So Yo-hen

An in-depth documentary on the reclusive Taiwanese artist Huang Hua-Cheng and his avant-garde legacy. Commissioned by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the retrospective exhibition: “An Open Ending: Huang Hua-Cheng” (2020).

Two Indonesian poets meet at Tainan Park, using daytime experiences to craft poetry. Inspired by encounters and emotions, their creations take shape through night-time chanting, imagination, and action. Taman-taman (Park) unfolds a journey resembling an ancient fable, with untold stories hidden in the endless night. The storytellers become integral parts of the narratives as well.

One after another, female Vietnamese laborers arrive, suitcases in hand, at a dormitory from another dimension, cluttered with bunk beds and clothes. Here, they exchange their experiences, culminating in a unique upheaval.

H is a migrant worker from Indonesia like wandering around and he already ran away for over a year. He built a temporary hut on his ex-employer’s farmland. He took his friend R in the shelter who ran away from metal processing factory and almost got caught when working in a tea plantation. Because of that R rarely steps outside the hut. Tonight, H receives a phone call from his friend T. She said she runs away from fruit processing factory and will come over with her friend B who also ran away from the auto-parts factory. Later the night, run away housekeeper E and D who run away from screw factory appear in the hut. In the same night, the hut of H already becomes well-known.

Originally written by HUANG Hua-cheng in 1966, the script centres on the dialogue between a couple sitting in the audience of a play. 51 years later, original actors CHUANG Ling and LIU Ying-shang are invited back to the theatre to recreate the groundbreaking original.

Suthat, a young man from the northeastern part of Thailand, has worked in Taiwan for six years. He does not aim to save money, nor does he have any plans for the future. He has just moved to Taichung. Four months ago, he visited the ASEAN Square for the first time. It was in a Thai disco club that he met the film crew that was scouting locations and looking for materials for a production to be shown in a group exhibition at MoCA Taipei in May. For reasons unknown, the film crew invited Suthat to join the film. That day, Suthat came to the ASEAN Square to celebrate the Songkran festival with his friends. During the past four months, he has made quite a few friends; and today, the film crew with a Thai interpreter became his new friends.

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A man who has died from burning himself comes to a paper house, where Golden Boy and Jade Lady await to take him to the Western Paradise. He climbs up to the Hua-Shan-Qiang, and his soul goes through a fable of national identity.

"The Chair" comes from an idea I had when I was little. I went outside to collect a lot of discarded cables and stealthily pulled out Mercedes-Benz badge from a Benz car. Later, I went home and put the chair upside down, decorating it with cables and the badge. I sat in the chair for a whole night. At that moment I believed that I had made a time machine. The event has been hovering around my mind for a long time. The desire of being an artist perfectly motivates me to do this work again. The chair may be a real time machine. At least through the process of reproduction, it connects my childhood and the present. By means of being positioned as an art work, the trip from my studio to the gallery literally becomes my time travel in reality. In this work, I am always interested in the part of A-side. In fact, it is the making of C-side, which comprises barren routine and unnecessary events. I want this kind of boring video.

31st August 2017, Nguyễn Quốc Phi, a Vietnamese undocumented runaway foreign worker, got nine shots by the police, who claimed he resisted arrest and he couldn’t be stopped by pepper spray or truncheon. Since there’s no CCTV footage nor testimony from Nguyễn, the film was made according to the police report’s perspective and therefore only visualizing two police officers fighting with thin air.

Jun. 2nd, 2013, Nalam, an Indonesian undocumented foreign worker misheard the police from “donʼt run” to “take a photo”. And later arrested after taking photo with the undercover officers. It was shortly reported as a hilarious news. What if we invited three Vietnamese martial art masters as Nalam, and if he escaped from assaulting the police?

We found Ishikawa's sketching route by following the 1909 travelogue of Kinyichiro Ishikawa's "Tataga's Memories" (タッタカの思出): the Nantou mountainous area was once a battleground for the aboriginal people and the Japanese army, and because of the need to contact the farm for filming, we learned that in 2016, the Meifeng Farm in Taichung University accidentally discovered the site of the garrison in the park, and so we decided to take the members of the Southern Art Association and their friends to go there and make a two-day and one-night sketching tour. The trip was a two-day, one-night sketching tour. For this sketching trip after 110 years, a few young Sedgwick men working at NTU's Mountain Experimental Farm cleaned up fallen trees and weeds in the park after the typhoon, and worked continuously in the forest, waiting for the upcoming team of painters and a team of photographers.

Theater Quarterly leapt on stage in 1965 with a literal bang by breaking a fragile plaster gong and the performance of two absurdist theatre pieces, The Prophet and Waiting for Godot. This film interviews those involved in the performance and recreates the plaster gong while weaving in archival footage.