Text/ Li Cheng-Liang
How do we construct our own lives? How do we prepare for the journey ahead? And how do we discover effective ways to rest?? These significant life matters, which we navigate over the course of several decades, often leave us flummoxed. The exhibition, 'The Next Stop at 10 Thousand Year Station,' resembles scattered scenes from a road movie, where the script was originally supposed to be a straightforward acceleration, but continually encounters bizarre landscapes. It encompasses the rebellion of cyberpunk, images of apocalypse and ruins, and glimpses into the repetitive and mundane aspects of everyday life.
As visitors step inside, they are enveloped in an experience reminiscent of driving alone on winding mountain roads in the dead of night, with bright road signs flashing by in the headlights. The initial sensation of weightlessness and speed gradually transforms as they meticulously examine material objects and handcrafted traces encountered along the way.
In this exhibition space, whether you're racing forward or strolling leisurely, moving ahead or changing course, lying down or drifting, eating a hamburger or sipping a cola, you are cordially invited to come and explore.
Exhibition sponsor: Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government & National Cultural and Arts Foundation.
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Text/ Chen, Sung-Chih.
Li Cheng-Liang's works, with their seemingly heavy and desolate imagery, reveal to us the shared past of a generation, permeated with a sense of post-apocalyptic anticipation. The artist goes against the grain in this technology-driven media age by using his handmade traces to enhance the blending of form, also connecting the anxieties of the human and the mechanical, signaling a turn away from modernity, cleanliness, and fashion. Through the meticulous details integrated into these fictional objects, the artist disrupts our conventional understanding of consciousness, provoking self-awareness and reflection.
''Next Stop of Ten Thousand Years Station'' is an artificial place with dramatic tension. Li Cheng-Liang uses a nocturnal road trip as a metaphor in the exhibition space, guiding the audience to wander in a curious sensory experience. With limited light and changing car speeds, the continuously rolling images before us create a disordered expansive experience, wandering amidst immense darkness.
The artist intentionally relinquishes narrative dominance, transforming all processes and construction actions into fragmented memories, turning them into visual patterns of destruction and regeneration, thus becoming a part of the reconstruction of the private and public domain. In the artificial scenes he constructs, these foreign realms transcend belonging in reality, evoking human curiosity. When the space's incidental disturbances, sounds, lights, or the movements of people synchronously pierce through moments of stillness, those within it become actively engaged in a fleeting moment that will never return, igniting a profound sense of human existence.