Members of Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art. Photo: Chong Kok Yew.
Founded in 2017, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art is a team of artists and creatives working in different disciplines. They focus on a variety of social engagement practices centered on interpersonal connections. Through their respective areas of expertise, the team members bring together different professional groups, form new knowledge communities, and build exclusive work structures.
For the Taipei Biennial 2023, the Hide and Seek team will host a series of workshops with Taiwanese as well as Chinese-speaking cultural workers who grew up in Southeast Asia, China, or Hong Kong and have moved to Taiwan in recent years or have lived here in the past. Their cultural backgrounds may be similar to those of many Taiwanese people, but minute differences in daily life are inevitable, be it in terms of language, food, or lifestyle. Do these differences bring the workshop participants closer together or push them farther apart?
Four key phrases based on the Taipei Biennial’s exhibition concept—“borders,” “imagination and identity,” “sense of humor,” and “future”—serve as the foundation for conversations among the participants, as they explore how people with subtly different individual experiences can find a place for themselves in mainstream culture. This sharing of experiences will also serve as a basis for further exchanges and discussions of the contents of the Taipei Biennial. Through collaborative writing, the participants will produce interpretations of some of the Biennial works, which will be recorded as audio guides and made available as a physical installation in a first-floor corridor of Taipei Fine Arts Museum one month before the Biennial’s conclusion.
