Text/ Tainan Art Museum
Orientation of Daily Life: A Biopsy of Our Life
In this fast-paced world, work patterns, information explosion and social media frenzy have affected people’s mood in daily lives more than ever.
Thanks to the efforts made by their predecessors in the past with social development, people nowadays have more choices from major issues such as gender identity and relocation to trivia like travelling and basic needs. To continue their life, each person makes countless choices, which can be interpreted using one word: orientation. Here, “orientation” refers to the direction one chooses to move forward, including the roles they play, interactions with others and things they encounter in daily life that involves spatial transition and passing of time.
Daily life “biopsy” implies an approach to interpreting our everyday life and observing daily choices. The time of an individual or group can be divided into slices of different size that formulate their everyday life patterns. Alternatively, like its medical definition an examination of tissue removed from the living body, a “biopsy” of our daily life denotes the process of observing particular trivia in our life physically and mentally to reidentify the characteristics and patterns of daily life.
To each individual, alternating between the public and private spheres shape the major scenes of daily life. Home, representing a private space, is strongly linked to one’s development and affects family members’ personalities, traits and gender roles on a daily basis, during which each member strives to find the value and meaning of their existence. After leaving home, everyone must pass through public spaces including city streets, schools and hospitals and walk by transportation vehicles and even gutter guards, where they stop in or stay for a while––which they take it for granted––before moving to next destination. People’s daily life is an entity comprising trivial persons and things they encounter, which will constantly proceed and accumulate. However, if we separate the said persons and things one by one, we will realize that people’s orientations either statically or dynamically interact with one another, ultimately shaping their perceptions of worldview, meaning of life or lifestyle at the present moment.
Serving as a platform for daily life reinterpretation and self-cognition establishment, this exhibition attempts to connect viewers’ life experiences through visual culture with three subthemes, namely “positioning”, “normality” and “gathering and dispersing”. The tour route on site allows visitors to appreciate the exhibits alternately at different distances and mentally perceive the surrounding physical environment, through which they can examine the roles they play as well as their relationships and interactions with others in daily life. Featuring works created by artists Chen Wan-ling, Chang Teng-yuan, Lai Chih-sheng, Huang Hai-hsin, Su Tsu-han, Yu Shih-fu, Lai Wei-yu, Li Cheng-liang, Wang Yu-song and Shi Meng-hsin regarding their care for and “biopsy” of daily life, the exhibition reveals “daily life orientations” formed in various spaces and times.
