Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

This is the video version of Heaven on Fourth. At “Performa 19” Huang Po-Chih used a non-realistic method to interpret an incident that occurred in the Chinese community of Flushing, New York. Heaven on Fourth took place in six performances, three performances per week. The work was expressed through a variety of forms, including installation, text and live performance. He hired actors, writers, bartenders and a masseuse to reconstruct the incident. The entire performance was based on the story of the Chinese woman Song Yang, an undocumented immigrant who engaged in erotic massage: To avoid being arrested by the police for prostitution again, she leapt from her rented fourth-floor apartment and landed heavily on a street lined with restaurants and erotic massage parlors in Flushing, New York. The title of the work (Heaven on Fourth) alludes to this incident, as well as the name of a massage parlor that was later established in the same apartment. Through this title, he directly explored the many contradictions in society today. Heaven on Fourth was not a typical performance. It defied specific categorization, because it had no script, only five texts. Within this structure, Huang Po-Chih and the four writers used words to open up an ambiguous space that accommodated any plot, any imagining or information, enabling an open-ended examination and review of the life of an inconspicuous character, and telling a story of “human fate at its lowest state.” During the process of performance, the actors read the text in a calm and gentle tone, and at each pause in the recitation, the bartender at the bar invited the audience to taste the cocktails. A massage bed was set up above the bar, and an actor randomly asked audience members if they would like to go upstairs for a massage. In this private mezzanine space, the hired masseuse massaged participants silently, while an actor recited the text softly in their ear. For Huang Po-Chih, the purpose of re-editing the incident with texts rather than a script was to provoke a direct reaction from spectators. However, such a manipulation had the potential to alter the real world. The artist did this deliberately in order to create a socially conscious “artwork.” However, works of art differ from acts of social activism, with their appeal to ideas and attitudes of skepticism. The use of an artistic vocabulary makes it easier for the audience to become engaged with a certain scenario.

Huang Po-Chih (1980 born in Taoyuan, lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan) completed his studies at the Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan in 2011. His diverse artistic practice revolves around the circumstances and history of his family which enable him to involve in issues like agriculture, manufacturing, production, consumption, etc. Since 2013, exhibitions of his continuous art project "Five Hundred Lemon Trees" have been transformed into a crowd-funding platform allowing the appropriation of artistic resources for developing an agricultural brand, activating fallow farmland, and growing lemon trees for lemon liquor. On the other hand, the project has connected his family members, local farmers, and consumers to make a new social relationship possible. In the same year, he published his first collection of essays "Blue Skin: My Mother’s Story", the story about his mother. In a way, such a brief account of personal history can somehow reflect Taiwan's agricultural economic reform and social change over the past fifty years, which is essentially, a micro-level of observing his own family history and society as a whole in Taiwan. Huang Po-Chin received the grand prize of the Taipei Arts Award in 2013, was nominated HUGO BOSS Asia arts Award in 2015, and received Prudential Eye Awards in 2016. Huang participated in Taipei Biennale in 2014 and 2016 and has been exhibited internationally including the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in China in 2014, Performa 19 in New York in 2019, Busan Biennale in Korea in 2020, also many group exhibitions in museums, e.g., the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, CHAT in Hong Kong, the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wie (mumok) in Vienna.