Date｜12.13.2025-04.12.2026
Veune｜Taichung Art Museum
Jointly curated by the Taichung Art Museum curatorial team, Taiwanese curator Ling-Chih Chow, American curator Alaina Claire Feldman, and Romanian-Korean curator Anca Mihuleţ-Kim, A Call of All Beings is conceived as an invitation to communal gathering and collective reflection —a meeting ground where artists, audiences, and the narratives of human and non-human beings across different times and places converge. The exhibition invites visitors to explore the multilayered relationships between humans and the environment through themes such as the histories of flora and fauna, fables and mythologies, migration and movement, and language and storytelling. The exhibition also probes the tension between body and spatial perception, as well as the resilience of the wildness and the agency that persists within systems of rule and domestication.
These inquiries unfold across five interlinked sections: In How to draw a coastline?, artists capture the shifting forms of nature and the world across time, tracing both visible landscapes and inner terrains. In Recalling Fables, artists revisit archives, folklore, and myths as pathways for reimagining our relationship with the world. In The Troubling of Natural Histories, the taxonomies and systems of knowledge that structure natural history and museology are unsettled and reimagined. In Folds and Flows, artists consider how the fundamental dimensions of contemporary existence—space, time, landscape, identity, and remembrance—are multilayered and interpenetrating. Finally, When the World Begins to Speak invites us to listen closely to wounded bodies, displaced memories, repressed emotions, as well as to rivers, animals, and other life forms that elude human language.
About Wu Chi-Yu's series work Stories of Celluloid |
Wu Chi-Yu works with moving image installations to examine fractured connections between technical
objects and environments. The Stories of Celluloid series takes camphor—an essential material in early
celluloid film base—to investigate cinema's past and present in the digital age. In the early twentieth century, Taiwanese camphor was indispensable for celluloid flexibility, an invisible element in image production and an unacknowledged thread in colonial surveys and indigenous wars. The series reconstructs the 1935 Taiwan Exposition's camphor hut exhibit, Fox Film Company's unreleased newsreels, and fragmented forest memories.
Under imperial rule, forests became systematically domesticated into profit-yielding territories. As a major late-nineteenth-century export, camphor embodied colonial economic value—medicinal and industrial, strategic resource and material symbol in visual archives. Yet camphor's foothill habitat became ground for bloodshed and sacrifice. Through images haunted by history, this project revisits historical illusions and forests' submerged, vanished memories.
-Text/Taichung Art Musem
