Lives in Seoul Kim Sora investigates the social codes embedded in the acts and manners of people, and represents them through the various media of installation, video and performance. The process of arrangement and composition of objects and concepts itself is of the greatest interest to the artist. An irregular movement of one point to an indefinite destination is an ongoing project, which has developed following the journey of the Discordant Harmony exhibition. Kim created two short scores for the Seoul exhibition, and produced the scores' performance and its video documentation in Hiroshima. She collaborated with performer Jung Youngdoo to create movements convertible into sound, thus activating the stones that have survived bombs and other troubles for many years. (text by Kim Sunjung)

Lives in Seoul In I am Not Going to Sing, siren eun young jung portrays Soja lee, a first generation Yoesung Gukgeuk (Korean women’s musical theatre) performer, who was restricted to only secondary roles because of her inability to sing. The performer had consciously refrained from learning to sing the pansori for fear of being slandered as a gisaeng (Korean geisha). By portraying the irony of Lee’s decision to stay out of the spotlight in a leading male role in order so as to protect herself from the scorn felt towards women with singing talent, like gisaeng, siren seeks to attack and deconstruct the illusion of gender expression that is repeatedly forced upon us by the society. (text by Park Eunah)

Lives in Beijing The multi-layered narrative in Hao Jingban’s four-channel video installation I Can’t Dance weaves together a mixture of both first-hand and source materials related to the subject of ballroom dancing and the political and historical contexts in which it was and is embedded. There are interviews with veteran dancers who have been part of the ballroom dancing scene in Beijing since the 1950s, recordings of them dancing in their usual dance hall in Beijing, excerpts from two films Song of Youth (1958), and Intrepid Heroes (1959) in which ballroom dancing is presented as overtly a medium of socializing and in essence a covert test of one’s political status, and an excerpt from Get Up and Dance, a morning TV program of 1997 that teaches ballroom dance moves. Through the study and perspective of a leisure activity, they conjure up a portrait of an ideologically charged historical period. (text by Carol Yinghua Lu)

Lives in Amsterdam The Sleep shows a hundred people gather and sleep together in a gymnasium. Ironically, a gymnasium, a facility to promote public health is often used as a shelter in times of crisis and disaster because of its capacity to accommodate masses of people. The most recent memory of this use for Koreans was when a ferry sank in 2014 in the West Sea of Korea, revealing the absurdity of the social system. Using sleep as a metaphor for the relation between people and their society, The Sleep reflects the response to current fears and the inability of the social system to assuage them. (text by Ham Yang Ah)

Lives in Tokyo Chiba Masaya creates temporal environments by combining different elements such as figures made of clay, wood scraps, photographs and various everyday materials, which become the models for his paintings. In the ongoing series Peaceful Village, objects and sculptures are randomly displayed on wooden shelves that stand out oddly against a rough mountain range, creating the opposing landscape of an imaginary place. Made during a residency in Oita, Japan, A Sporty Planet consists in a hole created by the artist for two weeks, which became a temporary dwelling juxtaposing the artist’s personal belongings, such as laptop and speakers, with the earthy components of rocks and soil. In Re-visiting, the composition of the image is complicated further so that it confuses the depth of the space, building a sense of chaos that keep our eyes moving around the canvas like an unfolded map. Sound of Ohiii In the Mountain emphasizes the feeling of being lost as represented by a man with his eyes covered amongst random details and images. Applying the artist’s self-portrait to the face of others, Self-Portrait #3 blurs the boundary between the self and other. Chiba’s artworks draw our attention to pictorial space, while at the same time, pushing us back to the space where we stand, reflecting the life experience of today’s society where the contour of reality is blurred by the flux od images and information. (text by Hirano Mayumi)

Lives in Taipei Self-documentation as an act of resistance. Chen Chieh-jen has always focused on communities that embody and initiate acts of resistance as a result of the violence endured in Taiwan’s history. With this as a creative concept and image plan, his work embodies a unique significance. Empire's Borders II-Western Enterprise, Inc., is the “life politics” that began during the Cold War era and extends to the present day, in which the United States uses trade as a means of intervening in and controlling Taiwanese politics, economy and military. Subsequent to describing contemporary violence through wandering spirits, the artist expounds contemplations of possibilities for emotional liberation. As Chen’s treatment develops from a “self-documentation” to a “self-methodology,” The Bianwen Book I undertakes the overturning of meaning to unfold an alternative method of production in another’s name. (text by Huang Chien-Hung)

Lives in Taipei The mise-en-abyme structure of history. Chang Wen-Hsuan is especially attentive to the subject of “fiction”. In her work, “fiction” is a narrative action that connects history with politics. The extension of history and politics within fiction is a way of managing the relationships and dynamics between individual stories and the writing of history. Continuing the subjects and techniques of “name borrowing”, “cataloguing” and “mise-en-abyme” in her previous works, “autobiography” becomes a historical node that necessitates fiction in the process of researching female members of the Taiwanese Communist Party, owing to the paucity of female Taiwanese Communist narratives. The Compendium of Autobiographies touches upon ethical relationships within historical archives as well as the experimental fictionalization of the narrative; and finally, fiction is used to open up different sites of historical discourse. (text by Huang Chien-Hung)

