Life | Death | Presence | Oblivion: June 4th 35th Anniversary Art Exhibition

Running alongside the programme marking 35 years since June 4th, this exhibition was built 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 carrying the memory of Taiwan’s White Terror, thinking through the persecution of human rights under authoritarian rule as a continuous thread — an expression of the New School for Democracy’s stance of holding the Chinese authorities to account for the June 4th massacre, standing with victims of human rights abuses and prisoners of conscience, and supporting those who resist totalitarian rule.

Curatorial Team

The exhibition was curated by Li Tsai-ying (李采楹), Chen Wei-lun (陳韋綸), and Lau Wai-ting (劉慧婷), director of the Europe-based organization We Are (我地). 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.”