Born in Taipei in 1969, YAO Jui-Chung graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts in 1994, and began his professional art career after graduation and has since been an integral part of Taiwanese contemporary art post the martial law era. He has participated in the 1997 Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the 2005 Yokohama Triennale, the 2009 Asia-Pacific Triennial, the connecting project for the 2010 Taipei Biennial, and the 2012 Shanghai Biennale. Active in the art world both nationally and internationally, Yao has exhibited in over a hundred solo and group exhibitions in Taiwan, Europe, U.S.A., and other Asian regions. He has also participated in residency programs in Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Gasworks Studio in London, the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, and Glenfiddich in Scotland, whereby he has developed an extensive transnational network of art. Yao is one of the rare artists in Taiwan’s contemporary art field that excels in the areas of creative arts, curatorialship, critique, and research.

This is a video installation that connects conceptual photography with tangible objects. Underneath the dazzling façade, the artist makes the attempt to reflect on the myths with consumerism in the Taiwanese society and makes an aesthetic criticism on the widespread money-worshipping phenomenon. The photographs are taken at real destinations in Taiwan, but their existence appears both real yet also fictitious, like ruins of human activity created slowly throughout the realistic shifts and flows of history. The dinosaur with its head embedded in the image seems to be conducting archeological activities, as it looks aloofly at the absurd and obscure human world.

After the lift of martial law in Taiwan, the discourse about subjectivity became a heated topic, with narratives about the land, history, and cultural identification filling up the intellectual arena. With the liberation of social power, the disintegration of authoritarian ideology, and the influx of democratization, Taiwan was in a state of frenzy. It was during that critical time that YAO Jui-Chung garnered extensive attention for his work by presenting his meta-observations on the subjectivity of Taiwan. His avant-garde, subversive, humorous and playful criticisms make his art highly distinctive.

Yao has poignantly identified the cracks among different discourses on subjectivity and all kinds of power narratives. Through his performance art, photography, and video works, he criticizes, subverts, and makes fun of the dominating value system. His projects, such as Territory Takeover, Recover Mainland China, The World is for All, and video works, such as Phantom of History, and Mt. Jade Floating, deal with different internal national and authoritative discourses to subvert and provoke for the rebellious deconstructive force. He also specializes in capturing the alienated, absurd, desolate and almost surreal time and space in the marginalized areas of Taiwan, which imply that there is a flowing alternative reality within this island.

Like a black hole that sucks in a different array of meanings, since 2005, Yao has embarked on investigations around Taiwan, photographing a series of ruins. The materialistic construction in spaces and under the reproduction of absurd capitalism and authoritarianism, phantoms are formed that coerce the textures of the environment. Around 2007, Yao began appropriating the style of traditional Chinese landscapes by reshaping them into “pseudo-landscapes” that represent personal memories, modern life and everyday situations, which provoke the hidden rebelliousness embedded in the traditional way of viewing beauty. In his recent Long Live / Landscape series, political allegories are deconstructed, with the ambiguous rebelliousness in classic aesthetic narratives fused together in a more comprehensive way. With all things stable with transfixed meanings, Yao seems to be able to meticulously unravel them and attentively gaze at them till all preconceived notions are dispersed.