Kim Sunjung Director of Art Sonje Center, Seoul Discordant Harmony was curated as a “moving exhibition”-- an exhibition that would move and travel around different cities in Asia. From the beginning, the four co-curators—Kamiya Yukie, Huang Chien-Hung, Carol Yinghua Lu and me--wanted to make a moveable and changeable exhibition that would change its content to reflect the particular localities of the cities it travels to. The list of participating artists (invited from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong) and the list of exhibited artworks will change as the exhibition moves from city to city. Discordant Harmony first opened at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul in February 2015, and then at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in December 2015. Now it is moving to Taipei, to be opened at the Kuandu Museum in July 2016. Because the exhibition is still in progress and open to change, I will avoid attempting a clear or full description of it; any account at this point could be only a partial or incomplete representation of the ongoing project. In this essay, I would like instead to explain the various endeavors that went toward realizing Discordant Harmony: the curatorial methodology, the formal and informal meetings and discussions, the preparatory process of knowledge production and the different approaches of the participating artists. Discordant Harmony was realized only after a complicated preparation process because the four curators decided to bring and apply their own, four different curating methods and ideas into the single project instead of adopting one method in unison. Every time one of us proposed an idea, we had to go through a series of discussions and agreements. Since the preparatory experiments hardly appear in the exhibitions, I would like, in this essay, to address the meaning of those hidden endeavors. We, the four curators, wanted to develop an exhibition concerned with knowledge production about Asia by Asia. Most of the existing discourses on Asia have been produced from the Western perspectives, so that the history of Asia's knowledge production about Asia is relatively short. Can an exhibition function as Asia's platform for the production of knowledge and art about Asia? This was one of the driving questions behind the Discordant Harmony project. To develop a practicing exhibition, we planned to realize the exhibition production in conjunction with art production and knowledge production. Concept To find a concept that encompasses the issues of the four different countries--South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan--was not easy. Geographically, they are all located in Northeast Asia, but during WWII and the Cold War, Asia were segmented into nation-states, each of which turned inward and tended to isolation. Asia's decolonization efforts to recover its independence spread to various ethnic and social liberation movements, but the effects of the Cold War's political, social and psychological oppressions and regulations remain to this day. In the late 1980s, however, the forced division of Asia began slowly to disintegrate, exemplified in such momentous events as Taiwan's lifting of martial law in 1987, South Korea's hosting of the 1988 Olympic Games and China's Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Since the late 1980s, the countries have resolved a good deal of the tensions making for their previous separations and are getting to know each another better. Japan, which opened itself to the Western world and underwent modernization much earlier than other countries in Asia, is different, but shares with other Asian countries similar experiences. To examine how Asia has struggled with and negotiated the Cold War, we conducted interviews with prominent scholars and thinkers in the four countries on policies and social changes after that period. Wang Hui, Wang Wei, Chen Chieh-Jen, Chen Kuan-Hsing, Inuhiko Yomota, Toshiki Okada, Park Chan Kyong and Oh Seung Yul participated in the interviews, sharing their thoughts on East Asia's history, politics, art and philosophy, and responding to the curators' questions. In addition, during the Discordant Harmony exhibition in Seoul, we began to interview the participating artists, listening to their interpretations of the exhibition and their works, and exploring the various perspectives on Asia and imagination. To begin with, the exhibition’s concept of “harmony” presented a challenging task. In Western cultures, harmony is associated with music, but in the East it is a philosophical concept. In China, it became an ambiguous term after being used in politics. Because “harmony” can be a term that is either too abstract or politically loaded, how to re-use it for an exhibition concept became our primary concern in the initial stage of our curation. After consideration, we decided to expose the term's political character, and arrived at "discordant harmony" as both our title and the concept through which we would explore the Cold War's influence in Asia. It expresses our aim for the exhibition project to reveal multiple images of “Asias”, to mirror the different countries' similar and different histories and experiences of the Cold War. After agreeing on the concept and title "discordant harmony", the four curators then concentrated on how to reveal the “discordance” in our curation. I decided to explore the invisible forces of the Cold War ideologies remaining in Asia, Kamiya Yukie to address the radioactive and natural disasters after 2011, Carol Yinghua Lu to look at China's past through our present mirror, and Huang Chien-Hung to deal with the Cold War itself. The Discordant Harmony exhibition can be seen as a result of invisible lines that interconnect the four curators working in different contexts, the positions of the four curators. The processes of development, agreement and negotiation among the curators, among the artists, and between the curators and the artists, progressed in a complex yet flexible manner. If we did not have different visions about Asia, the project would have not been realized. From the beginning, Discordant Harmony was curated as a moveable exhibition that would travel to Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China. It started as an endeavor to overcome the divisions of Asia and search for the means of connection and communication. To foster communication with diverse audience groups in different cultures and cities, we chose to leave our lists of artists and artworks “open” and flexible. When the exhibition moves to another location, it invites further artists to take part and they choose to show works in accordance with the new local context. Three cities and the localities The issue of locality began to appear in exhibitions in the mid-2000s. Biennale exhibitions, which are organized under the names of the hosting cities such as Gwangju, Busan, Istanbul, Venice, and Shanghai, serve as good examples of exhibitions that highlight the concepts of locality and site-specificity. The first such attempts can be found in the 2004 Liverpool Biennial and the 2005 Istanbul Biennial. For its 2004 exhibition, the Liverpool Biennial commissioned 48 artists to create new works for the city. For the 2005 Istanbul Biennial exhibition, the co-curators, Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun, proposed "an exhibition structure that folds out of and reveals its context - the city of Istanbul.”