which is similar to a third-person-game. “Toys: Boards, Lego, Strings”, “Production: Planks, Hardware, Strings”, Existence: Planks, Plants,  Strings”, and “Whisper: Planks, Dolls, Graffiti, Strings” by artist, You Ning Chen, are a series of works trying to eliminate distrust of the production of daily object and reconfirm the authentic feel of item/object through her artistic labor. The other work, “Residence Project: Where is Home?”, attempts to respond the powerless feeling that the Taiwanese youth experience in this era. This work encourages the audience to positively reestablish the connection between the spirit and the material world. 

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In this curating practice, the relationship between these two groups of exhibited works is like an endless cycle of questioning and responding and trying to solve the mystery relationship of the subject and object in this era.