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2018
QUESTION PROJECT
CERTAIN or UNCERTAIN?
BOUNDARY
MING-HSUEH LEE
2018/06/15 - 08/11
CERTAIN or UNCERTAIN?
When a product’s expiration date defines the endpoint of its value, does its influence on consumer judgment and motivation also reflect the blurred state — between certainty and uncertainty in contemporary life?
Boundary
In the Boundary Project, artist Ming-Hsueh Lee and his team spent half a year searching through shops, stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets for products that would expire on the same date as the final day of the exhibition (August 11, 2018). The process was like a game, full of chance, luck, perseverance, and hard work. On the final day of the exhibition, the objects on display would then be returned from being art objects back into everyday commodities. To achieve this, Lee held an 811 Special Meal dinner party, crafting these about-to-expire foods into an elaborate meal for the audience to eat. By consuming objects that had only just ceased to be regarded as works of art, the Boundary Project also asks the audience to reflect upon the culture of consumption in contemporary society — from the production of goods, to the shelf life that comes with their sale, through to the life cycle of these products that are used, discarded and recycled.
Supporting Partner l Panasonic Taiwan
ARTIST
MING-HSUEH LEE
Ming-Hsueh Lee, born 1978, is a professional art creator and a professor at National Taipei University of Education. He received his Ph.D. from the Loughborough University, his master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts, and his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Fine Arts at Tunghai University. He was awarded the first prize at the Taipei Art Awards in 2005. Lee’s work focuses on all kinds of objects in the shops to find underlying meaning within the context of art. He would attempt to re-examine the objects in life through humor, and inspect the various inertial comprehension from the media, education, and social framework. Lee’s national and international exhibitions of note include the Taipei Biennale 2016, Gwangju Biennale 2016, ‘Other Landscape’ in 2012 in Paris, France, and ‘0 & 1: Cyberspace and the Myth of Gender’ in Chongqing, China.
EVENT
Uncertainty Forum
2018.07.21 l Tai-Sung Chen X Tzu-Chieh Jian X Ming-Hsueh Lee l The Uncertainty Forum explored certainty and uncertainty in modern life. It used the qualitative change in value of ready-mades to examine the duality and paradox of value, how expiration dates relate to consumption as well as our definition and understanding of time. The conversation between artists, experts, and scholars drew on re-deconstruction to make the audience look at artworks and products from a new perspective and to rethink their relationship, status, and meaning.
811 Special
2018.08.11 l ARTIST/CHEF: Ming-Hsueh Lee X Tung-Shou Wang l The expiration dates of all the ready-mades/packaged foods exhibited in ‘Boundary – Ming-Hsueh Lee Solo Exhibition’ were August 11th, 2018. On August 11th, the artists put all the food products on display once more for an event named “811 Special.” Artists Ming-Hsueh Lee and Tung-Shuo Wang created a show around food design in which they took the form, structure, as well as identity of food products and reinterpreted them into one delicious dish after another. They invited the audience to taste the food, to consider the current culture of consumption, and to commemorate the last day of the food products’ shelf lives. Through this event, the audience had the opportunity to collect a short-lived work of art in their bodies. Special thanks to our tableware sponsor Leofoo Tourism Group.
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