Supervising | Ministry of Culture, T-content, Tainan City Government
Curated | Dongyi Art Design Studio
Organized | Tainan Art Museum,Dongyi Art Design Studio
Co-organized | Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto
Co-produced | Kumamoto City Art and Culture Promotion Foundation
Special Thanks | Japan–Taiwan Exchange Association, Kaohsiung Office
Sponsor | YI YUN ART LTD.
(Text/ Huang De-Xin)
“Twin Cities Project: Tainan × Kumamoto Taiwan Contemporary Art RelayExhibition” is a transnational art project that unfolds with cities as its nodes and timeas its axis. Through the movement of and responses between works in different cities, the exhibition forms a continuously extending narrative path, allowing creations to continuously accumulate new meanings within multiple spaces and viewing relationships. The project launches from Tainan, opening with a group exhibition of three artists at the Tainan Art Museum, and will move to Kumamoto in 2027 where solo exhibitions by the three artists will further deepen cross-city artistic dialogue.
Both Tainan and Kumamoto are cities woven from multiple historical layers. Tainan flows slowly between historical sites and daily life, while Kumamoto reveals a rhythm of rupture and repair within post-earthquake reconstruction and urban structures. Neither city is defined by a static history; rather, they generate contemporary forms amidst continuous change. Within this context, memory exists not only in space but also extends into digital images and individual perceptions, resulting in a state of fluidity and reconfiguration of both time and the self.
This exhibition invites three artists, Yang Mao-lin, Lin Hong-wen, and Chang Ling, to respond to contemporary conditions from the perspectives of cultural hybridity, existential perception, and the structure of the real and the virtual, respectively. Through the creations of these three, the exhibition presents the fluidity of identity, the accumulation of perception, and the reconstruction of reality, inviting viewers into a reconsideration of the self and the world.
Through the translation and fluidity of art between the two cities, this project redefines viewing as no longer merely a momentary experience, but an ongoing cultural practice.
About Yang Mao-Lin |
Between Myth and Hybrid Worlds, Summoning the Will of Identity.
Yang Mao-lin’s creations are established within a field where multiple cultural vocabularies intersect. Animals, heroes, manga characters, and mythological figures permeate one another within his frames, keeping the works in a state that is always difficult to define by a single cultural system. This visual strategy corresponds to the practice of cultural hybridisation: culture does not originate from a single source but generates new languages and systems through constant collision, translation, and restructuring, highlighting an important proposition: the question of “Who am I?”
When cultural memory no longer operates along a single path and identity continuously deforms under multiple influences, such an assemblage of heterogeneous symbols instead corresponds to the precisely fluid state of subjectivity,allowing the complexity and plurality of identity to be materialized. Amidst the visual tension where the familiar and the unfamiliar coexist, the self is no longer a fixed label but a dynamic existence that is constantly summoned and repeatedly generated within cultural intersections.
