For over three decades, Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-Chung has worked across media to explore how ideology, faith, memory, and desire shape the places we inhabit. In this program, he will take us on a visual journey through selected works, organized along Kao Chien-Hui’s narrative arc of “Yao’s Black Divine Comedy.” Moving from reimagined shanshui and abandoned infrastructure to contemporary sacred sites, his presentation will reveal landscape as a charged field of power, belief, absurdity, and longing.

Yao will be joined by critic, curator, and cultural historian Kao Chien-Hui, who will open the program by situating Yao’s practice—and landscape art more broadly—within Taiwan’s layered histories of migration, colonialism, martial law, and contested boundaries. Following Yao’s presentation, their dialogue will draw on Kao’s conceptual framework for Landscape as Storytelling to consider landscape as a reflexive mirror, a field of resistance, a mode of seeing, an awakening to boundaries, a shift in perception, and a form of situated knowledge.