Under Right Circumstances - Pei-xin Chuang

About

With the explosion of information in the age of the Internet, all kinds of
messages are easily communicated swiftly and conveniently in the absence of
borders and without time differences. In this massive torrent of
information, whether it is text, images, or audio, for us members of the
Internet generation, what method of discrimination should we use to build a
personal reading experience? Or how should we position our personal values
in a world where truth and lies overlap?

In recent years, Pei-xin Chuang’s works have focused on the transformation
and extension between real and fictitious, and have attempted to explore the
conceptual awareness of disassociation produced by the mutual interactions
between contemporary society and the world of the Internet. In this solo
exhibition, ‘Under Right Circumstances’, he brings together a large amount
of unclassified Internet information, subjectively organizes the appearance
of the messages, and invites viewers to feel the discomfort brought about by
the collection of technology.

The two parts of ‘Under Right Circumstances’ which are related separately
and in parallel, are narrative video and information sculpture. Pei-xin
Chuang utilizes the Internet to share the reorganization of videos, bringing
out a collage of three short plays. A series of landscape scenes delivers a
far-reaching tranquil atmosphere, while at the same time he puts the
original translation of the film through Google Translate to translate the
Chinese, making an important text which runs through the content, and then
adds narration, narrating this seemingly esoteric and beautiful text in a
moderate and unaffected tone. However, due to the erroneous deconstruction
of each fragment of the original text carried out by this well-known
translation tool, although the overall form possesses a poetic quality, its
logic is incoherent, failed words and sentences appear continuously
throughout the film, resulting in a powerful sense of breakage in the work’
s reading. The artist makes ingenious use of a not yet completely developed
technology (the translation tool) to lead to a 'dislocation' in the text,
which is re-linked together with imagery and video to produce an
extraordinary view of the modern age, attempting to calmly convey this
bizarre and paradoxical information experience, and thus set in motion the
subsequent imagination of viewers towards the message of the video.

Apart from dynamic imagery, Pei-xin Chuang has installed a number of twisted
acrylic three-dimensional sculptures. Each piece has deep folds like a
cotton curtain, and has been twisted, erected or hung in the exhibition. The
Internet images stacked on the surface of the sculpture are a mixture of
virtual and real-world images, all demonstrating a broken and chaotic state,
and they are replete with all kinds of visual memories. The artist hopes
that the viewer will be able to find the fragments of lost stories in the
creases and folds of the work.

There have always been aspects of the interaction between technology and
human nature worthy of debate, and the progress of the world continually
reminds people to think about the boundaries between the two. Pei-xin Chuang
has eliminated the traces of overlap between the digital world and the real
world, and used this to ignite debate on the method of viewing. ‘Under
Right Circumstances’ is like a maze; the choices taken at every
intersection will affect the direction towards the exit, and as we face
information, any method of interpretation taken will also induce the
development of a totally different consciousness.