（註） And they organized residency and other programs through which the participating artists invited from around the world could gain understanding and knowledge about the city and the local people. It was part of the attempt to bring artists and the audience together and to provide points of intersections between the local and the global. Biennales began to turn their attention to the issue of locality in response to the criticism that they are exclusive “stops” for nomadic artists and international art professionals. Besides biennales, the first exhibition that had variable plans based on its traveling locations was Cities on the Move, which started at Vienna's Secession in 1997 and traveled to several other cities, including London and Bangkok. To reflect the constantly changing images of Asia, Cities on the Move changed its presentation method and design when it traveled to different locations. Another notable example is Fantasia (2001-2002), an exhibition held in Seoul and Beijing, presenting works by artists from South Korea, China, Japan and Thailand. Derived from the preparation of the Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art exhibition in Tokyo (2002-2003), the Fantasia was like an experiment testing how the Asian countries, divided by the Cold War, can understand each other through an exhibition. It invited artists to a short-term residency to create new works in relation to the local culture and the exhibition space. For presentation of Fantasia in Seoul, the artists and the curators participated in a three-week residency and created new works, which were exhibited along with the artists' previous works. The program enabled the artists and curators to work closely together, to learn about their different local contexts and to understand Asia's disconnected histories. When the exhibition traveled to Beijing, more artists and new works were added to give it elements that are particular to the Chinese capital. The exhibition was part of the broader, emerging movement in the early 2000s to examine “Asia” from within and to bring together Asian countries that appeared to have long developed in separation and under Western influences after the Cold War. In our continuing efforts to “connect” the region, Discordant Harmony has adopted the methodology previously employed at the Fantasia exhibition. The 2004 Liverpool Biennial, the 2005 Istanbul Biennial and Fantasia all produced new artworks related to the localities, often through the short-term residency programs, and Discordant Harmony does the same. In cases where new art production is impossible, we exhibit the artists' previous works that have links to the previous exhibition location and address the problems of the new locality. For the exhibition in Hiroshima, new works addressing the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima were produced. Artists and Works Though Discordant Harmony is a variable exhibition, works by two artists, Chen Chieh-Jen and Tanaka Koki, remain consistently in all of its presentations at different locations. Chen Chieh-Jen's video installation Empire's Borders II—Western Enterprises, Inc. (2010) addresses the history and residues of imperialism and the Cold War in Asia, while Tanaka Koki 's A Piano Played by 5 Pianists at Once (First Attempt) (2012) and A Pottery Produced by 5 Potters at Once (Silent Attempt) (2013) stage situations of challenging collaborations among pianists and potters, thus providing clear representations of the curators' aim for the exhibition. Leung Chi Wo's work shows how divergent and variant Chinese characters are by juxtaposing history textbooks from China and Japan. As for Liu Ding's work Karl Marx in 2013 (2014), there were no problems in showing it at Seoul; but for the exhibition in Hiroshima, the artist had to produce a new, abstract version because the Shanghai government prevented the shipping of the original. This case exemplified how changing international relations can affect the contents of exhibitions. As Discordant Harmony moved from Seoul to Hiroshima and then on to Taipei, new works were produced simultaneously. Kim Sora created a score in Seoul, and produced the score's performance and its video documentation in Hiroshima. The performance consists of improvised movements interacting with stones in Hiroshima that were exposed to radiation. In Taipei, Kim is exhibiting the performance video, titled An irregular movement of one point to an indefinite destination. Koo Jeong A's Why Do You Do What You Do (2014) addresses invisible forces by using magnets. Playing with the magnets' nature to attract or repel, Koo changes the composition of the magnets in different exhibition locations. The Taipei-based artist Teng Chao-Ming presents a work based on his research on the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which he sees as turning points for the cities. In Seoul, at the opening of the exhibition, Chiba Masaya staged a performance with a Taekwondo master in addition to exhibiting paintings. Takamine Tadasu presented Japan Syndrome—Berlin Version (2013) at the Seoul exhibition, and created a new work, Taiwan Syndrome—Food Safety (2016), for the Taipei exhibition. Ham　Yang Ah showed her ongoing project Nonsense Factory—Factory Basement (2010-present) at the Seoul exhibition, but created a new video The Sleep (2015) for the Hiroshima exhibition. Wu Tsang exhibited Shape of a Right Statement (2008) in Seoul and Hiroshima, but Duilian (2016) in Taipei. Duilian, her new work, is about the life and work of China's revolutionary poet Qui Jin (1875-1907) and her relationship with the calligrapher Wu Zhiying (1868-1934). Kwon Byung Jun, siren eun young jung, Lee Kit, Yoneda Tomoko, Hao Jingban did not participate in the Seoul exhibition, but joined the project at the Hiroshima exhibition. Hao Jingban's work examines the vernacular culture of China that is disappearing owing to rapid modernization. Lee Kit created a new site-specific installation. In Hiroshima, Kwon Byung Jun showed a sound installation that treats the different quality of reverberations of a Korean bell and a Japanese bell, thus exploring cultural distance. But for the Taipei exhibition, Kwon is producing a new work utilizing the sounds he has collected in Taipei. siren eun young jung deals with gender issues in traditional Korean theatre and

