The 6th City on the Move Art Festival 2008:
Dark Urbanism+Eye of the City

Date: 2008/6/28-8/24

The “City on the Move Art Festival” held by the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs has already entered its sixth year. This year, the stage for the festival has been set at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. It’s divided into two themes – “Eye of the City” curated by Jo HSIAO , researcher at the Department of Cultural Affairs, and “Dark City,” jointly curated by Chao Lee KUO , Associate Professor of the National Taipei University Graduate School of Urban Planning, and Ke-fung LIU , Assistant Professor of the Architecture Department of Chaoyang University of Technology. “City on the Move art Festival” gathers together the talent of thirteen visual artists and architects to express their deepest thoughts and concerns not only about cities, but also about civilization, progress and existence.

For “Eye of the City,” seven local and overseas visual artists were invited, including Nicolas FLOC’H from France, Ryoichi KUROKAWA and Yuki OKUMURA from Japan, and Taiwanese artists Ya-hui WANG, Iuan-hau CHIANG, Chung-han YAO and Chih-chien CHEN. Using the medium of videos and sounds, these artists express the various prospects of the city and explore the concepts of time and sense of urban space, as well as the sights, sounds and even smell existed in the city dwellers’ experiences. They also convey snatches of the emotions or fantasies found in city corners, and the various anxiety hidden within city life. These seven artists use artistic methods to sample slices of urban life and reconstruct or reproduce them, giving viewers an even more penetrating insight into these issues.

The participants in “Dark City” include local experienced architects Albert HO, Jay W. CHIU, Kris YAO, Shi-chieh LU, Kyle Chia-kai YANG and Victor Y. C. SU. These six explore the relativity of lightness and darkness within the city, including urban night life and darker spaces, and the unique, mesmerizing nightscapes of Asian cities, through their individual viewpoints and methods of interpretation. For this exhibition, these architects transform themselves into spatial magicians, using changes in light, shadow and sound, and the reorganization of visiting routes, to create an epitome of their individual “Dark Cities” within the museum.