“OOtopia” is a deliberate miswriting of “utopia”, a word I have misappropriated and reforged. OOtopia reflects our distance from the world of the future; the misunderstandings caused by distance are the beginnings of imagination. The primary piece, Car-Modding Youth, the West, is like a nonsensical situation, depicting a group of youths who mod their cars and seem to be drawn to speed yet are always running in circles where they started. The other piece, Slug, Stairs, Security Guard, is instead like a situation from a scientific experiment: On the stairs, slug after slug is always moving forward, yet always stomped to death by passerby. Through the security guard’s “speed records”, they become interwoven with the car-modding youth. OOtopia is an assemblage of many unrelated elements: the crawling (slow) and the racing (fast); the local (Taiwanese) and Western (extraterrestrial); nonsense stories and rational mathematical calculations; the flow of time and unchanging forms – contradictory elements juxtaposed together. Through pondering that resembles experiments, the works attempt to bring some basis for trust to utter nonsense.
孫知行 Sun,Chih-Hsing 