Huang Chien-Hung Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts Poiesis is the ancient Greek term for “to make” and pertains to the logic of making. To achieve making, or poietic making, one must first choose a method. In other words, the meaning of poiesis includes the formation of a method and no doubt echoes Pier Paolo Pasolini's ideas about the cinema of poetry, which treat the process of making and operation as the most realistic factors in an artwork. Art as a depiction of the world and record of life certainly contains the tension between the individual and the system (otherwise known as common knowledge). The individual creation captures what is hidden in the system and also expresses the difference between self and system. This important relation existing within art seems especially clear and intense today. That is because systematization is an inevitable development of democratic politics and technological progress and, along with economic globalization, has accelerated the domination of production and exchange systems over the individual's life. Democracy is the key to securing the spread of economic globalization, and the hyper development of technology seems to be heading for a state lacking individual agency. How to get the individual to create or initiate something within this system, therefore, are no doubt unavoidable core problems of our world. Before addressing these problems, we should clearly state what the terms “international” and “global” mean. As in the past, an international situation requires that the participants are political entities possessing national sovereignty. Today globalization suggests that only transnational companies manage to cross the borders between countries. Apart from this, national sovereignty is still the parameter for any description of or negotiation taking place within global events. The entire alliance of international or regional economies and globalization starts from groups of nations, meaning that the critical problem lies in the fact that the legitimacy of the concept of “country”, as a starting point and basic unit, can never be challenged. Hence the clash between original intentions and subsequent development lies in the concept of nationhood and the violence that arises from positing nationhood as a foundation for a global order. Even though multinational corporations seem to be able to counteract nations, they are identical to them in that they copy national homogeneity and use national violence for purposes of the exploitation of labour and capital accumulation. Globalization has unilaterally crossed national borders and there is still a pressing need for national hierarchies and the management of regional conflicts by dominant nations. It could be said, therefore, that the changes in transnational systems are still founded on the idea of nationhood, and not on the fantasies advanced by the United Nations or globalization, which we imagine could overcome the limitations of nationhood. Internationalism and globalization thus are based on operating the ties between national interests and multinational companies. But this is not to say that internationalism does not exist in any real form, for internationalism partly consists in the physical places operated on by struggles between nations. These locations of international struggle are often nameless or voiceless and constitute the gaps between nations that arise from the use of nation as a basic unit in our globalized world. Prior to the twenty-first century, Asia did not play the role of a planner or executor of any systematic domination, but rather was the subject of experiments in a variety of systemic modernities. Over the last three decades, postcolonial theory has developed as a result of confronting colonialism and domination. This has also spawned different approaches to comparative literature, political and economic analysis, cultural studies, history and sociological research, which have formed concepts such as the third space, hybridity, subaltern studies and alternative modernities. But obviously, in any text, case study or image that we refer to, we find that their subjects have mainly, through all kinds of detailed interpretation, been rendered as naturalized images of domination, disaster and confrontation, and thus incorporated into a world-image where all individual situations and efforts are dissolved into a sweeping representation. This world-image permeated most academic symposia and international exhibitions in the last decade of the twentieth century. It should be evident that we must leave this indulgence behind, since field study, and its recording and display mechanisms, are not enough. Artist exhibitions are by no means limited to texts, images or videos, but also present the core concerns of development and creative methods. Chen Kuan-Hsing has proposed “Asia as Method”, which does not read as some new Asian identity (that is, based on the words alone) but rather as a process for removing concerns about identity in either Europe or China. It suggests empirical observation and new methods of exploration, emphasizing ways of seeking a new problem awareness based on different experiences in a common context. "Asia" does not refer to an identity, but is an effort to open a new problem awareness and methodology, and also an attempt to inaugurate a new critical perspective. By contrast, Chen Chieh-Jen's perceptual field study of Asia indicates vigilance, because Chen thinks the reality of international constructs is closer to Taiwan than to its neighbouring regions. Asia as a new issue arises from the relationship between competition and colonialism among countries, including the world division of labour system, seized and accumulated global capital, and today's global competition for cultural capital. Chen therefore is more concerned with how these international constructs produce functions of historicity and how new international compositions in the post-war years brought to bear a dual link of exploitation and learning while connecting and dominating regions. So we see Chen Kuan-Hsing, with his Asia as Method, seeking an alternative method on the basis of adjacent connections to Asia as a way of surveying and grouping experiences of neighbouring areas. And we also see how Chen Chieh-Jen connects outsourcing society and the ruins left by a period of flourishing consumerism in Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprises, Inc. and The Bianwen Book I. We see how Chen organizes and documents his experience with yao-yan films, temporary communities and perceptual field study. From this he derives a methodology of the self. Both Chen Kuan-Hsing and Chen Chieh-Jen are concerned with how experience can produce and develop methodologies. Two kinds of basic methodology of the self Because art starts from individual thoughts and ideas, and then is developed into a perceptual process sufficient to produce an effect, an artist's approach suggests that an individual methodology is being tested. Thus the exhibition title Discordant Harmony first points to the splitting and mixing of individuality and coordination. Tanaka Koki, in his nearly four years of creating projects, has focused on issues regarding collective engagements. He invites different participants to collaborate temporarily and even develops experimental conversations about historical issues. In other words, cooperation becomes something we must face today, but the relationships are completely unknowable. On the other hand, we can see that Chiba Masaya directly handles the process of painting in his studio as his subject. He uses realistic painting techniques to perform identities, which all attempt to present how internalization generates a wide field of vision. No matter how these two methods differ in their basic direction, they both are about how to create proximity with the world by using painting or concepts. Chiba Masaya makes painting approach the space and time in which the painting was made. Tanaka Koki makes problems directly occur and form in practice. World-generating mechanisms The world is a perfect example of the evolution of a system, in which people in different regions have passed through changes over hundreds of years and generations. Because of the scale in which the world develops the concept of the world, it entails many people's fates, especially since the development of science and technology, the industrial revolution and capitalism, which have accelerated various democratic revolutions. But it is never balanced or even; on the contrary, it is always uneven with regard to the acquisition of resources and generation of profits. We find that normality, steadiness or unevenness cannot satisfy the people's imagination of a just world. The real situation is that we need a dynamic equilibrium. Koo Jeong A composes her installations using magnetism. Their seemingly stable structure actually harbours persistent, dynamic and polarizing forces. The artist arranges industrial magnets to suggest a metaphor for world relations. The forces of attraction, balance and looming instability, seem to point to the fact that the language of reason and the rule of law are masking the underlying truth of power. They disguise a much more mixed state where mutual infiltration and exclusion take place. Kim Sora uses sound to occupy space and create interactive relations with space. Different sounds are used at either end of the installation to induce the experience of learning how to understand perceptual balance between two poles by choosing different positions. With a piano used in previous collaborations, Kwon Byung Jun creates a live performance that is recorded. He then broadcasts the recordings in the venue at different times. The three previously mentioned artists use objects to drive our possible perceptions, configuring different metaphors for our world. In contrast to these constructed metaphors, Teng Chao-Ming presents a variety of promotional and research images related to the Olympics. In this way, he pushes front stage a picture of world political, social and economic archaeology. As we know, to imagine the Olympics is to imagine the world. Another example is Pak Sheung Chuen, who uses the world's coding systems to rediscover the relationship between individuals outside the system and to see how individuals in Hong Kong have changed over the space of ten years by re-visiting them. The artist believes individuals are a microcosm of the world and elements that transcend the world system. History – world, survivors History is neither real nor a basis, but rather is written at some distance from an empirical reality and material basis. Jacques Rancière called this historicity and literature, and many historians call it fiction. History – world means a fictional crystal, an organic structure containing changing time, spatial difference, individual experience and collective memory. History – world, however, is definitely not a single or universal thing, but complex, interactive and overlapping. As Jorge Luis Borges revealed to us, we have some degree of exposure to an endless mise-en-abyme of fiction at each moment, and we also have a practice of fabrication that develops from the self. In this duality, the creator of fiction is a survivor of history – world and creates the relationship between the individual and the world as a survivor. Since the IMF crisis and the financial tu

