Instance Dungeons: Gray Zone

The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) is proud to present Instance Dungeons: Gray Zone as part of the Pavilion Project for the 16th Gwangju Biennale, with the National Asian Culture Center (ACC) as its exhibition venue. Featuring eight Taiwanese artists and artist duos—Su Hui-Yu, Li Yi-Fan, Cheng Hsien-Yu, Hsu Che-Yu & Chen Wan-Yin, Ting-Ting Cheng, Chang Wen-Hsuan, Lin Yu-Liang, and Juan Po-Yuan—the exhibition employs video, artificial intelligence, interactive installations, archival materials, and mixed media to examine how historical memory, information warfare, surveillance technologies, and geopolitics infiltrate our quotidian existence and change the ways we perceive the world.

The term “instance dungeon” in the exhibition title is derived from video game terminology, referring to an isolated level that players can repeatedly enter and challenge anew. Adapting this concept, the exhibition anchors itself in Taiwan, a pivot in the First Island Chain, and projects outward to reflect the turbulent global politico-economic landscape of recent times, where history, politics, and technological developments constantly intersect and reconfigure one another. The Cold War may seem to have ended, yet past conflicts have never truly gone away; instead, they have been reincarnated as military pressure, information manipulation, cognitive warfare, online rumors, and technological surveillance.

The “gray zone” refers to an ambiguous state between peace and war where boundaries are deliberately blurred. It does not necessarily erupt with gunfire; rather, through disinformation, economic coercion, cyber infiltration, surveillance technologies, and cognitive warfare, it insidiously alters how a society comprehends reality. Conflicts unfold not only at national borders and on physical battlefields, but also across news broadcasts, social media platforms, algorithms, supply chains, and the screens of our mobile phones.

For Taiwan, the “gray zone” is not a remote notion, but an intimate, everyday reality. How do we determine whether a piece of information is credible? How do we make sense of histories that are perpetually rewritten? When machines perceive, process, and judge faster than humans, do we still retain our agency?

The participating artists respond to these questions from different perspectives. Lin Yu-Liang examines how information, acting as both shadow and map, guides human perception and action. Ting-Ting Cheng interrogates the distance between mediated images of war and lived experience. Chang Wen-Hsuan connects the wartime memories of Taiwan and South Korea, illustrating the impact of information overload on memory. Juan Po-Yuan utilizes artificial intelligence to reconstruct military ruins and historical archives, revealing how algorithms can misread the past.

Cheng Hsien-Yu employs light beams that track viewers to inquire whether “being seen” constitutes attention, witnessing, or surveillance. Hsu Che-Yu & Chen Wan-Yin rekindle the sealed memories of Taiwan’s former nuclear weapons program. Su Hui-Yu combines cinema with artificial intelligence to revisit collectivism, patriarchy, and national narratives. Treating online conspiracy theories as his point of departure, Li Yi-Fan probes: Even if the information is fabricated, are the fears and desires it incites still viscerally real?

Instance Dungeons: Gray Zone offers no definitive answers. Instead, it invites visitors into a space interlaced with truth and falsehood, where history is constantly revisited. As machines begin to perceive on behalf of humans, and as the internet and algorithms increasingly dictate our memory and judgment, can we still locate our own coordinates? Art may not be able to halt the cycles of history, but it can expose obscured fissures and blaze a new way of seeing to understand Taiwan, the world, and our collective future afresh.

Curator: Chen Hsiang-Wen, Lin Hsiao-Yu

Artists
Chang Wen-Hsuan, Cheng Hsien-Yu, Ting-Ting Cheng, Hsu Che-Yu & Chen Wan-Yin, Juan Po-Yuan, Li Yi-Fan, Lin Yu-Liang, Su Hui-Yu

Organizer: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Co-organizer: Ministry of Culture, Taiwan
Special Thanks: Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB)
Sponsor: NTMoFA Patrons Circle