Island c: At the Edge of Limulus' Replisome: Inner Ocean from Prehistory
Shih-Yu Hsu + Jui-Lan Yao
From 2020 to 2023, during the pandemic, the world experienced isolation and lockdowns, and the horseshoe crab has been the biggest backup for the now four-year war against the virus.
The value of their blue blood has soared, but this has also accelerated the horseshoe crab's path toward extinction. Until they met human beings, they knew no natural enemy. The open circulatory cavity of the horseshoe crab seems to be a battlefield entangled with many issues, but the main subjectivity of the horseshoe crab is absent: due to the sensitive immunocoagulation mechanism[1] of the horseshoe crab, the crab is able to replace rabbits as a source of highly efficient biomaterial for medical reagents, and opens up a "blue ocean" of business opportunities. Due to the “time lag” of military and political “imagined communities,” Kinmen islands were displaced in time and are sparsely visited, so they retain the intact intertidal ecosystem of the horseshoe crab. Recently, the opening up of the coastline and its development, the number of horseshoe crabs has been reduced dramatically. The alternative to Tachypleus/Limulus amebocyte lysate (the reagent extracted from the horseshoe crab), “Recombinant Factor C" (rFC)[2], is restricted by pharmacopoeial regulations and cannot be implemented in the medical field widely. Therefore, we still need to extract the expensive and scarce "new fresh blood" (from the horseshoe crab) in depleted intertidal zone.
Continuing with the project“ The FEELed Walk " (Project System of Conductors, 2023), this presentation will lead participants to follow the “veinless vein” to the coagulation protein spiral that has long been intertwined with the ocean, and to gaze at the cross-species historical boundary of reorganization and replication[3].
[1] The coagulation mechanism of the horseshoe crab comes from its open circulatory system, where blood mixes with all tissue fluids and is at higher risk of infection. As a result, they have evolved a sensitive immunocoagulation mechanism that prevents bacterial invasion and allows them to survive across time and space in marine environments.
[2] rFC is a replisome protein that can be an alternative to Tachypleus/Limulus amebocyte lysate extracted from the horseshoe crab. The activation of rFC by LPS will trigger purple fluorescence with a wavelength of 380-440 nm, and studies as of 2018 have shown it to be no less effective than horseshoe crab amebocyte lysate (the reagent extracted from the horseshoe crab).
[3] Genetic engineering is a viable alternative to the controversial biomedical medicine industry by reassembling, replicating, and synthesizing molecular machinery to extract a small fragment of the horseshoe crab's blood.
WORKSHOP- Inner Sea, Blue Sea, Repli-story
As part of the “System of Conductors” that has been ongoing for over a year, curator Shih-yu Hsu and artist Jui-Lan Yao will lead participants to understand why the horseshoe crabs living in the Kinmen area of Taiwan have once again become the central focus of human beings in the midst of the pandemic. At the same time, they will show a video of their ongoing work, Replisome out of the Blue (tentative title), and lead participants to reimagine the possibilities of establishing value systems collectively.
The construction of "value system" is often a dynamic process involving negotiation, lobbying and consensus building, and the ecological context of horseshoe crab reflects this battleground of competing values. The open body cavity has evolved a sensitive immune mechanism, which positions the horseshoe crab in the space between human medical needs and shoreline development and conservation. This event is expected to loosen the clusters of value structures by using the “horseshoe crab” as a guide, and to reconsctruct the narrative by using the notion of “commons” as a way to find possible solutions to the social symptoms.
Time: MAY 4, 2024（Sat.）17:00－18:30
Venue: Galley E (B2)
Online Pre-registration is required and begins on APR 20 (Sast.) 10:00 AM.
- Number of participants: 15.
- Participating in the event is free of charge. Please purchase an ordinary TFAM visitor's tichet when entering the museum.
- In the case of changes on the event schedule, information on the official website shall prevail.
Shih-Yu Hsu
Shih-Yu Hsu is an independent researcher and writer. She has been a member of the study group lám-nuā since 2021. She graduated from Communication Engineering and Visual Art Administration at National Central University in Taiwan and New York University. Her research field includes image, media and new material feminism. She co-founded bi-lingual online media art platform SCREEN in 2015 and was the executive assistant of Taiwan Pavilion in Venice Biennale 2017. She was the curator at Taipei Contemporary Art Center in 2018-2021. Her writing on art has been published on several publications including Artforum.cn, Artist Magazine, Art Investment, Leap, No Man’s Land and Yishu. She is also the co-curator of the 8th Taiwan International Video Art exhibition.