Carol Yinghua Lu Art critic and curator. Phd candidate of art history, University of Melbourne. “MORE THAN 400 MILLION CHINESE STILL CANNOT COMMUNICATE IN PUTONGHUA.” The luxury of working on an exhibition that travels to a number of venues and, along the way, has the possibility of transforming itself has been offered to us as co-curators of Discordant Harmony: Critical Reflections on the Imaginary of Asia. When this project was initiated by the Goethe-Institut in Seoul in April 2014, all four of us engaged as co-curators of the exhibition shared a vision of establishing a curatorial model that does not fixate on one imaginary of Asia existing in the general perception, but rather contests and complicates this. The commonly held imaginary tends to anchor itself in the perception of Asia being a unified cultural entity bound together by the Confucian spirit of harmony. Coming from four different cultures–China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea–we knew well enough that the value of such a project could lie in setting up a platform through which we could reflect critically upon our political unconsciousness and examine our own cultural fixations. In this collaboration, one of the very first things that challenges us to think outside our national and cultural fixations is the issue of language. It is exactly one of the manifold tests as to whether Asia forms a unity. On the surface, there is the issue of the multiple linguistic systems. In Asia, there is not one single language that crosses all borders. Thus, for most Asians, to communicate with one another usually requires a third language other than their own. In the collaborative process of Discordant Harmony, English is the working language for all those engaged in the project. It is not Chinese, not Japanese, not Korean, not German (the languages of the initiators and sponsors of the project), but English. The round-table discussion we had in Hiroshima with participating artists and all the curators required interpretations from Japanese to English, Japanese to Mandarin, Cantonese to English, English to Mandarin, Cantonese to Korean, Korean to Japanese, English to Korean, and so on. Imagine the complications and chaos! Language aside, the diversity of points of view exchanged at the oversized table in the basement of the Hiroshima Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art was something of a spectacle, and an embodiment of heteroglossia unfolding right in front of us. The Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, the originator of the term heteroglossia, defines it as another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions, but in a refracted way and as a condition in which distinct varieties of speech co-exist within a single language. It can perhaps be a concept with which we re-examine our cultural consciousness, both of ourselves and of our neighbouring countries, through the exhibition as a platform and through a language. Outside the museum space, I think about the formidable buying power of Chinese tourists in such Korean shopping malls as “Lotte” that has driven the shopping malls to equip themselves with Chinese signs and Mandarin-speaking sales staff. In situations like this, a solution can be easily implemented when opportunities and challenges present themselves in economic terms. I think about the recent movie Ten Years, a movie made by Hong Kong directors anticipating the onset of a Mandarin-speaking Hong Kong where social pressure will deem the native tongue of Cantonese obsolete, irrelevant and simply an outcast in society and even in the family. I also think about the following paragraph from Children of Mao, published in 1985 by Anita Chan, a native of Hong Kong, explaining her reason for writing this book: “I was drawn to this study of Chinese youths after several brief encounters in Hong Kong in 1971 with a small group of young people who had just come from China. Cantonese myself, brought up in a British colony perched on China’s coast, it was astonishing to me to encounter the vast difference between these former Red Guards from Canton and us Hong Kong young people. The accent of Cantonese that they spoke was not in the slightest different from ours, but that very fact served to accentuate the other aspects of their speech which sounded odd to our ears. It was the different vocabulary they employed, and the meanings and connotations behind that vocabulary, and the experience and worldview behind that, which set them off from us.”[1] In Chan’s experience, language is not simply linguistic, but the rhetoric of a deeper psychology. Deep down, the issue of language is ultimately linked to that of identity and consciousness. The use of a particular language is intricately linked to a cultural tradition and thus a sense of cultural belonging. The Chinese reformers of the early twentieth century were fixated on revolutionizing the prose of language and speech, considering it closely allied to an entire feudal cultural tradition that was a burden hindering the modernization of China. The America-educated Chinese scholar Hu Shih’s (1891-1962) call for a vernacular prose in literature heralded a literary revolution that was part of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Whatever utopian aspirations this generation of Chinese scholars and reformers had for China were initially invested in the revolution of language. As much as the revolution of language was a matter of life and death for the nation in the face of the crisis of the early twentieth century, the manipulation and control of language and speech is also a critical instrument in nation-building. From the First Emperor of ancient China, Qin Shi Huang, to the Communist Party after its seizure of power in the 1940s, the regulation of language and speech is of ultimate importance, not only as a cultural matter but also as a political one, as a component in dominating the consciousness of the people. In 2013, the statement made by the Minister of Education in China was headlined thus: “More than 400 million Chinese still cannot communicate in Putonghua.” Putonghua, the standardized Mandarin prescribed by the Communist Government after the establishment of the People’s Republic China in 1949, is pervasive in both official and vernacular communications, yet the vast population of China, consisting of fifty-six peoples, makes language a political frontier still demanding constant conquest by the Communist Party. There is still work to be done. Having expressed worries about this phenomenon, the Chinese minister made his appeal with the following slogan: “To develop Putonghua, to construct the Chinese Dream”. Unifying language is a key to the formulation and consolidation of national identity and belonging. In this sense, language is a political device and channel. Heteroglossia, however, could be a counter-condition opposing the solidarity of such a national ambition. The coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech would run athwart the Communist Party’s vision of nation-building. It was on the note of “language” that I entered this symphonic discussion on the subject of Asia as a collection of various geopolitical entities in contest with one another in the past and in the present. An acute awareness of the hierarchical relationship set up by the recognition of and preference for the relevance of one language over another is the subject of Shape of a Right Statement, (2008) a video work by American artist Wu Tsang. As someone who is concerned with inequality caused and defined by social conditions and consciousness, Wu Tsang tends to question what is given and to provoke the audience to consider the relevance of what falls outside constructed canons. In this short film, Wu Tsang looks directly into the camera and narrates one section of “In My Language”, a text written by autism rights activist Amanda Baggs. In her utterance, Wu Tsang mimetically reproduces the voice of Baggs’s Speech Generation Device, stating, “It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication”. This work propels us to give consideration to negligence and discrimination that result from the precedence we give to our limited experience. My process of considering cultural and political consciousness through the issue of language continues with Singaporean Chinese artist Zou Zhao’s performance work Chinese Is Not a Language (2014). For me, this work further problematizes the idea of language as a cultural boundary and orthodoxy. Departing from her interest in the role of the English language in the neo-colonial distribution of knowledge and the gap between English and Mandarin, Zou Zhao gave a lecture performance, entirely in English, on the untranslatable nature of language, invoking the example of Chinese. By demonstrating her failed attempts to translate Chinese poems word by word into English, she describes the frustrations of cross-cultural understandings, which are largely dependent on translation. In her performances and video works, Zou Zhao takes the voice as a metonymy for the body so as to raise questions about identities and the perceived “autonomy” of language. Subjectivity and consciousness as embedded in manners of speaking and unconscious choices of words emerge in Liu Ding’s video installation Karl Marx in 2013 (2014), a work composed of two photographs and one video. The video shot on Liu Ding’s I-phone recorded a run-in he had with a group of Chinese Communist officials who were visiting Karl Marx’s tomb in the Highgate Cemetery in London to perform the dutiful ritual of singing the Internationale and reciting the Communist Manifesto before the tombstone. The dispute arose as some members of the group discovered that Liu Ding’s phone might have recorded their activities in the cemetery and demanded, in authoritarian language and tone, that Liu Ding delete everything, warning him of undesirable consequences should he fail to comply. By typing part of the exchange on black screens, Liu Ding intends to highlight the power structure behind such articulations of both authority and insecurity. He wonders what has given them the legitimacy and confidence to talk with authority and power, though at the same time the outrage of the group revealed an obvious feeling of anxiety and wariness of being exposed, as if what they were doing something to be ashamed of. The first chapter of my reflection on the extent to which Asia is a cultural construction and on the inbuilt deficiency of such a construction includes Hong Kong artist Leung Chi Wo’s two-channel video projection Storical Affairs (2006). In this work, Leung Chi Wo works with a Japanese-language primary school textbook of Chinese history approved by Chinese officials. Each video shows a copy of the same Japanese textbook being flipped through. In one video, the textbook appears with all the kanji (Chinese characters) in the text crossed out, accompanied by a soundtrack of a Japanese man reading every single syllable in the textbook except those of the kanji. In the other video, the same text in the book has all words crossed out except kanji and only the content written in kanji is narrated in Cantonese by a Hong Kong woman. In this work both written and spoken languages, and to a great ext

