1646 X Taiwanese Cultural Center Paris (CCTP)

This collaboration was kindly initiated and supported by the Taiwanese Cultural Center in Paris (CCTP). The Taiwan Cultural Center was established in January 1994 as Taiwan’s second-ever overseas cultural center following the 1990 launch of the Taipei Cultural Center in New York. The center serves as a bridge introducing Taiwan’s arts and culture to European audiences and as a global platform for promoting cultural discourse and professional collaboration in the arts. Following the Ministry of Culture’s recent expansion in Europe, the center now focuses on Taiwan-centric cultural exchanges with Belgium, France, Luxemburg, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

PROGRAM

THURSDAY 28 MAY

STUDIO VISITS

Zoe Yeh will pay studio visits to artists in The Hague. The visits are coordinated in collaboration with Stroom Den Haag

FILM SCREENING + Q&A: Fragments in Recall; Contemporary Moving Image from Taiwan

19:30 – 21:00
Flora Filmtheater, De Constant Rebecquestraat 55
Tickets

This film screening brings together 3 video works by Ciou Tzu-Yan, Lin Yi-Chi, and Liao Chi-Yu, exploring postwar memory and temporal perception in Taiwan. Moving between reality and imagination, and between personal experience and collective history, the works assemble fragments of unfinished narratives, inviting viewers to reconsider how memory is constructed, recalled, and reimagined.

After the screening, Zoe will give a more in depth explanation about the works and is open to answer questions from the audience.

Bird (2021) – Liao Chi-Yu, 16:47 min.
Spoken language: Mandarin Chinese
Subtitles: English and Traditional Chinese

Bird unfolds as a fable-like narrative shaped by memory, imagination, and transformation. Drawing from the artist’s childhood experience of visiting commercial photo studios, the work reflects on a once-common practice in Taiwan in which families posed before painted backdrops depicting distant, imagined landscapes. These staged images, while projecting aspirations toward elsewhere, also produce a subtle disjunction between lived reality and constructed scenes. Through the camera’s simultaneous claim to truth and artifice, the work explores the ambiguity between what has been and what has not, between reality and imagination. In doing so, it opens a speculative space where personal narratives may be reconfigured, suspended, and reinterpreted.

Liao Chi-Yu lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. Working across video and installation, her practice explores subtle and complex emotional states related to bodily experience, memory, love, and human connection. She often employs role-play and open-ended narratives to construct intimate yet ambiguous situations. Her works have been presented internationally, including at Videonale and Kaunas Biennial. Recent exhibitions include Way Out Beyond at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; River Still, River Goes at VT Artsalon, Taipei; and Sanssouci Park at a.m. space, Hong Kong.

Awake Before Your Gaze – Lin Yi-Chi, 20:18 min.
Spoken language: Mandarin Chinese, Hakka, Hokkien
Subtitles: English and Traditional Chinese

Awake Before Your Gaze examines a lesser-seen chapter of postwar Taiwan: the presence of the U.S. military and its lasting social implications. Through the personal accounts of two elderly African Taiwanese-American men, Han-Chung and Hsiao-Chung, the work reflects on the complexities of mixed-race identity and social visibility. Moving between language, memory, and lived experience, the film traces how identity is negotiated across cultural and historical disjunctions. Rather than seeking resolution, the work foregrounds acts of refusal and self-articulation, presenting identity as a condition shaped by external projections yet continually redefined from within.

Lin Yi-Chi lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. She is an artist and filmmaker, and the founder of Toisland Project. Trained in both contemporary art and filmmaking, her practice spans video, experimental film, and moving-image installation, focusing on diasporic experiences within Asian geopolitics. Through fieldwork and the collection of voices and narrative fragments, she transforms memory and dreams into cinematic structures, examining how history persists as an ‘unfinished’ condition in contemporary life while bringing marginalized local narratives into view.

Man on the Rails – Ciou Zih-Yan, 26:32 min.
Spoken language: Mandarin Chinese
Subtitles: English and Traditional Chinese

Man on the Rails draws inspiration from Gan Yao-Ming’s short story The Mysterious Train, through which the artist Ciou Zih-Yan reworks his childhood experience of living near the old mountain railway line in Sanyi into a narrative centered on a man dwelling along the tracks. Structured through a dreamlike narrative, the film intertwines personal memory with the historical context of Martial Law, rendering history as lived experience. By tracing the subtle entanglement between individual life and political conditions, the work reflects on the everyday realities of those shaped by historical violence, while gesturing toward events that may remain outside official history yet persist as enduring traces.

