“Lost in these imaginary illusions, I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted. For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator.” 

 Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

Winner of the Grand Prize at the “Taipei Art Awards 2017” with Hualien White Lighthouse, Yu-Song Wang has in recent years focused his artistic practices on exploring the contextual evolution of a given space, and reflecting on the perceptions, feelings and sensations aroused as one moves through different timelines at a specific site. For his solo exhibition at the TFAM, he has created a completely new site-specific installation, Garden, which consists of a model of the here and now, using machinery and principles of mechanics to show that all things exist and function autonomously from subjective minds. As the viewers wander around the gallery, they ramble through the scenes of their imagination, between the visible and the invisible, between the discernible and the indiscernible, touching on the blurry boundary between perception and cognition. Their experience is reminiscent of that of the artist as he conducted the field investigations for this project. Wang sought to put together clues about the past by reading historical materials, just like an archeologist or a historical researcher who, during the process of excavation and detailed research and with the aid of excavated objects, strives to imagine events that unfolded over a given period of time in the past. Perhaps we will never get to the “then”. It’s like the protagonist in The Castle by Franz Kafka, a land surveyor, who tried to get closer to the heart of the castle but never succeeded; however, he didn’t get farther away from it either.

For Yu-Song Wang, the maze is inside our brain, and although all objects have an objective existence, their “rhythm” changes as a human brain has a different sense of time. The rolling balls in the gallery are both the inside of a space and the outside of an object. The viewer’s body wanders, sometimes slowly sometimes quickly, through the outside spaces that he or she imagines. The contextual traces of the balls, all in different materials and seemingly without connection, are brought together in a montage thanks to the artist’s field investigations. With Garden, the artist ponders on the state which is similar to that described by Borges: “I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars.”

Special thanks to Yiri Arts for its support in the production of this work.