Sweet Apocalypse Revealing Current Absurdities
Presenting absurd events in utopian settings with a naïve and romantic style, Tu Pei-shih’s work explores the serious theme she is concerned with: how people ignore the real and indulge in sweet fantasies about a beautiful new world to escape reality. Unlike other artists who criticize capitalism, her work uses childlike images and an innocent and coy manner that follow pop culture and pander to the audience to explore the bubble life in late capitalist society in the age of globalization.

Prior to 2005, Tu mainly did drawings on mirror paper, creating characters with comical looks and expressions. These caricature figures are expressions of her reaction to and conflicting emotions about ugly human nature. The artist exaggerates the hideousness of these figures and suggests with mixed excitement and resignation that this is the crazy world in which we live.

In her animation works since 2006, Tu carries on and further develops her previous style, using luxurious glossy paper and sequins. Appropriating pop media images, she substitutes the former meticulous drawings with labour-intensive stop-motion collage animation, and replaces the exaggerated comic characters with innocent cartoon figures.

From 2007, Tu had developed collage works which are the extension of her animations. However, each of the work had made under the independent subject which points out her insistence of relationship between subject of work and the characteristic of the media where they should be correspond with each other rather than attached to one another. This may also lead the audience to a variety of viewing experience.

Despite their naïve style, Tu’s works are serious explorations of issues of contemporary life. As the artist says, “I am cute and harmless. Please don’t hurt me.” Once viewers living the bubble life are willing to contemplate the works, they begin to realize the mechanism of the current system and the crises that might hit us anytime. While each work deals with a definite issue, it is not isolated events that the artist attempts to explore. Instead, she highlights the danger of the contemporary bubble life through the events and the importance of recognizing it. Deceptively sweet and innocent, her works are like an apocalypse that reveals the absurdities of troubled times.