Zoë

The third phase of “Citing Bar” collaborates with the artist Ting-Ting Cheng to present the project “Zoë”, which focuses on immigration, women, mental health, and death, along with its extended actions.

Zoë includes a dual-channelled video installation and a publication revisiting the book “Last Words from Montmartre” by Qiu MiaoJin, a self-identified lesbian Taiwanese writer based in Paris between 1992 and 1995. The book was comprised of letters written by Qiu a week before her suicide at age 26 in her room in Montmartre, Paris.

During Cheng’s artist residency in Paris, Cheng invited nine female immigrants in Paris to translate and read the letters extracted from the book in their mother languages at locations where Zoë, the protagonist of the book, visited. The actions were documented by videos, presented with the interviews of the participants on the second channel as the subtitles, along with the publication.

In the exhibition at Solid Art, Taipei, Cheng again, invited nine female immigrants in Taiwan to recite the extracts from the interviews of the immigrants in Paris, to continue the conversation. The interviews with the nine immigrants in Taiwan were also documented. These stories about global female immigrants will continue to be written and read, perpetuated through the act of citation – the Speech Act of vocalizing words. This project aspires to evoke and connect within the realm of departed lives, to reestablish relationships within seemingly isolated individual circumstances.Like Writer Hsiang-Yin Lai said, “Under this circumstance, the author indeed died, but the writing has its future.”

（The project and the exhibition are supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan. ）

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Cheng is an artist from Taiwan, graduated from MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London.

She likes to reinterpret archival and found materials to construct narratives in the current context. She had solo exhibitions at Taipei Fine Art Museum and other institutions and galleries in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Spain, UK and more.
She had participated in Tokyo Biennial, Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil (São Paulo), Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architechture (China), and group exhibitions at Jim Thompson Art Center (Bangkok), Daegu Art Factory, Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Künstlerhaus (Vienna), ISE Cultural Foundation (New York), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, National Art Museum of China…etc. She was the resident artist at Iniva (London), CFCCA (Manchester), Zero Station (HCMC), MMCA (Seoul) and more.