Lonely Planet Taiwan
2013
Mixed
media installation (vinyl letters, mounted prints, framed pages and video installation)
After
researching through a number of English written tour guides of Taiwan, artist
Ting-Ting Cheng applied the five editions written by Robert Storey from Lonely
Planet between 1987 – 2001 in the project, and compared the subtle changes
through time to explore the transformation of the society, identity and
politics of Taiwan, and the oscillating relationship between the West and the
East, exploring her own identity through the perspective of the other.
Who is
Robert Storey? The vinyl texts on the wall were extracted from the Lonely
Planet books, not only signaling the hidden “authenticity” behind the
“knowledge” provided towards the East/foreign cultures, but also questioning
his role of being the representation of the Asianess.
As an
outcome of the tour guides, in the video, Cheng collected clips from Youtube of
foreign tourists having snake cuisines in the famous tourist spot – Snake Alley
in Taipei, combined with her voice over, reading the texts introducing Snake
Alley in the tour guides from 1981 to 2011 chronologically.
Continuing
Cheng’s interests in the perspectives towards the foreign cultures, and the way
they were represented by mass media, this is the artist’s first project
applying her own country, Taiwan, as the subject, hoping to find out how Taiwan
is viewed and filtered by the context, and question the concept of tourism,
exoticism and speculation in a broader genre.
在一系列對於英文台灣旅遊書籍的研究後，藝術家鄭亭亭利用於1987年至2001年間，美國作家Robert Storey為Lonely Planet所著的五個版本作為主要的元素，藉由比較文字之間微妙的修正，來探討台灣社會、身份和政治上的改變，以及國際上東/西方敏感的關係，並以他者的觀點來思考自我的定位。
誰是Robert Storey？在牆壁上的文字介紹來自於Lonely Planet的作者簡介，不僅點出這個隱藏在我們在日常生活中所面對，對於異文化的“知識”背後的“權威”，也同時質疑他在代表“亞洲”上所扮演的角色。
作為這樣文化媒介化的結果，在錄像作品中，鄭亭亭從Youtube收集外國遊客在台北華西街品嘗蛇料理的影片，聲音的部份是從1981年至2011年間的英文旅遊書籍對於台灣華西街的介紹。
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