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Creation/Research Support
Molasses, Ethanol, Fitness Workshops, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Life So Different, So Appealing?

Sucrose has never been a necessity of life. However, it’s so addictive that it altered the gustation of humankind. Previously, human beings engaged in trade, wars and colonization for sucrose. Nowadays, people start to abstain from sugar and work out actively in order to keep fit and healthy. Accordingly, sugar has played different roles in different historical contexts. Sucrose’s value and definition evolved from an agricultural product into a tradable commodity. Today, it caused a civilized social symptom from which escape is nowhere on the horizon. The sucrose industry has performed different social functions in different periods of time as well. The proliferation via free trade even boosted the tropical commodity economy in colonies. By virtue of the historical development and imagination unfolded from the sucrose industry, this project seeks to investigate the history, power, trade, circulation, modernization and processing of tropical cash crops as well as the reversed flow in colonies under the free trade system. This project also responds to the social circumstances with artistic practice in the era of globalization, contemplating people’s pursuit of a better life and presenting the varied roles and value of the sucrose industry in different periods of time.

CREATORS

LO Yi-Chun

Born in Taipei in 1985, LO Yi-Chun is interested in the trade history of Taiwanese cash crops and adopts natural materials as her creative media. Since 2013, she has not only created objects and spatial installations in different forms with banana peels, tobacco leaves and bagasse, but also collated both the historical context of Taiwan’s industrial development and the structure of global economic system through field survey, data collection, and literature review. She tries to examine Taiwan’s pivotal position that has connected East Asia with global supply chains since the Age of Discovery, as well as the flow of people and goods in the globalized world.