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Revolving Binary Forces｜Paintings and Sound Art by LIN Chi-Wei These works were made between 2013-2016, a period of brutal changes in my life. After six years of residency in Beijing, I returned to my hometown of Taipei and witnessed radical cultural changes taking place there. The house I grew up in had become marked for demolition as part of the city’s urban revitalization project. My father’s valiant struggle against prostate cancer had failed and he was entering the final stages of the disease. Outside the doors of the hospital, another kind of struggle was going on: Student protestors had occupied the Parliament building to rally against the free trade agreements with China. Everything I was familiar with, the very landscape of the city I had known as a child, seemed to have been shaken to the core; and all the symbols, things, and sounds of the past were collapsing into chaos. Confronting this situation, art seemed to have become pointless....For the reality in Taipei at that moment seemed more outrageous than any form of art or anti-art could ever imagine. In the weeks before the demolition of my parents' house, we dislodged hundreds of small family objects. Though no longer of any practical use, they belonged to the stock of Post-War family memories: each object was marked by the traces of time lived under martial law, and it was difficult to just relegate them to the dustbin. I ended up storing them in my temporary studio. Over the next three years I realized that, one by one, each had miraculously found its specific place amongst my series of new collage works. My father was a fervent futurist and scientist, and yet science couldn’t save him from his fatal disease. The slow process of the breakdown and decay of his body, memory and reason revealed the invincibility of time. Bearing witness to this process, I found that his death gradually turned into something precious. Time was both destroying and distilling, revealing the unparalleled power and beauty of life itself, whose inexpressibly brilliant light radiates beyond death. The nationalistic culture that I grew up in entered its final stages of decay along with my father's death. Dictatorial privilege is now being dismantled, while new pipelines are being configured to carry an even quicker flow of money, merchandise, and information. In the process, both the identity and the cultural landscape are undergoing a restructuring. My father’s death is thus doubled in this way. The culture of dying and the death of culture have melded into one. I would like to sincerely thank Hanart TZ Gallery for first inviting me to do a painting exhibition with them three years ago, and for their patience during the long wait. I would also like to give my heartfelt thanks to my dear family and close friends who, during the past three years, have helped me in every way imaginable. Without their generosity in providing space, material and spiritual support I would never have been able to achieve this work.

LIN Chi-Wei August 2016 (Translated by Valerie C. Doran)