Cloud of Unknowing: A City with Seven Streets is a key exhibition organized by the museum in conjunction with the city government’s celebration for the 130th Anniversary of Taipei's Founding in 2014. Because this marks the first time for the museum to present a themed exhibition on the subject of urban spatiality and issues pertaining to space, therefore, two important scholars from Taiwan and Hong Kong specializing in spatial discourses are invited as co-curators, and they are: Professor Thomas TSANG from the University of Hong Kong and Professor Ching Yueh ROAN from Taiwan’s Yuan Ze University. The exhibition includes 25 important artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Japan, whose artistic focuses are on spatial contents, location-specific memories, and habitation relationships, with many new site-specific artworks to be presented.

The central theme of the exhibition deals with the multiple angles observed in today’s society, and by forgoing urban psychical structures and architectures, the focus is placed on examining the cultural elements and historical contexts contained in a city’s composition, and to closely investigate the interconnected links and implications that have evolved and been derived from urban spaces and cultural memories. Moreover, the exhibition further attempts to think outside of the box from the museum’s conventional approaches and habits with its venue, and from which, the third floor tube-shaped space is transformed to simulate a cityscape containing seven streets. From the artists’ spatial interpretations and transformations, the core subjectivity of the city in the modern life is reexamined, and through the distinctive features expressed through the various media of sounds, installations, constructions, images, manuscripts, and objects, the audience is guided to observe the interdependent contraposition between the architectural space and the body’s memory in the chaotic and vague modern city, where elusion and reality are intermixed. 

*image (left)
© Cheng Han