Taiwanese artist’s Vancouver show of abandoned building photos a statement against waste
- Yao Jui-chung hopes photos of abandoned buildings in his show Mirage: Disused Public Property in Taiwan will lead to new uses for them
In 1991, Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-chung began noticing that there were many abandoned public buildings around Taipei, where he is an associate professor of fine arts at the National Taiwan Normal University.
He started to photograph every one he came across, and enlisted his students’ help by having them return to their hometowns to find similar buildings to document.
Thirty-three years later, he is showing part of a record of over 800 such buildings, which Taiwanese call “mosquito halls” because they are breeding grounds for the pests, in a major exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver, in Canada, called “Mirage: Disused Public Property in Taiwan”.
As curator Denise Fong explains, these symbols of waste and urban decay exist in many places, and the Museum of Vancouver has worked with students at the nearby University of British Columbia to adopt Yao’s approach to grass-roots activism and to look at abandoned public space in Vancouver.
Born in Taiwan in 1969, Yao is the son of Yao Dong-sheng, a lawyer, legislator and traditional Chinese painter.
