The artists in this exhibition come from a variety of backgrounds: from civil engineering, electro-mechanics, steelworks, to design. Artist Liang Ting-Yu reverses the trend by crossing from art into the realms of cultural history, geology, and animism through his sensate artistic practice. His works are often presented in various and interdisciplinary forms including exhibitions, lecture forums, essays, and public screenings. While the aim of most artistic fieldworks is to seek the boundaries of stories and crevices in the narratives, rather than to produce academic papers, Laing’s essays, which collect and analyze the differences among the viewpoints and thinkings around various ethnic groups, are byproducts generated from the process of the artist organizing his research topics.
Liang’s work in the exhibition, Death Valley, delves into ghost stories that cannot be “produced” by traditional fieldwork through methods of oral narratives and field investigation. The artist combines high chroma colors with negative image effects to make visible the hidden stories. In the vein of the pathways, historical spaces, shifting borders, and intersecting perspectives, and the visualization of intangible subjects embodied in his works creates a contrasting reference to works by other artists in the exhibition.