nca | nichido contemporary art

Venue: nca | nichido contemporary art
Date: 2.1 (Sat.) – 3.8 (Sat.) / gallery hours: Tue. – Sat. 11:00 – 19:00 (Closed on Mondays, Sundays and National Holiday)
Opening reception: 2.1 (Sat.) 17:00 ～ 19:00 *The artist will join us for the opening.

nca | nichido contemporary art is pleased to present The House Was Quiet, a solo show by Taiwanese artist Ting-Tong Chang.
Through an artistic practice that ranges from drawing, to performance, sculpture and video art, Chang addresses a variety of issues brought about by the absurd and illogical dynamics of contemporary, consumerist societies - like, for instance, their ecological and societal consequences –. He, then, deconstructs the world surrounding him - history, technology, science and so forth – to fuse it back together through the creation of new narratives.
Marking the artist’s first-ever solo show in Japan, this exhibition features Chang‘ newest video work UZU that utilizes interactive technology and allows the audience to directly engage with the story making process, the mobile game of his own making She, You and Her, and a few pieces from the tapestry and embroidery series.

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The House Was Quiet: Voices From Within.
Fumiwo Iwamoto

I first heard the story of Ting-Tong Chang’s grandmother in autumn 2018. Right before the world was about to be engulfed by the COVID-19 pandemic; we were enjoying a beer while laying on the grass nearby the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea. Apparently his grandmother used to work in a sugar factory back when Taiwan was under the Japanese occupation. From what I gathered eventually through our encounters, the factory had been built in Huwei, in Yulin County, which is in the center of Taiwan, during the Japanese colonial era. Yet, Chang only learnt about this after his grandmother’s passing through memories shared at family reunions. Chang had indeed little chance to hear his grandmother’s tales firsthand when he was little as the possibility of a direct exchange between the two of them was impeded by their generational gap which translated in their speaking different languages: Chang spoke Taiwanese Mandarin the country’s current national language, while his grandmother used a combination of Taiwanese and Japanese.
Chang was four years old (1987) when the martial law under the Kuomintang government was lifted, and he was thirteen years old (1996) when Taiwan held its first free, direct presidential elections marking the end of the single-party system led by the Communist Party. The idea that “history changes” is quiet a familiar concept to Taiwanese people, far more than we can imagine, and it is rather normal for a family to simultaneously count among their members some who might have lived under the Japanese occupation, others who might have experienced the Kuomintang regime or the February 28 Incident (228 Incident) or might have witnessed the country’s economic boom with all the resulting lifestyle changes, or yet might have been active participants of the Sunflower Movement, meaning that there are families who have lived through more than one of these historical events. Talking about “home” (conceived as something that evokes ideas of family, stories of nations and past generations), then, requires “a way of telling” that navigates through all these historical hardships. There is a process that is set in motion by such personal experiences and recollections, which is what this exhibition is made of, an intimate, quite house, and it goes on to connect each of these bits to, for instance, the experiences of others or the stories and different societies they have shaped. And, likewise, the process itself may be representing an act of moving back and forth between different stories, or, we should say, between reality and virtual reality.
Chang’s work explores a wide range of issues, yet, “technology”, “society” and, in that vortex, “human life” seem to be at the chore of his practice. However, when we talk about technology, many are the ways in which it can be employed or showed through an artwork: there are DIY scientific approaches that create kinetic gadgets using everyday items; some works can turn the surrounding space into a pseudo-reality through notions of biology; others make use of programming techniques as it is the case for UZU (2023) and She, You, and Her (2022), featured in this exhibition. The technical features can, sometimes, be visually exposed, while, at others, they are kept completely hidden within the work’s structure.
The peculiarity of Chang’s work (at least for what concerns is most recent endeavors) lies in his looking at such technologies as a mean to weave together these important stories, namely stories of nations, memories of societies and personal experiences. The tapestry series Little Hell (2024-25) presents cultural references to Chang’s generation, simultaneously hinting at the development of Taiwan’s postwar textile industry, its industrialization and resulting lifestyle changes.**
Likewise, both UZU and She, You, and Her are set against a backdrop where eroge (erotic games) and galge (gal games, visual novels based on dating/romance)’s culture of Chang’s generation overlaps with the novel fiction genre of gakuen-mono (youth/ entertainment novels where the story is usually set in a contemporary Japanese high school). Yet, technology here becomes a tool that more than connecting personal stories to aspects of society or historical times, creates a connection to Chang’s attention for the very construction of the narrator as the story teller. Standard visual novels progress through key turning points, unfolding in different directions according to the player's choices. The player leads the narration directing it towards one of the many pre-set endings. In She, You, and Her the presence of a different will from the player’s (some sort of computer bug, we could say) raises the question of who is in charge of the narration; on the other hand, UZU allows multiple players to join simultaneously, which, if we consider the already irregular structure of the game itself, clearly obscures the identity of the main narrator. It goes without saying that while irregular indeed, the way the game progresses has been previously programmed, yet, the most crucial aspect is that the viewer/player would find themselves questioning their role as if indeed a free agent who gave shape to the story through their choices. It is up to the viewer/player to decide whether this can be taken in as some sort of dystopian futuristic experience where humans are being manipulated by technology, or whether this cycle of manipulate-being manipulated can be interpreted as an opportunity to release themselves from the grand narrative ingrained in us all – the illusion of subjectivity and the human-centered perception of the world -, and really open themselves to the ideas and thinking of others.
Through the familiar setting of the visual novel, and kitsch, colorful expressions, the viewer is invited to step into the world of Chang’s artworks, and carefully listen to the safe and seemingly ordinary silence of The House Was Quite and by so doing a circuit is opened leading to all the tiny noises filling the room. The viewer explores experiences and perspectives made possible through the use of technology, employed as a tool to overlap different timeframes and situation. And we are left to wonder what we will see and hear in this room full of Chang’s experiments.