Lives in London, Berlin Magnetism is a phenomenon associated with moving electrical charges (electric current). Magnetism can be “baked” into a piece of metal, aligning microscopic domains inside it, as occurs in everyday magnets. Magnetism can be generated by a moving device, such as a rotating dynamo that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. The Sun and the planets seem to generate their magnetism in this way, like large spinning dynamos. Magnetism manifests itself in a magnetic field–an invisible force that surrounding the magnet, which scientists often sketch on paper with the help of looping lines called “magnetic field lines”. Occasionally, nature “sketches” the lines for us to see when charged gas flows, glows and is recorded by our cameras. (Excerpt from Dimitar Sasselov, Subtle Power in Koo Jeong A: Constellation Congress, edited by Yasmil Raymond, 2012, New York: Dia Art Foundation)

Lives in Seoul The reverberations of the modified piano strings reverberate towards the city of Taipei, from the exhibition space located on a hillside just outside of the city. The old piano, which had long been neglected outside to house thousands of insects, has been transformed by the documentary Is This a Musical Instrument? into a new instrument, which makes sound by moving slightly instead of hitting the strings. Eight tunes, composed with the modified piano's timbre, will be played every hour from the two horn speakers located on the rooftop of the exhibition space. (text by Kwon ByungJun)

Lives in London The Parallel Lives of Others –Encounter with Sorge Spy Ring documents various locations in Japan and China, where secret meetings supposedly took place among spies engaged in the international espionage just before the outbreak of WWII. It was led by the undercover German journalist and Soviet spy Richard Sorge and his informants, including the Japanese journalist, Communist and political advisor, Ozaki Hotsumi. In an intimate frame size, the scenes appear in soft focus and monochromatic tone, evoking the obscurity of life as a spy as well as the ambiguity of historical accounts of past events. Through the camera, Yoneda Tomoko has directed a sincere look at Asia, showing remnants Japan’s modernization process. In Taiwan, for instance, Japanese style houses in Taipei and the landscapes in Jingliao, Tainan were the subjects of her photographic works. The Japanese House series objectively documents an architecture style during Japanese occupation, it also traces personal memories of the former residents, such as General Wang Shu-Ming, the Chief of Staff under Chiang Kai-Shek, and the daughter of the Japanese Prime Minister, who, signed the Potsdam Declaration, Kantaro Suzuki. The work exposes the multi-faceted dimension of the undisclosed past in the major historical discourse. (text by Hirano Mayumi)

Lives in Vienna, Taipei, Yokohama Jun Yang takes Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) as a reference and starting point of The Age of Guilt and Forgiveness. When commissioned to make a documentary on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Resnais instead invited Maguerite Duras to write a screenplay for a romantic film dealing with the issues of memory and the trauma of Hiroshima. The Age of Guilt and Forgiveness is an attempt to look at history, particularly the burden of history in the context of contemporary Japan’s position, more than seventy years after the end of WWII. Mainly shot in the city of Hiroshima, this film stages a conversation between two lovers to comment on twentieth-century Japanese history and Japan’s role in a changed geopolitical situation. It also addresses the question of guilt—personal and collective guilt of the present and the past—and the idea of forgiving in a relationship, in national and in personal history. (text by Kim Sunjung)

Lives in Los Angeles Wu Tsang’s reconstruction of the biography of the well-known Chinese revolutionary poet Qiu Jin (1875-1907) in her film Duilian, referring to both to a form of couplet poetry and to the martial art form of sword-fighting between two swordsmen, reveals Qiu’s lesser-known intimate relationship with her female friend and calligrapher Wu Zhiying. While popular narratives in novels, films and plays tend to associate Qiu Jin’s legacy with the revolutionary discourse of China in the early 20th century, Wu’s reading and portrait of Qiu’s life is situated in the trajectory of queer histories and their relative obscurity in Asia. This work sets out to question the larger ideological framework in historical accounts that give little consideration to individual experiences and conditions. (text by Carol Yinghua Lu)

Lives in Taipei A tattered historical construction. Reading and re-encoding are the main progressions of Teng Chao-Ming’s creative project. A reading of the phenomenal enthusiasm among Asian nations to host the Olympics is converted into a historically layered archeological diagram, becoming an archeological diagram that connects shared East Asian experiences and values. The installation of these images and diagrams, however, enable us to move beyond the seemingly irresistible political status quo and development to silently connect sentiments from our individual lives to the temporal structures and historical experiences that have been intentionally concealed by politics. The visibility of the Olympics seems to speak to the life condition of the individual in Asia. What cannot be avoided is the “diagram” of a world structure that forcibly intrudes into the organization of individual lives. (text by Huang Chien-Hung)

