Concert for Plants：Mt. Jade is in Metamorphoses

Concert for Plants

lololol (Xia Lin & Sheryl Cheung), Shin Hanagata, Wang Yu-Jun

Mt. Jade is in Metamorphoses

With the sporadic sounding of mechanical pulsations, you travel through the veins of plants to enter a technocratic city and its memory of the future. Here black water gushes between rock boulders, while a gust of wind stirs up sand and turns the skyscrapers in front of you into blocks of heated gold.

Multiple commands / archives / information as bodies / decode / generate / natural phenomena Artificial world / reproduction / resource allocation / functional reorganization / training paths / aggregation

Following "Sun Moon Lake is a Cement Box", a 2020 Taipei Arts Festival commission and shortlisted performance for the Taishin Art Award, lololol teams up with artist Shin Hanagata and musician Wang Yujun to explore emotional memory and technological consciousness through the human body, plants, images, experimental sound and song. What does the spiritual energy stored underneath our land reveal about the relationship between man and nature today, and of the memory tomorrow?

*Mt. Jade is in Metamorphoses is commisioned by Taipei Performing Arts Center in collaboration with Kyoto Art Center.

lololol (Xia Lin & Sheryl Cheung)

lololol is a boundless laughter, an endless extension of lol (laugh out loud), an acronym that appears to be constructed by the building blocks of I-Ching and/or computer code. Founded by Xia Lin and Sheryl Cheung in 2013, the artist collective focuses on how emotions and body politics are informed by diverse technology cultures, with special interest in martial arts, materialist ontologies and Taoist-informed philosophies.

lololol's work, performances and collaborative projects have been shown at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (UK), Taipei Arts Festival (TW), Times Museum (CN), Vernacular Institute (MX), Flaneur Festival (DE), Liquid Architecture (ASTL) and Contemporary at Blue Star (USA) amongst others.

Shin Hanagata

Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1995. Graduated from Keio University and completed the master's program in media art at Tama Art University in Tokyo. Interested in the boundary between self and other, human and non-human, which is changing in a capitalist society accelerated by technology, he practices a body that is no longer "I" and no longer "human”. His major works include "Uber Existence," an imaginary "existence agency service" that commodifies the human body itself as a real avatar in the real world, and "still human," which deviates from the norm of the human body by moving the position of the eyes to another part of the body. Major awards include the New Face Award in the Art Division of the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival and so on.

Wang Yu-Jun

Engaged in artistic creation spanning theater, dance, film, and contemporary art, Wang Yujun is one of the few singers in Taiwan who combines poetry and literature. She continues to explore the boundaries and sing the truth of life with her voice. In recent years, she has been interested in the experimental poetic qualities extended from sounds and literature, the multi-dimensional sonic-imagery space expanded by dialogue visuals, the polyphonic relationship between musical sounds and Taiwan’s art history, and the resonant sounds captured through the acts of gathering and human voices. Her works explore the unknown sounds of the future on the timeline while also responding to the call of the ancient earth. She aspires to emulate the spirit of farming, adapt to the changes of natural seasons, and continue creating art to capture the breaths of life in the moment. She seeks to engage in cultural dialogues in the context of poetry and song.