Synchronic Constellation: Cross-Boundary Perspectives in Art

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is pleased to present Synchronic Constellation: Cross-Boundary Perspectives in Art, an exhibition that reconsiders the cultural and artistic modernity of Taiwan and Japan. The show draws inspiration from a film on the Le Moulin Poetry Society, a collective of modernist writers founded in Taiwan in the 1930s. Featuring approximately 200 modern Taiwanese artworks, 500 related archival materials, and 100 contemporaneous Japanese pieces, the exhibition maps a constellation of intercultural exchange, inviting viewers to rethink modernity through from today’s vantage point.

The film Le Moulin (2015) traces the efforts of a group of poets who introduced Surrealism to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period and composed their own verses in Japanese, weaving together a diverse body of work from across multiple regions, generations, and genres. The film offers no fixed narrative, leaving room for each viewer to form their own interpretation. Its director, Huang Ya-li, serves as guest curator for the present exhibition. The six chapters of the show translate Le Moulin’s reflections, along with its editing techniques, into the space of the museum, bringing together artworks, literature, cinema, music, theater, and dance in a montage-like constellation. The galleries itself thus functions as a device that generates intersections of multiple relationships, implicating the viewers themselves, through its incorporation of footage directed by Huang Ya-li, reflective surfaces, and a seemingly labyrinthine floor plan. 

The individual endeavors in modern Taiwan and Japan each possessed a radiance of their own. While not geographically adjacent, they belonged to the same era, linked together like stars in multiple constellations. The present exhibition seeks to distance itself from existing narratives and linear conceptions of history, fostering instead complex and diverse connections, not only among the works themselves, but also with our own bodies and perspectives. Encountered in that space, these artworks and documents emerge not as mere fragments of the past but as experiences of the present—an invitation to reexamine our own point of view.

Curated by Huang Ya-li (Director of Le Moulin), Kaneshima Takahiro (Associate Professor, SCAPe, Kanazawa College of Art), Torigoe Mayu (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo) 
Organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Roots Films Ltd.

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