Visual Arts

Land of Longing and Exile is the beginning of the artist’s “red” series. With Chinese language literature as the point of departure, Chan Sai-lok recounts how New York City was represented in fiction writing by Pai Hsien-yung (Taiwan), Wong Pik-wan (Hong Kong) and Kuo Chiang-sheng (Taiwan) and has since become a symbol of forlornness. Set in the late 1980s, protagonists in “Love in New York” have grown dependant on each other but are fated to separate. Completed in the late 2000s, “Danny Boy” and “Tea for Two” take a retrospective look at how helpless social minorities were in New York and how the city was overwhelmed by fear when AIDS had just begun to become an issue. Nightly, set against the fall the Twin Towers at the September 11 attack, looks at how individuals find they ways of existence under the shadow of Americanism. We are in New York even though our souls are drifting somewhere else. It’s time to “regain our own vision of narrative”[1], though this “we” are not our old selves any more.