Calendar

Venue:
MZIN
Museum der bildenden Künste, Katharinenstrasse 10
04109 Leipzig



How is a tourist attraction created? Who determines the representative views of scenic spots? Is there a proper way of seeing when visiting scenic places? In a country like Taiwan, with its complex history of colonial rule under various nations, all attractions/scenes/views can be traced back to the “causes” from its colonized past. However, whose views are actualized? Is the imagined geography of the other becoming a visual reality for us?

The Eight Views of Taiwan—From Forming the Scenic Spots to Actualizing an Imagined Geography is a curatorial project that utilizes publication as a multifaceted narrative medium. Themed “the Eight Views of Taiwan,” this project not only focuses on the formation of “Eight Views” (八景) through the interweaving of cultural images from East Asia, but also frames these transformations geographically in relation to Taiwan’s colonial background, pictorial production, and historical progress. To explore publication as a curatorial space, the views recontextualize source materials from a range of print productions — government-issued postcards, magazines, anthropological reports, travel advertisements, and catalogues of artworks. As a new platform for spectatorship, this publication aims to produce a thematic pictorial narrative system in which a revision of interdisciplinary pictorial archives can be reformed.