Comments on the Finalist

Au Sow-Yee often employs multiple, complex images that are mutually referencing and overlapping to form jump-cut narratives that deconstruct nationalism and history, through which the artist conveys critiques of rigid national consciousness while exploring individual obscure situations. STILL ALIVE continues this creative context and uses three independent yet interrelated videos and installations, which have Malaysia at their core and are incorporated with elements from Taiwan, Japan and Thailand, to discuss the fluidity and fragmentedness informing the concept of Asian nation-states. The exhibition not only, according to the artist herself, reveals her “spiritual landscape over the past three years,” but also epitomizes the genre of “phantom archives” in contemporary art. (Commentator: KAO Jun-Honn)

Artwork Introduction

STILL ALIVE presents three works created in recent years. Featuring three mysteriously disappeared or deceased figures, who have connected the histories of Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand, the three works are composed and reconstructed with existing image and audio materials found in mass culture to fabricate narratives that indirectly hint at the three figures. In addition to using “cinema as an approach” to expose the fact that history is itself biased or fictitious, Au also aims to reveal the hidden politics in mass culture, such as cinema and pop music. The three seemingly unrelated figures are brought back in this exhibition, and the audience gains the possibility to understand them through the intertextual, intertwining representation, which introduce more imagination about the power network and border deployment during the Cold War while prompting the audience’s re-examination and reflection on the relationship between Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan.

About the Artist

AU Sow-Yee Born in Malaysia and currently living and working in Taipei, Au Sow-Yee’s practice blends video, concept and installation, and mainly focuses on the constructed relation between image and worldview as a way to reflect on image’s conditioning of our imagination and thinking before expanding such examination to the production of image and its relation with history, politics and power. Au was a finalist for both the 2018 Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize and Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona Video Art Award 2018. She is also a guest writer for the online magazine, No Man’s Land, and the co-founder of Kuala Lumpur’s Rumah Attap Library and Collective.