"POST-movements：Nights of Café Müller" is an exhibition plan which treats Pina Bausch’s dance-theater work “Café Müller” (1978) as the point of departure to address the relationships between individuals and politics in East Asia. The rise of Asia does not take the form of an emerging market, but an unprecedented dilemma over democracy and cascading fragments of history. It is a state of chaos in which Asia becomes a laboratory for ambiguous democracy. In other words, Asia is mired in a state of probationary and therefore uncertain democracy. “POST-movement：Nights of Café Müller” attempts to point out such a probationary state. This exhibition is going to invite artists from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam to collectively unfold the diversity of East Asian life.

The Sunflower Student Movement’s emergence and consequences represent neither a piece of political or social news, nor simply a wave of public protest, but the turning point of social awareness. Whether the impacts of this movement are immediate or not, the movement per se and its subsequent development have wielded implicit but significant influences upon the society and the whole generation. On the one hand, the appeal for “positioning self” becomes an extremely important link between individual creativity and social events. On the other hand, the appeal for “opening spaces” creates an alternative way for political participation.

“POST-movement：Nights of Café Müller” is a spatial experiment on image and sound, offering possibilities to new proletarians and minorities who attempt to organize their own movements. We are performing the “art in motion,” the art against “impossibility,” that is, to transcend the limitations of “impossibility” and “illusions.”

The theme that runs through this exhibition focuses on how individual experiences connect and interact with institutional structures. As a result, this exhibition is not a conventional static one but intends to highlight how individuals reflect on and interact with environments, institutions, and history. The primary goals of this exhibition comprise 1) creating a space (Café Müller, aesthetic politics) from an intertwined context through the exhibition; 2) enriching the contexts of East Asian life by screening videos and organizing events under the individual-structure biopolitics; and 3) making the exhibition a connective interface between real action and museum spaces. In sum, this exhibition encourages reflections on how to create a realm of discourses on East Asian life.

Artists: Aki Yahata(Japan)、Okin Collective(Korea)、Apichatpong(Thailand),
Singing in Taiwan、Post- Movement Teams、”How are you all doing” Network(Korea)、
Trần Thi Dào (Vietnam)、Trần Duy Hưng(Vietnam)、Huang Yen-Ying、
Pu Shuai-Cheng、Siren Eun Young Jung(Korea)、Teng Chao-Ming

*image(left)
© KdMoFA