The development of new technologies and the resulting electronic products, continuously inspire the human imagination for life in the future. The application and consumption of electronic technology has gradually and unconsciously mired us in the logic of commerce and the cycle of innovation and outdatedness. Technological products become obsolete and are replaced at an increasing rate, creating a severe problem of electronic waste. “Waste” is a relative concept that leads us to contemplate how values are formed and abandoned. The process by which value is transformed and rediscovered is what the exhibition seeks to explore.

With the re-creation of electronic waste in daily life as a starting point, the artists participating in this exhibition are like contemporary alchemists who distill renewed value and significance from discarded objects. In biological terms “regenerate” refers to a process of reconstruction, recovery, and growth; this exhibition tries to extend this definition to its aesthetic connotations. How do new media artists who use technology as a creative medium respond to, query, and inspect the ethical issues of contemporary technology through their work? A state of global crisis has been created by the rapid pace of resource consumption, continued production, and discarding. When all aspects of contemporary life has in effect been constructed by that intimate union of technology and capital, human beings find themselves dependent upon nature as they simultaneously attempt to alter it. What future of peaceful coexistence between nature and technology can artists envision? The “Regeneration Movement” goes beyond the reutilization and repair of reclaimed objects, and hints at possibilities for correction, adjustment, and re-innovation in the multiple relationships and contexts between humans and the material environment, nature, and technology.

With the “Regeneration Movement” as a purport, this exhibition presents the creative rendering and contemplations of 16 different groups of artists along two main trajectories: “Transformation and Recycling: the Power of Circulation,” and “Hybridity and Symbiosis : Ecological Imagination from an Interdisciplinary Perspective.” “Transformation and Recycling” attempts to loosen the preset functional contexts of electronic logic that recreate new technological rules to reverse passive consumption and production settings, and to liberate the intended functions of objects; while simultaneously re-excavating preexisting histories and memories of media. “Hybridity and Symbiosis” brings out possibilities for reversed resource discovery and energy conversion with the fusion of interdisciplinary methodology of art, design, the sciences and imaginative experimental projects; and even portending a direction for future evolution and proffer possibilities for a sustainable coexistence with the environment.“Regeneration Movement” revisits the balanced and circular relationship among technology, human beings and the nature, in an effort to find possible indications for a sustainable co-existence future in the dynamic and intertwined network of our living systems through artistic perspective.

About the exhibition

Curator: FAN Hsing-Yu

Date: March 19 – May 22, 2016

Participating Artists: Aram Bartholl, CHENG Hsien-Yu, CHI Po-Hao, Gilberto Esparza, Benjamin Gaulon, Gijs Giskes, Karl Klomp, Tom Verbruggen, Kosuke IKEDA, Cecilia Jonsson, Luxury Logico, Yuko MOHRI, SEAD (Space Ecologies Art and Design), Kentaro TAKI, Unknown Fields Division, WANG Lien-Cheng, XXLab, Pinar Yoldas

Venue: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts

Courtesy of the artists and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, for further information please visit www.ntmofa.gov.tw.