Jui-Lan Yao
Jui-Lan Yao (b.1989), artist based in Taiwan, Taipei. B.D. in Painting and Calligraphy, National Taiwan University of Arts, M.F.A in New Media, Taipei National University of the Arts. She went to the Bourges College of Fine Arts in France as an exchange student (2013). Her works are mainly based on traditional training in calligraphy and painting, as well as on interactive technology, relational aesthetics and electronics. Her recent interests focus on technical material and metaphoric behind technology development. She held the art project “System of Conductors” in C-LAB CREATORS residency project (2023). And her artist in residence experience includes Peripheralized People: Solastalgia between Taiwan and Nepal III, (NexUs Culture Nepal, Kathmandu, 2019), and STUPIN.ORG (Taipei International Art Village, 2017). Her artwork was selected and exhibited in the Taiwan Biennial (2020). Her creations often cooperate with local open source community.
[Commoning 1]
A Sea of Islands: Networked Art Communities in Our Time
Launched in 2017, Nusantara Archive was originally conceived as a framework and methodology for regional decolonization. The word "Nusantara" is a combination of the Sanskrit words "nusa" (island) and "antara" (outer), referring to the vision of the Malay Archipelago (including Southern Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Borneo, the Indonesian Archipelago, and the Southern Philippines), where Malay is the lingua franca. Given the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global art ecosystem in 2020, our initial plans for art residency exchanges between Taiwan and Southeast Asia have also undergone changes. We have begun to shift our attention towards local communities as well as to think through the agency of technological media in the practice of art community, further internalizing the metaphor of the "island" into the reterritorialization of regional networks.
During the post-pandemic community activities on-site, we will invoke Epeli Hau'ofa's theory of the Pacific islands by replacing the notion of "islands in a far sea" with "a sea of islands", and experiment with a mode of decentralized collaboration specific to art communities. With this conceptual shift, the exhibition reflects on its own post/re-colonial situation from the perspective of the sea. Simultaneously, it connects the genealogy of actual islands such as Malaysian islands, Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, and Austronesia along with historical “Nanyang” (South Sea), with individual islands serving as metaphorical landmarks. This aims to expand the Nusantara Archive residency project both before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. The five consecutive weekends consist of a lecture performance, screenings, discussions, workshops and a music party carried out by five groups of artists and curators. It is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal dynamics and multi-scalar perspectives of the "Sea of Islands" that are not confined by the linear time of progress.
Through the spatial metaphor of the "ocean" as a technology of the sensible that connects the "non-homogeneous" islands, we invite you to reflect with us on the practice of networked commons that art communities have not been able to carry out due to language barriers, technological limitations, and other factors. Finally, by curating a special features on the online Modern Art+ and special screenings, we will create memory landmarks for each week's activities.
Reference：
l “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 148-161, 1994.
l “The Ocean in Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10 (2): 392-410, 1998
l ISSUE 52: Archipelago Futurism?「群島未來主義？」Jun 2022
Concept Development
Rikey Tenn／Curator
Rikey Tenn is the founder of the Nusantara Archive Project (since 2017), which is based on the shared history of Taiwan and Southeast Asia and its decolonization process. He initiated and co-organized the workshop Nusantara in Future Tense with Singaporean artist collective soft/WALL/studs in 2020. As a researcher, he was involved in The Secret South (curator: Nobuo Takamori) in 2020, as part of which he presented the Nusantara Archive (archive f) His most recent collaborative project, A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe, (the first year) is a CREATORS creative/Support Program initiated by C-LAB in 2022.
Spatial Design
Wu Chi-Yu／Co-curator
Based in Taipei, Wu Chi-Yu (b. 1986) is a multimedia artist whose works include film, video installation, and photography. He delves into the lost and unestablished links among species, environment, and the technology that constructs human civilization, exploring the complex historical geography of Asia and the interdependence of various beings through multiple narratives. His works have been exhibited and screened at Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2021); MoCA, Taipei (2020); 2018 Shanghai Biennale; 2016 Taipei Biennial; Beijing International Short Film Festival (2017) and was a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2014-2015).
Contact：02-25957656 ext.122