Artworks return to Chiayi

On the first floor of Chiayi Art Museum, visitors gather around a map of the city. Small sculptural forms stand on its streets. Among them is a red, blue and yellow model of the statue that Wang Wen-chih wrapped in 1996, when Sculpture Chiayi put work across the city rather than inside a single exhibition room.

The largest work at the entrance was made in 2026. For a new commission, Tsai Pou-Ching worked with children who observed public sculptures around Chiayi and developed a script together; generative AI entered the production of their response. The exhibition begins with people looking at the city now, thirty years after the period named in its title.

Curator Yu Wei built the exhibition around art made in Chiayi between 1996 and 2006. Much of it was temporary, site-bound, social or tied to hardware that has aged. A surviving object can be installed again. A temporary action may leave photographs, models and people who remember it. A video work can keep its old televisions while changing what they show.

Wang De-He's 荒蕪暢遊 originally used five CRT televisions for three video channels, so two monitors repeated existing material. In 2026, Wang recorded two additional KTV sequences with the assistants painting the museum walls. The five-monitor structure remains, but every screen now carries a different channel.

Dai Ming-Te's 機關倉庫檔案 began in 2000 as plainly produced black-and-white photographs spread through the alternative space at the railway warehouses. The current museum installation places the surviving images into a single-channel sequence and adds Dai's narration. In the museum's room view, photographs and records lie across trestle tables, a monitor stands at the centre, and a suit hangs above them.

Chen Cheng-Hung's large Boulder paintings were made and first shown in the railway warehouses. At the museum, the canvases rest on wooden pallets instead of settling into a conventional wall display. The gallery does not imitate the warehouse; the pallets carry one physical relation from the earlier room into the current one.

One of Lin Hui-ru's current photographs shows Wang Wen-chih standing next to images and labels from his 1996 work while a younger visitor reads them.

On the third floor, Yu places two ideas about public art beside each other. One follows the decade's large outdoor festivals. In Wu Mali's model, artists became residents, residents became artists, and an art festival could operate as public service. Both arose during the period shown here, but they disagree about what art in public should do.