“Shivering Wall” (00:10:00) by Tseng Yu Chin, Taiwan, 2020

The work was available on our website only for the period of the screening.

“Shivering Wall” (00:10:00) by Tseng Yu Chin, Taiwan, 2020

It’s a self-examined process to assess your present time. In the regular bass sound surround space, you could find a few teenagers having a crazy house party, and there’s a girl awake but exhausted from being there. There’s a slight smog or light gently but regularly moving in the space. The smog represents a spirit inside a space. It could be you or others. It’s like you are just in a conference or a party and suddenly there’s something that pulls your spirit away from your body. It makes you look at yourself in a different angle, but you’re still in the group. What would you do and what’s the connection between you and others?

If the smog was another you – a same existence from another world to look at your body in this group full of chaos and desire. However, there’s nothing you can change as a member in this group. All you can do is silently look down at your body, and move away quietly.

If the smog wasn’t you, it was an outsider of this whole group of people. You are paralyzed to make any specific change in the group although your body is still in there. What you should do and what would you do? You are just there and silently away from all these scenes made by human beings.

There’s certainly no right or wrong answer. This just points out the way you look at yourself. It’s a discussion about the existence of yourself. What makes you becomes the present existence, and what track you would leave in your life.

Director Bio

Tseng Yu Chin began his career as an experimental filmmaker, now based in Berlin/Amsterdam/Paris, and at the age of 27, he was first noticed by his own country, Taiwan, for the finalist in the Golden Horse Film Festival for the experimental short film project in Taiwan. Afterwards, he concentrated on the artistic expression of video as a medium during his graduate studies, and officially entered the field of video art making (or extended cinema).

At the age of 29, he was selected as the youngest artist in the 12th Kassel Documenta Biennale with his series “Who is listening? “, and became one of the most representative artists in the world at that time.The work itself is based on the human body as a creative text, using the body to discuss the distortion and aphasia of politics, society, self-identification and values that have been violently and coldly inflicted on the individual’s body.

Tseng Yu Chin is a video art-based artist, all his artworks, from the use of media to the form of presentation, are based around the thinking of video art, all of which can be discussed in relation to the proposition of moving image itself. Express the political embarrassment of the body’s presence but the absence of the spirit.  This is what often fascinates him and keeps searching for it, a photograph, a text, an image, a sound, an illustration, an installation, all of which he can’t stop gazing at and making. The most representative series are the children’s body series and the teenage body series. The teenage body series is currently in progress.

Now he is trying to escape from his own country, from a country that is considered by the world to be democratic, Taiwan, a country that is eager to deal with authority and is gradually turning itself into another totalitarian consciousness. During his early years of international visibility, the Taiwanese government used a flexible but strong request to abandon his own creative concept and instead produce works that promoted a positive image of the government and showed its allegiance to it. But he decided to refuse this request, and as a result he was silenced in Taiwan for almost fifteen years. He felt deeply the disguised dictatorship of the democratic world, or the backroom political manipulation of Taiwan, and the embarrassment and disappearance of the presence and existence of the people he had long discussed in his work in each moment.

For him, this is already a very abrupt state of affairs, and he just want to find the dignity of his own creative freedom after being banned by the government for a long time.

He  has long been concerned about the disorder of self-consciousness in any one moment, the sudden conflict between physical presence and consciousness, and believe that all of them are not just single-minded individuals at all times, but are in urgent need of constant control of the body at each moment. This complex thought-consciousness, yet constantly anxious in the active or passive control of the physical body, allows for a sudden disorientation and drowning of one’s being, a moment that I find very beauty and a reality that cannot be ignored.

And in every disorderly state of human self-consciousness, He believe it is possible to look closer at one’s own existence in the present moment and to point to three questions about oneself in the present

+Why am I here?

+What am I doing?

+How did I get to this state?

These three issues are so strongly highlighted in the disordered moment that you cannot ignore them, can see beyond the axis of time, can see both the past present and the imminent present existing simultaneously in the state of staring at the disordered moment, any but also brings out the sadness of human existence, you become part of the whole, you can only see yourself living in it, trapped in the darkness of this human quagmire. You become part of the entire thing, you can’t get out of it, you can only see yourself surviving in it, trapped in the darkness of this human morass, and because we will eventually die, we continue to live under this eternal nonsense, but the constant disorder of self-consciousness becomes a possibility to stare at the whole of life.

Website: https://tsengyuchin.com/ 

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