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Creation/Research Support
Collector & Printmaker in 20th Century

The project this year revolves around two mysterious figures with totally different identities. The first is a printmaker from the “Free Painting Society.” He visited different places where he led locals to create prints via stories, physical transformation and compositions, and then brought the “White Terror stories” unfolding in these places back to his hometown. Following the insight of the 1940s, he recognizes that prints have the merit of proliferation by “copying.” Therefore, being about to drift around Taiwan with his “Free Atelier” in the second half of the year, he will not only invite locals to revisit the waning spirit of their native places, but also exchange horizons with them so as to stimulate reflections on the White Terror. The second figure is a natural historian who visited many places, drew maps and assembled an extensive collection. Finally, he turned the “rebels” he collected into specimens, and placed them in the “national specimen gallery.” Specifically speaking, he turned the “scapegoats” in the ceremony of “avoiding mishap and adversity” into specimens by means of collage and historical archiving, and then exhibited them as a whole. He opened up new horizons for this country. He will present the results of his field survey without following the printmaker’s footprints. The two figures evoke the memories of the White Terror respectively from the perspectives of the people and the state. Although these memories have faded, these figures did exist and the massacre did take place in the 20th century. We seek to re-memorize or imagine this group of people who were “blithering, suffering, striving or at least contributing to this world” (the oblivion of young teacher CHIU Xing-Sheng in 1952), and, by dint of our artistic creations in the 21st century, try to relocate these traces back to our vague memories of our hometowns.

CREATORS

LIN Chuan-Kai(LIBERA WORK-GANG)

Founded in 2018, the LIBERA WORK-GANG is comprised of like-minded artists, researchers, educators and the masses. Concerns over the dissidents in the martial law period serve as the core philosophy behind its operation. The demise of these dissidents implies not only the disappearance of their physical bodies in contemporary memories, but also the loss of a paragon capable of galvanizing us to care about social issues and public affairs. In other words, we lost the “soul.” As a result, the practice of the LIBERA WORK-GANG is twofold: (1) to allow these figures to reappear in the contemporary world; and (2) to help contemporary people muster their energy and prevent them from underestimating their objectively greater strength due to their subjective conservativeness. Using such a two-pronged strategy, we attempt to reconstruct the “soul” of contemporary people in a bottom-up and horizontally connected manner.