黃祥昀 Hsiang-Yun Huang

Introduction

Uchronia is a website-based artwork about identity and history, initiated and co-created by Chen Jhen and Hsiang-Yun Huang, in collaboration with many others (see credit list below).

Uchronia, a portmanteau of utopia and chronos, refers to fictional time-periods of our world; reconstructed pasts, presents and speculative futures. The interactive website offers a new way of looking at history from a uchronian perspective. Here we use Taiwan, where the nation status is still undetermined, as an example. Taiwan underwent multiple waves of colonization and, following World War II, a period of authoritarian regime. Its colonial history is marked by Spain, the Netherlands, the Chinese Ming government and Japan. Currently, inhabitants of Taiwan struggle to (re)discover or establish their own identity, finding themselves caught in the middle of a power game among the international community. This raises interrelated questionsof identity, historical truth and the idea of Nation, as the official Taiwanese history had been written and rewritten by the imposing authorities throughout the island’s past.

Uchronia aims to reveal power structures underlying identity and providesartistic alternatives to create hybrid imaginative identities, evoking a rethinking of the methodology of history.

We also consider this website as an "online curation". Different from the other
online exhibitions, which just put the works on a website. Uchronia attempts to make the interactive process become the experience. At the same time, it is also integrated with the concept of the work.

1—Fictive Nation
Conceptual Archive

In the section Fictive Nation, we have compiled a conceptual database linking over two thousand newspaper clippings, forming a collage of images relating to “Taiwan (Formosa),” published by historically influential media outlets owned by its former colonizers and other politically relevant countries, including Japan, China, Indonesia, Netherlands and Spain. The database includes alternative search filters (gender, gesture, distance from camera, etc.). As a user chooses certain filters, groups of images are sorted into virtual clusters which form ‘islands’ on screen.

Taken together, these images from different eras and countries help uncover
deeper patterns in neo-colonial narratives and information, controlled by global media powers. It also serves to reveal how the concept of “Nation” is constructed through ideology and hegemonic powers. The interface invites participants to create their own filters and thus form new collective narratives about the concept of Nation, or rather to deconstruct the idea of Nation itself.

Way of Seeing

The platform is not a rigorous historical research of collecting evidence or producing discourses. Rather, it provides a starting point for thinking about "historical research methodologies" in a metaphysical way. The users can group the photos by filters. It is different from the library, where the archive is designed for function, we would like to call this a conceptual archive.

Knowledge—Power

The archive is considered a collection of KNOWLEDGE. And knowledge is also a kind of power structure—archives are established by the powerful to protect or enhance their position in society. Through archives the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized. In the digital age, we have too much information, but also a lack of ways to see this information. The power structure behind the
archives is hidden. In the Platform, instead of normal filters, we would like to add some
special ones, such as the distance between the subject and the camera, gender,
expression, etc. The main purpose is to broaden the viewing angles and liberate the
framework of knowledge.

Historical Writing

We will try to open the Platform to the public so that everyone can tag photos and have self-created filters on the website. While taking this action may not result in a more historically accurate platform, academic historical research cannot be fully accurate either. As with the essays exploring revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative by Hayden White, every study about the past is a narrative. The narrative consisting of traditional evidence is not more real than the fictive narrative, because the storytelling and plot of each narrative is predetermined when looking at the original material, and often there is an ideology behind the narrative.

2—Xdentity
'I'dentity—'X'dentity

In the section Xdentity, by shifting from “I” to an “X”, we deconstruct the idea of “I”-centered forms of identity. The focus on “I” entails the dangers of exclusivity which can lead to specific formations of national identity and divisions based on ethnicity and blood kinship, which are then taken as excuses for systemic violence, radical nationalism or racism. In order to deconstruct and reframe these forms of identity, we aim to provide an alternative mode of identity formation. The user chooses stories belonging to three distinct categorizations: personal identity, cultural/national identity and identity that goes beyond social or even strictly human domains.

The stories were made during a storytelling workshop with participants from
diasporic backgrounds. The stories use the same categories and story structures but contain different content, creating the appearance of the same story repeating itself in different variations. In this way real-life stories and fictive stories become composites, creating a space for a mutual understanding of the past and creating new narratives
of potential futures.

By enabling the mixing of real/fictive elements, and the three levels of identity,
the website allows users to create a hybrid-identity for themselves. We hope the website will serve as a starting point to create a new form of identity, Xdentity - one that drifts between similarity and difference, placed in-between human, non-human, and beyond the borders of our thought.

Diaspora

We would like to collect identity stories through a workshop. We are hoping the stories could be formed through the lens of “Individual” , and could be used symbolically against the narrative from the official, the institute, and the colonist. We invited participants who have the experience of diaspora, such as long-term immigrants, mixed-race, or people who need to constantly travel.

There are already many documentaries, photography, and art works about
identity in the past. Yet in many cases, the artists would first categorize people into groups by their parents ethnicity, skin color, etc. However, we believe that a truly politically tolerant identity story should not be exclusive to identities beyond these, and should not use ethnicity as the basic classification of the narrative. In other words, we hope to find a way of narrative that transcends nationalism.

Methodology

Like another part “Fictive Nation”, we don’t want to make a rigorous oral history or to find an identity story that only belongs to a certain group of people, but to make a methodology where people can produce their own identity stories. The goal is to make people able to recognize the difference but also empathize others. In the workshop, we will invite one of the participants to tell their identity story, then we will invite other participants to adapt it using the same structure but different content. In this way each individual’s story will contain their own version of the story, which interweaves the fictive and real elements.

Credit 

2020年展覽

網站論述與概念:黃祥昀、陳臻

展覽策劃:黃祥昀

實體展覽單位:F Studio

線上展覽單位:良日激動所、Lightbox攝影圖書室、雲的藝評、F Studio

網站視覺設計:陳臻

實體展覽視覺設計:陳臻

網站互動設計:陳臻、黃祥昀、梁祐文

網站程式設計:梁祐文

音樂設計: 張君慈

Fictive Nation 圖片彙整:陳臻、黃祥昀、趙芳儀、林品君、黃俞瑄、張新、Rok Kranjc 、邱敬、Gašper Tavželj、蕭雅庭、朱晏禎、Cara、陳悅音

英文翻譯:黃祥昀、張新、陳映竹

英文編輯:Rok Kranjc

中文編輯:邱奕潔

實體展覽特別感謝:大稻埕國際藝術節、F Studio、Florence、李萌、李萁、宋采洵、Lightbox攝影圖書室

網站特別感謝:Bas Vroege、Beatriz Bloch、叁式、林品君、羅晟文、黃俞瑄、林彤

展覽贊助單位:國藝會

2018年工作坊素材蒐集

Xdentity工作坊企劃:黃祥昀、吳璠。陳臻、林品君、黃俞瑄、李薇協助

Xdentity 工作坊執行與影音紀錄:吳璠、林誼如、梁紹文、張新、林品君、黃祥昀

2018年Xdentity 工作坊影片剪輯與後製:黃祥昀

Xdentity 說故事者:原始故事參與朋友:Andrew Wong、蘇欣、呂曼華、Kim Soonim、Anthony Chin、Ian Maxwell、劉順鵬,後經黃祥昀改編

2018年Xdentity 場地單位:大稻埕思劇場、Lightbox 攝影圖書室

Xdentity 工作坊特別感謝:南洋臺灣姊妹會、燦爛時光:東南亞主題書店、TCAC 臺北當代藝術中心