Everyday life

DURATION: 2015-12-05 ~ 2016-02-28
OPENING: 2015-12-05
VENUE: KAOHSIUNG MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
ADDRESS: 80 Meishuguan Road, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
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Curator: Wu Hui-fang What is the appearance of everyday life? It is our ceaselessly recurring actions, our repeated journeys, and the spaces in which we have long dwelled. The substance of our daily lives is woven from these marks and manifestations of everyday life, which also comprise the landscape closest to us and the world we encounter in the most direct way. Nevertheless, “ordinariness” also has a two-sided contradictory nature, in which life’s repeated journeys become insipid burdens, long-dwelt-in spaces become prisons, and our ceaselessly recurring actions become suffocating routine affairs. If everyday life is the thing with which we are most familiar and know best, when everyday life is disturbed by the unfamiliar, what will happen? How will our sense of familiarity and knowing change? Perhaps we can contemplate ordinary everyday life as a port in a storm. Perhaps we will be bewildered by the unchangeableness, or feel relaxed because of it or sometimes feel happy or depressed. What is special about our ordinary everyday lives is that there is nothing special about them. A quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle captures the true significance of the everyday life: “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” The part of everyday life which is not ordinary can be found amidst the redundant overlap of everyday life. This exhibition relies on five whimsical subtopics — “Monkeys playing in the human world,” “Kaleidoscope of life,” “Life is like a play,” “Nothing is more important than food,” and “Yeah! Fun is life” — to try to interpret some non-mundane spectra that artists have refracted from everyday life.