Wisp

The feeling of being abandoned to a rapidly changing society. On a small island with increasingly limited habitable landmass. Where still tender memories of a colonial history co-exist alongside the products of self-determination. These and more have long been the reality for the shrinking indigenous peoples of Taiwan. From changes coming from within their own family histories, to the increasingly delineated nature of their cultural environments, they are poised to inherit and preserve what can only be hesitantly called a culture of their making. Still, these unavoidable encounters not only present the complexity and feasibility towards an indigenous maintaining their “ownness”, but they go further to define, mark and, ultimately, make available an image of Taiwan, itself contested as being “itself”. 

From a mother’s imagination of her, then unborn, child, into a spiritual offering to a recently deceased grandfather, something both urgent and contemplative is revealed, namely how the past and future generations might gather and act out within introspection. An interiority of the subject to oppose the strict externality of “a people”, or to treat ethnic histories as the contaminated diversities that they always have been, that is part preservation, reconstruction, misinterpretation, partially present and forever precarious.

FOGSTAND is pleased to invite you to Wisp, a solo exhibition by Wen-Li Chen. This exhibition, utilizing a curated collection of new and previous projects (The Distance Between, Island, To My Unborn Child), is prompted by simultaneously being a part of and apart from what she calls a “dying nation”, namely a Taiwanese indigenous people named the Kavalan. Much of her creative output is both informed by and aims to produce a sense of the uncertainty in losing a grasp over one’s heritage.