Hidden Threads

(From the Archives, 2/7)

There are various threads running through the exhibition of a museum. You have the architecture, often a certain “house aesthetic” of colors, typography, etc. There is the explicit theme of a given exhibition, the implicit taste of the curator. And of course there is my own thoughts and feelings I carry through the exhibition.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, some of the artists added another thread, images of ghostly visitors sprayed onto the wall. The pieces were maybe too subtle for me to notice as an art piece alone, for which the team compensated with a quite-too-blunt-fourth-wall-crushing explainer video at the end. I think it was a show for young talents, so all good.

And yet, for me as a visitor, there is one more thread: The people visiting the museum at the same time, people you’ll likely never see again, you don’t speak to, yet share the experience of the exhibition often for many rooms in a row. For me, many were silhouettes or ghosts just like the spray figures at the wall, until I later realized when looking through my images that some of them show up again and again.