Penumbra
A penumbra is the partial shadow of an eclipse; throughout its history Taiwan has lived in the penumbra of many colonial powers: the Han Chinese, the Dutch, the Qing dynasty and, prior to World War II, the Japanese. The country currently exists in the shadow of the People’s Republic of China. The Taiwanese indigenous people and their language have been quashed under these successive occupations. Indigenous Taiwanese people now account for only two percent of the general population. Mandarin is the official language and many of the country’s indigenous languages are now extinct while others are currently endangered (a not uncommon story throughout the contemporary world). Considering that the works in ‘Penumbra: Contemporary Art from Taiwan’ are predominantly videos, there is a surprising lack of voices to be heard in the exhibition space. Is this silence a result of having spent too long speaking through another’s tongue?
Wu Diing-Wuu (Walis Labai is his indigenous name) uses ethnographic photographs of Taiwan’s indigenous population as the basis for his series of grating plate works. As the viewer moves around each work the subjects within these images fade while the rest of the scene, including the figure’s shadow, remains unchanged: in the same way that with each new colonising gaze the Taiwanese indigenous population dwindled. Memories—and their limits—whether they are of dying cultures, of historical events, or of childhood, reappear throughout the ‘Penumbra’ as an ongoing preoccupation.
Acid Tongue by Tseng Yu-Chin recreates the blurred vision of childhood memories. Four dark muddy views are projected onto the walls of an undersized room. There are moments within the sequences in which subjects are subtly illuminated, and in some of these moments the illumination hints