Lives in Tokyo By employing a wide range of media and methods, Tanaka Koki artistically explores the possibilities and forms of social engagements. He uses the format of workshops in order to observe collective behavior and action among strangers who have temporarily come together. A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt) documents interactions and negotiations of five pianists specialized in different music genres such as improvisation, classical and jazz, in response to the given assignment to play “a soundtrack for collective engagement”. The course of action in which participants attempt to create a harmony through democratic processes serves as a metaphor for contemporary society. Staged in Kyoto City Museum of Art, this work originally comprised documentations of five workshops held with eight high school students. One of the workshops presented here incorporates the history of the place, which had been requisitioned by the American occupation forces following World War II. The participants exchange their ideas in response to key words pertaining to post-war Japan, such as "Self-Defense Forces", "America" and "Hiroshima". Made during a period of heightened debate over Japanese-American security arrangements, the work Provisional Studies: Workshop #1 "1946-52 Occupation Era and 1970 Between Men and Matter" reflects the atmosphere of contemporary Japanese society by capturing the impressions and understanding of the past expressed by teenage students. (text by Hirano Mayumi)

Lives in Taipei, Akita Japan Syndrome has been developed over the course of three years since 2011, while moving from one city to the next, intertwining the behaviors and voices of people in response to questions related to the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima. By employing various media, such as performance, video, installation and social media, this work went through constant changes and captured the unstable mood of the Japanese society and the sudden shift in interpersonal relationships after the disaster triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake, revealing the invisible social and political power structures. Created in Taiwan, Taiwan Syndrome: Food Safety work employs the same format as video work Japan Syndrome, in which actors on stage reenacted conversations among people in shopes on the issues of nuclear power, the Fukushima disaster and the like. Taiwan Syndrome: Food Safety shifts the topic to “food safety,” which has become a great concern of people in Taiwan today. By capturing spontaneous reactions, utterances, and unconscious behaviors, this work reflects the social and political atmosphere from perspectives grounded in the actual lives of people. This work was developed out of discussions and in collaboration with students of Taipei National University of the Arts, where Takamine holds a visiting professorship. (text by Hirano Mayumi)

Lives in Hong Kong Revisiting artistic practice. In the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement, Pak Sheung Chuen undertook an in-depth self-criticism of artistic practice. This critique enabled the artist to re-examine previous art projects that attempted to link community with the media. The re-visitation of artistic projects allowed the artist and participants to establish a developmental and reflexive organic relationship through archiving. This practice made it possible for us to deftly and continually undertake direct confrontations and negotiations between the ever-changing management systems and individuals in society. At the same time, social practices and interactions entered into the artistic work of archivalization to become documents that illustrate the world. The relationship between society and artistic practice is no longer simply dependent on the marketplace and ideologies: re-visitation has become an extension. (text by Huang Chien-Hung)

Lives in Beijing In 1988 (Language as the Issue), a group of objects, including a painting, a wooden box painted blue on four sides, three copper sticks and a pack of postcard-sized laminated color printouts are arranged on a raised platform to appear like a setup for a still life painting. In the background is a watercolor painting on canvas done by the artist that appears in the style of a water ink landscape painting from afar, partly propped up by copper sticks. The excerpts of texts on the printouts came from the discussion arising in the aftermath of the “85’ New Wave Movement” on the subject of “purification of language”, turning the deliberation on artistic language into a visible debate on artistic practice. Artists in art academies, state-employed art critics, independent critics and, young artists emerging from the “85’ New Wave” came forth to express their views. This discussion died down gradually after the 1989 China Avant-garde Exhibition. In the process of debate, the issue of artistic language became a touchstone, reflecting the footholds of various value systems. At the end of 1985, the American artist Rauschenberg visited Beijing and Tibet and held two solo exhibitions in Beijing and Tibet consecutively. Chinese art history has given this particular trip and Rauschenberg’s presence in Beijing a very prominent role, attributing the transformation of the artistic practice of many artists and that of Chinese art to these exhibitions. In Message, Lui Ding pretends to be Rauschenberg and offers his friends in the Beijing art world a gift. The gift consists of a bundle of paintings done in the name of Rauschenberg and a letter addressed to the friends after Rauschenberg’s arrival in Tibet in preparation for his exhibition there. (text by Carol Yinghua Lu)

Lives in Hong Kong Silent Music Plane 1967 consists in paper plane made with the cover of Life magazine (June 1967), flying on a string tied to the arm from the axis of a slow-speed motor set on a tripod. Based on the rhythm of some music, a micro-controller creates signals for variable voltages that make the plane flying at variable speeds. On the cover of this particular issue of Life magazine is the story of the escape of the famous Chinese musician Sima Cong from China. In May 1967, a good deal of Chinese propaganda slogans and music were broadcast from the loudspeakers at the Bank of China Building in Central, Hong Kong. It was loud and heard everywhere in the Central District. To counteract the propaganda, the Hong Kong government installed six large military speakers on the roof of the Government Information Services building (very close to Bank of China), loudly playing jazz and Western pop music, including the Beatles. In this installation, the movement of the paper plane responds to the tempo and sound levels of two songs: Long Live Chairman Mao (1966) and Yesterday (1965) by the Beatles, both tools in the war of propaganda! (text by Carol Yinghua Lu)

Lives in Taipei, Hong Kon Legends of anonymous individuals. Lee Kit specializes in highlighting the traces left behind by individuals in living spaces and objects. Based on this creative trajectory, his artistic projects necessitate a specific spatial creativity, while the selection of “minority” spaces corresponds to events hidden in our lives: an excessive tension and anxiety. The paradoxical and contrasting relationship that exists between tension and living spaces suffices to describe the individual in post-war East Asian cities, under the conditions of mutual entanglement between developmental doctrine and ethics that cannot be explicitly addressed by law. The markings left behind by our bodies and our bodies in spaces are a sort of benevolent legend of the “existence” that confronts us. This is a category of legend constructed of single phrases and active or lingering time. It is a legend that belongs to anonymous individuals. (text by Huang Chien-Hung)

