“Big Vases and the Exotic Landscapes” is represented in “SUNDAY: Contemporary Art on Migrant Workers in Taiwan” at Tainan Art Museum

It is interesting to note that since ancient times, vases have carried images of exotic landscapes. However, for migrants who work and live away from home, landscapes are not only regional customs and sceneries, but also project their aspirations for their home towns or future lives. It could be said that the landscapes that migrants see are not fixed perspectives, but have different variations and meanings as they move along their own trajectories.

Lo Yi Chun (1985-) has been concerned with the living conditions of migrants in Taiwan since 2018. She has met and got to know migrants in various parks in Taipei through spontaneous projects, establishing exchanges and connections through chatting, sharing food, and beach-cleaning activities. These interactions have led to the creation of the ‘Taste of the Ocean’ series (2018), which uses banana peels to create portraits and stories of migrants, and ‘Big Vases and exotic Landscapes’ (2019-2024), which depicts migrants’ hometowns in sea waste. In 2024, Lo expanded her “Big Vases and the exotic Landscapes” project to Tainan, joining Indonesian migrants at the An-Ping beach clean-up site and collecting sea waste with them to create the vase installation for the exhibition.

SUNDAY: Contemporary Art on Migrant Workers in Taiwan

The exhibition, SUNDAY: Contemporary Art on Migrant Workers in Taiwan, explores the lives of migrant workers beyond their role as laborers. Their holiday life (often on Sundays) is seen as a symbol of freedom and serves as a “loophole” of the labor system, whereby they can catch a breath amid the busy work and temporarily forget about it to regain control of their time. The title “SUNDAY” symbolizes not only their free time but also their hopes and aspirations for the future.

By inviting migrant workers and Taiwanese and foreign artists from diverse backgrounds, the Tainan Art Museum (TAM) presents issues surrounding migrant labor through contemporary art. With subthemes of “Flavors of Migration”, “Trajectory of Flight”, and “Southern Breeze in the Sunlight”, the exhibition reveals different aspects of migrant workers that are less known to the public through life experience observations, monologues, translation, exchange and collaboration, along with other creative processes. The exhibition intends to prompt visitors to reflect on the diverse emotional states that are hidden beneath complex situations, with migrant workers as the subject. They can then proceed to recognize the importance of mutual respect in a shared life community and realize that differences and similarities do exist simultaneously in the contemporary world.

Venue: Tainan Art Museum
From December 19, 2024 till April 13, 2025
For more information: https://www.tnam.museum/exhibition/detail/567