Mile End is the name of a place located in the East End of London, which means "one mile from a small village". If you pick up your smartphone and search for East End, the internet will tell you that it is home to a large number of poor people and immigrants, with a burgeoning population, overcrowding, and unemployment problems. If you search for Mile End, in addition to the geographic information, the internet will give you a song by Pulp, singing about living nowhere and going nowhere with a lilting beat... Oh, everything sucks! It means finding motivation in alienation and chaos or turning to the paralysis of comfort, a bit like the sharp dances that swept Europe's youth in the last century.
Mile End is an exhibition about the works sampled by and the world presented by three artists. The artist Harold Linker creates large scale paintings that reassemble the symbols of popular culture, presenting overconsumption and spiritual exhaustion in a virtual mash-up of suburban landscapes. As an oboe player, video performer, and director, Artist Huang Ya-Nung also has a lot of exile experience of traveling in foreign countries and creates works with a sense of intimacy that is different from localization, yet grounded. He is considering sound and video as a kind of heterogeneous intervention, such as playing oboe at a church mass in Europe, dancing with the elderly in a small village in Japan, or adding electronic synthesizers in an old house for an interactive sound performance. Unlike Linker's use of symbolic sampling in his paintings, Huang Ya-Nung tends to experience and collect through the body. Liu Yao-Chung's works often distill different texts into a single paragraph, which becomes the entry point between the images and the sound of both.
Here, I would like to translate Mile End as "the end of a mile". In a way, creation is a means of reconstructing life, trying to break out of the known, and moving forward with anticipation or dissatisfaction. When Mile End is the name of a place, indicating the distance of a mile away from a small village, when you are driving toward the suburb, is it a vacation or an escape? What awaits at the end?
Participating Artists｜
Huang Ya-Nung
Harold Linker