Kamiya Yukie Gallery Director, Japan Society, New York. Asia’s shifting global presence Let me share a story from the past. In the late 1990s, I collaborated with up-and-coming curators from five countries for the first time on organizing a group exhibition at the De Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam. The profiles of participating artists included indications of their countries of origin. One had the abbreviation “CH” on it, and I asked, “We don’t have any artists from China, do we?” The reply: “Obviously, that means Switzerland”. My fault: I wasn’t familiar with the two-letter European country codes, which you can see on stickers on the backs of cars. Today, however, more people would sympathize with my question, which at the time just seemed confusingly out of place. Nearly two decades on, artists not only from China but from all over Asia regularly participate in shows held all over the world. Here in New York the presence of Asia in the art scene also keeps growing. Asia’s presence has expanded beyond the continent’s borders, and discussing the aggregate of diverse histories and cultures we call “Asia” is tantamount to discussing globalism in a broader sense. This trend did not begin only yesterday, but it is a relatively recent one. According to Morimura Yasumasa (born in 1951), who exhibited at the 1988 Aperto, a section of the Venice Biennale for emerging artists, and has since exhibited all over the world as a trail-blazing, global Japanese artist: “As a precocious child, my classmate painted some roses in oils as a summer homework project. The smell of the sticky paint entranced me. Since then, it has always been Western art that I relate to.” During the Cold War, the Asian region was divided by external forces and artists of Yasumasa’s generation saw themselves in the context of this reality, with Western art history presenting a set of impossibly lofty standards to aspire to. It is fair to say that through the conflicts this generation endured, we have attained a platform on which to view Asia from Asia. In the late 1990s, when the winds of liberal globalism were beginning to blow, the first staging of the exhibition Cities on the Move took place at Vienna Secession in 1997 [1]. Focusing on the drastic transformations Asian cities were undergoing, it was a traveling show that changed its scale and lineup of artists flexibly each time it moved, interpreting Asian creativity from an urban perspective and showcasing not only art but also various other genres such as film and architecture. Admittedly, there was a strong regional view of works of contemporary Asian artists largely from the West. Even so, Cities on the Move was considered a groundbreaking event, one of the catalysts for Asia’s appearance on the global art-critical radar. Meanwhile, in Asia the long-running, developing project Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art (2000-2003) [2] was a pioneering example of the intra-regional cultural exchange organized by the Japan Foundation, and because it was a community-based project in which curators active in Asia collaborated to organize a group exhibition, it served as an opportunity for human resource development and to raise awareness of a number of challenges related to Asia. A new world order arose after the end of the Cold War and Asia has since undergone great geopolitical changes. In East Asia, U.S. policy promotes regionalism, as exemplified by ASEAN, launched in 1967 as a forum for Southeast Asian regional cooperation on economic, social, political, cultural and national security issues. The economic boom in Asia, which began in the 1980s, overcame the currency crisis of the late 1990s and brought about further social and economic development, which underpinned cultural outreach. Asia has taken a leading role in the march towards globalism, but what truly maintains the art scene in Asia is grassroots organizations and connections between artists and curators rather than conventional cultural infrastructure such as museums. The Asian art scene is characterized by personal-experience-oriented connections based on friendship and trust, which exist in a different dimension from global art criticism, market distribution and so forth. The trajectory of this exhibition, spanning the three cities of Seoul, Hiroshima and Taipei, and connecting each locality while at the same time showing the differences between the cities, products of the complex history of the Asian region, means that it has a different implied vantage point each time. This gives rise to a variety of experiences in and relationships of the participants, to which is added the viewpoint of critical reconsideration of the Asian region through artistic representation –– ranging from a reflection on the post-Cold War world order, which was a primary focus when the exhibition was first held, to the region’s increasing role as a driving force behind the global economy. Thinking about East Asia from Asia, a part of the adjacent region. The structure underlying each of these societies is by no means monolithic. So let us take a moment to consider the complex region of East Asia, the countries of which all have their own regional, cultural and historical differences, and all engage with, resist, sympathize with, and compete against each other from different positions. Regarding harmony with skepticism The aim of Discordant Harmony, a project that has involved two-plus years of exchanges since its inception, is to open up in the gap between the past and the future—in other words the present— a platform of debate in the form of an exhibition to artists who are deeply involved in and think about current society as something that cannot be separated from their respective backgrounds and the history of the places to which they have migrated. This involves thinking about East Asia while casting a skeptical eye upon "harmony," which as well as being an intrinsic part of the Asian aesthetic can also lead to diverse voices being stifled by authority or by the force of numbers. As noted by Hannah Arendt, human existence is a "small non-time-space in the very heart of time," and because of this "every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew."[3] Looking closely at the reaction to the contemporary society that surrounds us from various angles through artistic expression. Curators from countries in Asia, all neighboring countries with different positions, and artists who have participated in the same circles of discussion address socio-political themes as everyday practice. Creative activities and expression arising from their researches and workshops became mirrors reflecting the present and ongoing opportunities to explore East Asia from the ground of three cities, Seoul, Hiroshima and Taipei. This approach, which enables interpretations that are abstract and open rather than limited, is discordant and dares not seek unity. In other words it is diverse and encourages participants to have the intellectual curiosity and bravery to engage in dialogue even in complex situations. In the course of this ongoing conversation, the idea of "Asia as method" proposed by Sinologist and critic Takeuchi Yoshimi has become a major inspiration.[4] It is a way forward for Asia that involves transcending the idea that East and West are in a confrontational power relationship of invasion and resistance and creating universality through one set of cultural values being embraced by and reformed by another set of cultural values, which is to say a method that involves repeatedly accepting, thinking, denaturalizing and evolving. The open possibilities of the ambiguous "I" As the economic regional map of East Asia rapidly changes, opportunities for considering East Asia from the point of view of cultural exchange within the region have increased more and more. Amid such an environment, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami represented a decisive opportunity requiring a fundamental change from the thinking in Japan up until now. In Japan, which despite experiencing an atomic bombing, undergoing modernization and suffering economic stagnation boasted that it had achieved calm and peace without striving for these, we were made to realize that grave dangers were hidden and that we were ignorant of them. We were no longer able to shake off suspicions that we were trapped in a scenario of controlled harmony. One could say that the question of what artists can do, which they were confronted with in the upheaval immediately following the Tohoku disaster, became an important motivating factor for breaking away from an overly materialistic society and for artists struggling to connect expression and society. Currently, however, as seen in the adoption of a security resolution changing the interpretation of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, uncompromising political forces that run counter to dialogue have manifested themselves and the spirit of collaboration that had for a moment intensified among the people has also begun to atrophy. Amid this current, the artists participating in this exhibition, while gazing patiently and keenly at contemporary society, rather than adopting an approach of strenuously confronting it, are standing in the middle of this ambiguous situation and practicing open expression that before anything else encourages us to think actively and autonomously. In his worksh