You Are Me Exhibition

YOU ARE ME: Mapping New Geographies

Hsinchu City Art Gallery & Hsinchu Zoo Park

July – September 2020

The YOU ARE ME exhibition considers the new geography of a socially distanced yet globally united humanity — presenting works that question constructs of borderlines, race, and personal space in the context of the pandemic.

Hsinchu City is home to cutting-edge manufacturing of the most advanced technology industries and a world-leading Science Park. It is Taiwan's wealthiest municipality, with a young, fast-growing population. It also has a growing multi-cultural community.

The Chinese title of this exhibition is: "Sharing a New Territory Together"

Exhibiting artists: Angelica Dass (Brazil/Spain), Uta Kopp (Germany), Achim Mohné (Germany), and Taiwanese artists: Yu-chuan Tseng (曾鈺涓), Chi-yu Liao (廖祈羽), Hao-chiang Lin (林豪鏘), Chih-hung Liu (劉致宏)

Featured Project

HUMANAE by Angelica Dass

The HUMANAE Project is a globally celebrated photographic installation by Madrid-based Brazilian artist Angelica Dass. It features an ever-growing collection of 80+ portraits of strangers from diverse nations, organised by their exact Pantone skin tones. Through visual literacy, research and social participation, the work challenges racial stigma and stands up for human rights.

In this work, the Pantone system is used as a creative feature. The artist applies precise colour-matching codes to human skin tone, exposing the arbitrary nature of racial categorisations—nobody's skin is actually "black" or "white." Each subject is photographed against a background matched to their exact skin tone, making the face float and expression matter more than colour.
The project is envisioned as an open archive—anyone can participate. It has grown from a personal experiment into a global collaboration spanning schools, prisons, and parliaments. No labels, no names, no nationalities--only a face and a code. The absence forces viewers to notice what assumptions they bring.

— — —
The word "humanae" appears in famous Latin titles of Catholic documents, where it functions as the feminine form of "human", and it can be interpreted as "the human person" (neuter).

Yu-chuan Tseng, "What is Your Scent Today?"
Year: 2018; Program by Sheng-Po Shen, Yi-Ching Huang, Chia-Chun Chang; Cooperation with LFP Laboratory of Fragrance

“What is Your Scent Today?” is a piece of the series works “Jane”, the continuation of “Digital Portraits-Jane ” and “Jane’s Diary”, which revolves around the theme of smell. In this piece, a discussion of how scent evokes emotions is presented before proceeding to analyse the transformation of scent in a physical space. In the digital era of rapid communication and information flow, especially on social media, massive amounts of data that contain many emotional cues are created. These texts on the internet serve as a source for exploring and analysing human sentiments, which in turn help researchers to better understand the public’s opinions and emotions."

Qiyu Liao, "River" Year 2017; Dual-channel video, 20 minutes 30 seconds

Two friends are travelling by boat, letting the river carry them onward. The scenery and people change with time, yet revisiting familiar places always feels new—the river is constant, but never the same twice. The still river in this scene is a transformation of the artist's memory. We photograph scenic spots to prove they were there. The work is a fable about a young couple chasing the perfect photo—a pursuit doomed from the start, since no image can truly hold something as large as love.

Liao's recent work draws on his experience shooting family portraits in an old photo studio.

Chih-Hung Liu's "Soundscapes" Year 2015; Charcoal pencil, sketch paper, aluminium frame; 237x306cm
This is an abstract sketch series depicting several sound environments in Kaohsiung: the noisy engine running in a ship's cabin, migrant workers chatting in the harbour at lunchtime, and passengers waiting at the ferry dock.

“Humanity is finished if it fails to adapt after the current pandemic. We have brought this on ourselves because of our absolute disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals” Jane Goodall, primatologist

Public Art Project

ANIMAL FARM by Achim Mohné & Uta Kopp

ANIMAL FARM is a special public art commission for the Hsinchu Zoo.
Using the language of REMOTEWORDS, the artists draw on Orwell's satirical novel, in which mistreated farm animals overthrow their human master and dream of a self-sustaining utopia.

REMOTEWORDS is a long-term project by Achim Mohné & Uta Kopp in which oversized text messages are painted onto the roofs of cultural institutions worldwide, addressed to satellite image providers like Google Earth as their primary locators.

Formulated at the intersection of Art, Literature, Design, internet culture and navigation technology, each message forms a semantic unit with its host location and surrounding environment. The aerial view is a symbol of both surveillance and shared territory.