He said, “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!” When the universe was flipped upside down, time started to fall. He raised his finger gun and shot down a sky full of wishes from a starless night. In the night sweat of a hot daydream, reality got thinner the more it knocked, crumbling and crumbling into salt, until it covered the ground around my little toe. He said, “The future is no longer my concern.” He said that he himself was an introverted fly rubbing his hands together, staring at the shadow of a mosquito biting someone’s soul. The shadow slowly lengthened, and he stared at it for a long time, thinking someone was living inside. Finally, one day he let go of his own shadow, grew wings, grew feet, and “whoosh…whoosh…whoosh…” flew away with time, saying, “See you in the future.”
“Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!” Weaving a blanket of fallen wishes, he said, “Sleep is the most practical way to harm time.” We switch our bodies to silent mode, cover ourselves with blankets, and receive calls from comets, and so we come to understand the universe best.
“Call from Comet” is a story of three plant gatherers who make their own liqueurs. They are Dawan Katjadrepan, a Paiwan tribal leader in Taitung, Taiwan, and her dream-inspired millet wine; Patient Number 7 from the “500 Lemon Trees” project, who concocts limoncello; and a mezcal maker from the city of San Baltazar Chichicapam in Oaxaca, Mexico. Presented through a variety of media, including photographs, text, video and objects, this exhibition tells of their dream worlds and their waking daydreams; it ponders alcohol as a form of self-consumption/healing and a transparent currency to pay for detouring around reality.
Huang Po-Chih was born 1980 in Taoyuan, currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. He completed his studies at the Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan in 2011. Most of his diverse artistic practices are long-term projects, and as the projects progress, a new story is added to the previous narrative that revolves around the circumstances and history of his family which enable him to be involved in issues like agriculture, manufacturing, production, consumption, etc. Since 2013, exhibitions of his continuous art project Five Hundred Lemon Trees have been transformed to a crowd-funding platform allowing the appropriation of artistic resources for developing an agricultural brand, activating fallow farmland, and growing lemon trees for lemon liquor. On the other hand, the project has connected his family members, local farmers and consumers to make a new social relationship possible. In the same year, he published his first collection of essays Blue Skin: My Mother’s Story, the story about his mother. In a way, such a brief account of personal history can somehow reflect Taiwan's agriculture economic reform and social change over the past fifty years, which is essentially, a micro-level of observing his family history and society as a whole in Taiwan.
Huang Po-Chin received the grand prize of Taipei Arts Award in 2013, was nominated HUGO BOSS Asia arts Award in 2015 and received Prudential Eye Awards in 2016. Huang participated in Taipei Biennale in 2014 and 2016 and has been exhibited internationally including the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in China in 2014, Performa 19 in New York in 2019, Busan Biennale in Korea in 2020, the 8th Yokohama Triennale in Japan in 2024, also many group exhibitions in museums, e.g., the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, CHAT in Hong Kong, the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wie (mumok) in Vienna, and the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
