Life | Death | Presence | Oblivion: June 4th 35th Anniversary Art Exhibition — Artists’ Talk

Life, Death, Presence, Oblivion: June 4th 35th Anniversary Art Exhibition was curated by curators from Taiwan and Hong Kong around the idea of a “warehouse of memory,” bringing together 18 artists from around the world in a shelved, rack-like display space to explore, through the transformations art makes possible, the delicate relationships between death, existence and forgetting. The layout began with works relating to June 4th in China, extended into work from Hong Kong’s democracy movement, and then to art from Taiwan’s White Terror, thinking through the persecution of human rights under authoritarian rule as a continuous thread. This artists’ talk brought the curators and participating artists together on site to discuss the curatorial thinking and how the works came about.

Curator Chen Wei-lun (陳韋綸) said that making work is often itself a way of thinking, and that he hoped the medium of art could bring more people to issues they had never approached before: “Talking about June 4th isn’t about reopening a wound — it’s about having more momentum to move forward.”