Are family chronicles personal memories or collective, historical memos? Exhibition The Memorandum begins with the context of traveling out to sea from the early years of Kinmen history. Artist LIN Yi-Chi traces letters that were sent between her family and Nanyang and traveled to Bangka Island, Indonesia for investigations, which led to two image works, Nanyang Express: Trans-drifting and South Sea Crossing and Doppelganger, which are reinterpreted for display.
LIN mainly creates video art and experimental short films. Although the two works mentioned above manifest the different qualities of "documentary/documentation" and "fabrication/fiction," they are translated into works that complement each other through the artist's creative approach. This exhibition is a collection of the artist's travel encounters and manuscripts and materials of the creative process, all of which delve into the perspective of memory, witness, and migration in historical materials amid contemporary contexts and explore clues for creative practices.
The encounters of forebears often become memos for later generations, and works often become memos throughout the artist's creative context. Apart from documenting the incidents of Kinmen family members who traveled out to sea, the exhibition also spotlights the dialogues of the video works, extending and shaping the multivariate qualities of video art.
▧ About Between Screenings Between Screenings includes video works created by Taiwanese artist Yi-chi Lin between 2009 and 2020. We can see that Lin’s artistic practice centers around several subject matters, ranging from the marginalized realm of military dependents' villages in relation to the historical contexts to the migration experience in terms of diasporas in East Asia. The artist excavates her own life events and documentation of her family’s history for further investigation, and then deconstructs and transforms memories, dreams, and oral legends into narrative texts. Through Lin’s mastery of delicately bringing moving images and installation together, the style of her image-based creation shows an enchanting charm. It aims to explore Lin’s art universe in depth by dissecting the thinking behind each inspiring moment and by presenting a detailed analysis of her works. Critical writings on observations of her artistic trajectory by scholars are collected, as well as interviews between Lin and other professionals—both researchers and creative practitioners—in fields such as cinema, theatre, literature, and art history. Conceptually inspired by a visual experiment, this book attempts to fashion time-based video works onto the two-dimensional pages of a printed publication. It can be seen as durational contents being played or screened as readers flip through the pages, which, in a sense, allows video works to wander off and exist outside the screen. “Between Screenings,” then, is no longer a term confined in a place for screenings to happen. It is further a type of practice as a medium for expanded cinema.
