LIGHT YEAR 53: From the People to the Land

Video Art Exhibit projected onto the Manhattan Bridge

Thursday, September 5th, 2019 | 7 - 10pm *****Best place to view: from the Pearl Street Triangle

Featuring works by: Jen-Pei Cheng, Pey-Chwen Lin, Yu-Chuan Tseng, Miya Ando, Pei-Shih Tu and Ching-Yao Chen

Curated by Luchia Meihua Lee, from The Taiwanese American Arts Council (TAAC)

In From the People to the Land we pay special attention to cultural diversity and are naturally respectful to various human beings representing those varying backgrounds who collectively make America what it is.

It is the fashion to predict that our future, and increasingly our present, belongs to high technologies. Ethnicity and other humanistic concerns seemingly will be dissolved in a utopian future. Stephen Fry retorts that we live in a flood plain and a great storm is coming; most urgently, if counter-intuitively, in order to prepare for a future bristling with technology, it is imperative to redouble our efforts to understand who humans really are, what machines can and cannot do, and which of our priorities they can assist. Art and humanity are more important than ever; we need to understand our soul, spirit, sense of beauty, love, inspiration, loyalty, and empathy. The widespread use of machines will afford us much more time, so it is vital to know how and why we can fulfill our true destiny.

The subject of From the People to the Land is a portion of the urgent topic of immigration in this era of globalization. A concern faced on many continents, it portends political, economic, and cultural crises. From this wider subject, we focus in on cultural issues in the new community that has been created typically in the big city where inevitable impacts are compounded, and the profound and ever-present opposition between remaining faithful to tradition and adapting to the enveloping milieu is most acutely felt.

From the People to the Land starts with an emphasis on human nature and how it adapts to movement of peoples, and then proceeds to discuss the land and environment.

There is also a growing realization that cultural diversity is as important for the evolution of civilization as biodiversity is for biological evolution. The discourse of relationship is rather hard to refine into a straight line, as in the elegant work of several artists in this exhibition. Yet they all respond in their various ways to Kant’s fundamental question about the modes of human existence

ABOUT TAAC

Based in New York City, The Taiwanese American Arts Council (TAAC) was founded in 2014 to promote Taiwanese American art and artists and to raise the awareness of Taiwanese and Taiwanese American art in all media.