Online Fortune Sticks
2021
wood, bamboo sticks, fortune sticks, CRT TV, moon blocks, altar lamp, altar kneeling pad
Image +
VT Artsalon, Taipei, Taiwan
wood, bamboo sticks, fortune sticks, CRT TV, moon blocks, altar lamp, altar kneeling pad
Image +
VT Artsalon, Taipei, Taiwan
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the anxiety that people feel is not only regional. All human beings have experienced a severe state of hypochondriasis. In the face of this ubiquitous anxiety, we have to internalize worries and fears caused by the disease into our bodies. For the past few months, people have been living in such faint anxiety. In this project, I tried to simulate the worshippers’ prayers or requests for fortunetelling. People would take these actions when they encounter difficulties, feel uneasiness, and have confusion. When asking for fortune poems to solve our puzzles, we are used to meditating our questions in our minds, throwing divination blocks, and drawing fortune sticks. After obtaining the will of God, we follow the always mysterious and inexplicable textual meaning in the poems to coexist with our future selves and adjust our decisions.
In this project, the questioner tried to pass the question to another person in the same obscure and alien space. The artists can’t be certain about the existence, capability, and character of the other party. They tried to upload their confusion in life to the Internet, just like what people have been doing at the temple to convey their inquiries upward to another zone. The Internet system, which has become more significant due to the pandemic, is in fact very similar to the realm of God. There is neither space nor time limit; the sound and color exist but are soundless and colorless at the same time. The artists each hand over their confusion to another artist and expect him to give a fragmented reply of fortune poem. Then they try to resolve it with themselves via multi-media fortune poems composed of various forms. We are not always able to receive the answer from the obscure context of Gods, whereas the doubts from the artists in the exhibition can be pieced together into a kind of poem about the adversity over the pandemic generation. Through each artist’s experimental creation, they achieved a particular fragmented form of reconciliation with the pandemic. When we see this artwork or even other artists’ rules and the resulting products in the exhibition as a whole, we can at least get a little bit of a glimpse into the psychedelic solution under the pandemic anxiety.
In this project, the questioner tried to pass the question to another person in the same obscure and alien space. The artists can’t be certain about the existence, capability, and character of the other party. They tried to upload their confusion in life to the Internet, just like what people have been doing at the temple to convey their inquiries upward to another zone. The Internet system, which has become more significant due to the pandemic, is in fact very similar to the realm of God. There is neither space nor time limit; the sound and color exist but are soundless and colorless at the same time. The artists each hand over their confusion to another artist and expect him to give a fragmented reply of fortune poem. Then they try to resolve it with themselves via multi-media fortune poems composed of various forms. We are not always able to receive the answer from the obscure context of Gods, whereas the doubts from the artists in the exhibition can be pieced together into a kind of poem about the adversity over the pandemic generation. Through each artist’s experimental creation, they achieved a particular fragmented form of reconciliation with the pandemic. When we see this artwork or even other artists’ rules and the resulting products in the exhibition as a whole, we can at least get a little bit of a glimpse into the psychedelic solution under the pandemic anxiety.
Chiu Chih-Wei
Lin Tsu-Fan
Peng Fan-Xiu
Huang Yu-Yang
Lin Tsu-Fan
Peng Fan-Xiu
Huang Yu-Yang
Sung Ming-Yi
Chiu Ling-Chen
Tseng Hsiu-Chen
Chiu Ling-Chen
Tseng Hsiu-Chen
Documentation ：
Ya Hsuan Hsiao