*The exhibition’s title comes from Wallace Stevens’s poem The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm. This poem too that can be interpreted as if depicting a silent summer day, however, different interpretations come to mind if we consider it had been written right after the war.
**With the development of Taiwan’s textile industry in the 1950s, a gradual transition from agriculture to manufacturing occurred followed by a resulting relocation of people from the rural areas and the industrialization of agricultural workers. Taiwan, that deeply relied on raw materials imports, developed, from an early stage, technologies to manufacture synthetic fibers; the synthetic fibers used by Chang for his works on view here share too the same background. Since the 1960s, textile products ranked first as exported goods changing Taiwanese people’s lifestyle while leading the country to a phase of economic growth.
The view of wholesale districts with their colorful, plastic-made items all arranged in lines, an image that comes to mind when thinking of Taiwan, is too the legacy of such history.
Furthermore, America’s aids that boosted the post-war textile industry served also to strengthen the economic ties between these two countries. Eventually from the 80s, we witness a transition from a textile industry built on cheap labor to the electronic industry, forcing many factories to shut down following their business shrinking. Chen Chieh-Jen and Huang Po-Chih represent an example of artists who, through their artistic practice, have been exploring the changes Taiwan’s textile industry went through at that time.

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Ting-Tong Chang
b. 1982, Taiwan. Currently based in Taipei (Taiwan) and Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
2011 MFA in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London
2005 BA in Advertising, National ChengChi University
Main solo shows: There Is Another Captial Beneath the Wave, with Chia Wei Hsu and Hsien Yu Cheng, Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2024) / UZU, Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA), Taipei, Taiwan (2023) / There Is Another Captial Beneath the Wave, with Chia Wei Hsu and Hsien Yu Cheng, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], Yamaguchi, Japan (2023) / BODO, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2023) / Remains for Those Remain, Yiri Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2022) / SOAP, Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE), Taipei, Taiwan (2021) / and others.

Main group shows: Oodaaq Festival, La Parcheminerier, Rennes, France (2024) / Farout Festival, BASE, Milano, Italy (2024) / Anyang Public Art Project, APAP7, Anyang, South Korea (2023) / Imagination, gallery common, Tokyo, Japan (2023) / Telling A Story With You Part 2, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2023) / Festival AVIFF 2023, Variétés cinema, Marseille, France (2023) / Festival Proyector, White Lab, Madrid, Spain (2023) / Verbo Monstra de Porformance Arte, Galleria Vermelho, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2023) / PERFORMING TIME - In Vivo/Ex Situ/In Situ, NULL (U+2205), Lisbon, Portugal (2023) / I Am Another You, You Are Another Me, Art Istanbul Feshane,, Istanbul, Turkey (2023) / Time Flies Over Us But Leaves Its Shadow Behind, Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo, Tokyo, Japan (2023) / Jeju Biennale, Jeju Museum of Art, Jeju City, South Korea (2022) / Storyteller, nca | nichido contemporary art, Tokyo, Japan (2022) / Time Flies Over Us But Leaves Its Shadow Behind, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai, China (2022) / Adaptor, MoCA Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan (2022 ) / Bucharest International Dance Film Festival, Cinema Elvire Popesco, Romania (2022) / Busan International Video Art Festival, Busan, South Korea (2022) / PERFORMING TIME - In Vivo/Ex Situ/In Situ, Flora Chang DTLA, Los Angeles, USA (2022) / Green Routes, CADAN Yurakucho, Tokyo, Japan (2021) / Future Media Festival, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB), Taipei, Taiwan (2021) / and others.