Chi-Wen for West Bund DREAM Video 100 presents “Tell Me What You Want” (2018) by Yu Cheng-Ta, “Transactions” (2008) and “Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800” (2018) by Yin-Ju Chen and “Exercise Living” (2018) by Tsui Kuang-Yu. DREAM Video 100 is a new section, which will be launched this year, featuring a premier program of over 100 film and video works presented on the outdoor LED projection wall of the Dream Center on the West Bund Plaza and providing a glimpse into the diverse development of Chinese and international video art. 

Yu Cheng-Ta’s “Tell Me What You Want” is an ambitious 4 screen video project about the interactions of a tourist and the inhabitants of an exotic culture, culminating in friendship. The project was created between November 2015 and June 2017, when the artist Yu Cheng-Ta flew frequently from Taipei to Manila, all the while assuming identities of that of a traveller, a friend, and a film producer. 

Yin-Ju Chen’s “Transactions” takes place in a sewing workshop. The making of a piece of clothing is filmed in detail while we listen to a phone conversation between a Taiwanese mother and her daughter, the director of this film. The mother spends her days and nights toiling away so she can afford to send her daughter to school in the United States. They are discussing the credit card bill. Not only their physical distance, but especially their emotional one manifests itself in an increasingly emphatic way. Their worlds are light-years away from one another, which leads to miscommunication and lack of understanding. A talk between two people who love each other is reduced to a business transaction; after all, the language of the dollar is universal. Transactions is about the boundaries of a love that supposedly knows no bounds.

“Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800” is a continuation chapter of the “Extrastellar Evaluations series” that first began in 2016. This project contemplates human civilization and humanity’s future through an investigation of space physics, extraterrestrial myths, and cosmography. By using hypotheses and prophecies founded upon a choreography of fragments of history, as well as mass media imagery and information, eponymous video “Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800” attempts to reveal when exactly doomsday takes place. This video further adapts the notion of “entropy” from the second law of thermodynamics, and connects it to the avarice and belligerence of human nature. Interspersed in the video are the narrations of a non-human intelligence named “Ra” concerning that everything is the distortion of the one infinite Creator.

In “Exercise Living”, Tsui Kuang-Yu tried to take a look at our lives. We have been performing other people’s experiments and attempts as they interpret the contemporary life. The imagination and anticipation of life are like an onion with multiple layers. It is like one is looking forward to seeing the hatching of a baby chick when it is another egg that comes out eventually! What is inside the egg baffles all; perhaps, what it contains is only the projection of our own psyche influenced by our situations in the reality. Finally, we will realize that if we want to learn the truth inside the egg, we must create our own prophecies. Therefore, if the reality is the best place to realize these prophecies, we must be ready to welcome an age when everyone is a prophet.

The fifth edition of West Bund Art & Design is taking place from November 8 to 11, 2018.