Ciou Zih-Yan lives and works between Miaoli and Yunlin, Taiwan. Working primarily in media art, including video and installation, his practice focuses on the history and memory of Taiwan’s White Terror period. His works often employ strategies of ‘filling in the gaps’ to engage with historical structures, while drawing on the aesthetics of Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s. Through a visual language informed by New Historicism, he constructs narrative frameworks that critically respond to Taiwan’s fragmented historical consciousness.

FRIDAY 29 MAY

FILM SCREENING + TALK: Assembling Time: Moving Image from Taiwan

15:00 – 17:00
KABK Auditorium, Prinsessegracht 4
Get your free ticket here

For their last screening of the year, KABK Lectorate Film welcomes Zoe Yeh and presents the video works Hominins (2019) by Wu Chi-Yu, Compound Eyes of Tropical (2019-22) by Zhang Xu Zhan, and Bad Dream Rocking a.k.a. The Rocking Malay(a) (2024) by Her Lab Space.

Zoe will give a more in depth explanation about the works and is open to answer questions from the audience. She introduces her selection of films as follows: “With advancements in technology and increasing cultural exchange, our modern understanding of the world has undergone a profound transformation. The selected works provide the understanding of regional relationships from Taiwan’s perspective. The artists introduced in this screening-lecture are deeply fascinated by how humanity perceives the world. Through investigations into prehistoric civilizations, studies of tribal legends, and reinterpretation of folklore—each representing a distinct historical moment of human inquiry—they examine the limitations and complexities of contemporary systems of knowledge.”

More details about the films can be found here.

HOOGTIJ #85

19:00 – 23:00
1646, Boekhorststraat 125
Free access

HOOGTIJ is the well-known contemporary art tour through The Hague. Following the exhibition The Mind The Heart by Līga Spunde, the video work On my Tail by Taiwanese artist Jeci Chen will be screened for one night only.

On My Tail by Jeci Chen is a visual diary of the emotional expressions and observation of daily life, presenting five internal monologues. The installation is based on and re-designed from a “Crankie Box”, a traditional animation box. On My Tail intends to let the viewers fall into a loop with no beginning and end.

During HOOGTIJ you can visit more than 20 locations in the inner-city of The Hague: from white cube to underground; from established art in galleries and institutions to installations and performances in artists initiatives.

About Zoe Yeh

Yeh’s curatorial and research practice focuses on the shifting power dynamics and spatial allocations within urban society. Through creative interventions and field-researches, she explores contemporary interpretations of place and locality. She leads the Hong-Gah Museum’s long-term community-based initiatives, utilizing art as a participatory tool to engage the local community and deepen cultural education and site-specific curatorial experimentation. Yeh is also deeply engaged in the fields of moving image and has curated numerous solo exhibitions for emerging artists, with a particular interest in cross-disciplinary practices and experimental narrative strategies. In 2023, she co-curated the Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition: Living-Togetherness with curator Shih-yu Hsu, further promoting dialogue and collaboration between Taiwan’s video art scene and international platforms. Yeh previously served as a curatorial assistant at the Art Tower Mito in Japan and was a board member of the artist-run space Polymer.

About Hong-Gah Museum

Hong-Gah Museum was formally opened to the public in 1999. With exhibitions, campaigns, and interdisciplinary performances, amongst others, the museum provides an art appreciation venue of quality as well as sows seeds of art for the local community. Having opened for more than 20 years, the museum received its membership as one of the Local Cultural Museums of the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture in 2023. Furthermore, the museum has been recognized many times with “Arts & Business Awards” and “Taipei Culture Award”. Hong-Gah Museum has long been devoting itself to educational courses and lectures to promote aesthetic education in the community. It serves as a platform for the showcase of contemporary art via regular themed events such as the biennale Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition and solo exhibitions of artists from home and abroad. The Hong-Gah Museum expects itself to be the starting point of profound art cultivation, through the promotion of community culture, elevating the spiritual life of the public, and ultimately demonstrating the local community’s cultural landscape in warmth and humanity.

This collaboration was kindly initiated and supported by the Taiwanese Cultural Center in Paris (CCTP).