Artist｜CHANG Ling
Group Exhibition | VOC, Sea Monsters, Artillery Fire, and Them: 400 Years of Fort Zeelandia
Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan
28 March 2024 – 16 June 2024
Don Gallery is pleased to announce the participation of artist CHANG Ling in the group exhibition " VOC, Sea Monsters, Artillery Fire, and Them: 400 Years of Fort Zeelandia" organised by the Tainan Art Museum. Since the advancement of nautical technology and cartography in the 15th century, the world had ushered in the Age of Discovery in history. Empires encountered constantly on the sea, and crossfires took place across different waters, following maps and scents of spices into the Far East and expanding their territories. Deerskin, spices, sugar, and porcelain were all resources from the tropical Far East, fascinatedly sought after by empires. Due to her ample resources and strategic location, Formosa (Taiwan), reputed “the pearl on the sea,” saw empires, merchants, and migrants come and go since centuries ago. Colonizers arrived in the faraway places with the advantage of relatively matured technology, encountered the indigenous people inhabiting the island of abundance, and subsequently created economic and production systems.
After the colonizer occupied Formosa, the natural resources on the island entered an initial stage of industrialization, for instance, the prototypical sugar refinery built by the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or the Dutch East India Company); the sika deerskin sourced from the Plain Indigenous People, of which the exported number reached 100,000 pieces per year; and various industries developed by the colonizer, including the camphor, forestry, and tea industries. Humans migrated for resources, and then built new social systems. Colonizer brought with them seeds of new species to newfound lands, and facilitated the growth of new species and the disappearance of the old. The Dutch occupied Taiwan in 1624 and subsequently built the Fort Zeelandia. Today, after four hundred years since the establishment of the fort, the symbolic meaning of this exhibition is no longer to re-examine the influence of the invader’s colonial regime, but instead to open-mindedly unearth, comprehend, and re-imagine the exchange of culture, species, and resources at the time. Through examining the contemporary time by reviewing history, the expression of the artworks featured in this exhibition enables us to reflect on a range of contemporary topics, including the post-colonial society of Taiwan, the increasingly intensified concern over geopolitics, the crisis of regional warfare, and the allocation of resources.
This curatorial project starts with the Fort Zeelandia built by the VOC in 1624. Through the problematic revolving around the colonization and trade by this state-run commercial company – one that was able to carry out diplomatic actions and launch violent wars – this exhibition concentrates on the exploration of several keywords, including “trade,” “war,” “marine navigation,” “colonization,” “post-colonial,” “map,” and “plants and species migration.”
Text from Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan
21 March 2024
