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2025
CATALYST PROJECT
IF NARRATIVES BECOME THE GREAT FLOOD
LIU YU
2025/01/31 - 02/16
If Narratives Become the Great Flood is a work by artist LIU Yu, commissioned in 2020 by the Hong Foundation’s the Question project. In 2025, with continued support from the Hong Foundation, the work was exhibited at the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. The 2025 edition of the festival was themed Docs: Images and Records, exploring the fundamental role of images in documenting reality. The exhibition critically examined the ways in which technological advancements have increasingly blurred the boundaries between the real and the virtual, leading to a state of ambiguity. If Narratives Become the Great Flood was a key work in the basement-level thematic exhibition Images, Words, Mythologies.
The multi-channel projection installation If Narratives Become the Great Flood integrates video, text, and clay figures to articulate the artist’s reflections on the myth of the Great Flood. Spanning 254 ethnic groups and 84 linguistic regions, this myth—centered on a world-ending deluge and the origins of humankind—constitutes a shared narrative among diverse ancestral traditions.
The sound composition in this work is a collaboration with percussionist Sayun Chang, of Taroko-Hakka heritage, and indigenous students from Taishin Elementary School in Miaoli’s Taian Township. Through contemporary scripts, spoken-word recitations, and video installation, the myth is disentangled from a specific historical time and place, re-emerging in fluid, interwoven forms across different media. The work not only captures the shifting textures of shared consciousness but also offers an alternative narrative thread—one that draws from ancient mythological structures, running parallel to contemporary linear storytelling.
Still from Exhibition, TOP 30th Anniversary: Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025: Docs: Images and Records
Courtesy of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Cover: Arai Takaaki
Photo 1. 2. 3: Arai Takaaki
Photo 4. 5: Nakagawa Shu
ARTIST
LIU YU
Liu Yu was born in 1985 and is currently engaged in artistic creation. Beginning in 2014, she began to gradually develop a creation method in the vein of field-work documentation. Liu produced a series of works focusing on marginalized communities within the social structure, setting the existence of these groups against the current social or historical situation. Her works involve a variety of raw images and the reorganization of a large number of field surveys and reference material into her own unique creations. Solo exhibitions include 'Cabinet of curiosities' (Absolute Space for the Arts, Tainan, 2021)‘The history of the concave and the convex’ (Hong-gah Musuem, Taipei, 2018); ‘Several Ways to Believe’ (Taiwan Academy, Los Angeles, 2017); and ‘The ship of fools mooring’ at the train station (Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei, 2016).
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