Comments on the Finalist

“Cold chain” refers to the refrigeration throughout a supply chain to ensure the quality of transported goods, a concept employed by the artist as a metaphor for the control in contemporary society. Cold Chain—Hou I-Ting Solo Exhibition tailgates the issues of art production, trade system, and the artist’s long-term focus on the craft of embroidery and female labor. From the artist’s commission of embroidery works (The First Workshop) made by prisoners working in the self-run workshops of a women’s prison, to the live performance of making embroidery on colonial archival images printed on canvas by recruited participants during the term specified in the exhibition contract (The Second Workshop), to the alternative economy, embodied by street sewing stations in Jakarta, which is excluded by the global economic system, the exhibition reveals a complicated tapestry of various dimensions, ranging from the colonial body discipline, the exchange of labor and wage, the order of globalization, etc., and can be viewed as the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date. (Commentator: Rikey Tenn Bun-Ki)

Artwork Introduction

“Cold Chain” is taken from the terminology of the logistics supply industry. It refers to the contemporary methodical engineering of creating a low temperature environment consistently maintained from raw material suppliers, to processing factories, to storage and transportation for items to remain in good quality during long hours of transportation. The exhibition is divided into three sections in the name of “workshop”: the First Workshop features commissioned works made by the self-employed workshop within a woman’s prison; the Second Workshop displays works created by contracted participants gathered through an open call to create embroidery on archival images of girls’ public schools and schools of home economics for girls during the period of Japanese rule; the Third Workshop revolves around street substitute employees in cities, who have been excluded from the global economic system. With an elaborate and intricate arrangement, the exhibition beckons the social governance in modern times, and explores the interactions built on distribution, value exchange and information communication in a myriad of production relations in human society, from which the artist extends to the production, trade and value conversion in contemporary art systems.

About the Artist

Hou I-Ting was born in Kaohsiung in 1979, and currently lives and works in Taipei. She is known for her digital image and video creations, through which she studies and addresses the relationship between digital image and the body under various social contexts of different historical periods. Her practice engages in topics related to labor production, and aims to discover new connections between traditional crafts and non-traditional production systems through comparison and contrast to reflect on colonial education, total institution, economic production chain, and the realities faced by the female gender in the global order. Hou has exhibited internationally, including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; the Centro Cultural La Moneda, Santiago, Chile; the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Australia; the Centro de Historias, Zaragoza, Spain, etc.