A Better Tomorrow
*ABK, an abbreviation of Anak Buah Kapal, which means ship crew in Indonesian, is how Indonesian crew name themselves.
No One Here - Afternoon under the Coconut Tree is the first public presentation of a long-term project by Working Hard since 2019. The project aims to discover those unseen social landscapes beyond the grand narrative.
How would you consider this space and this landscape? and how does this place mean to you? These are the messages and questions you normally perceive from their artwork. Their creation aims to explore the difference among similar cultures and seek the identity and shared common when placing in foreign context.
Working Hard is an artist collective from Taiwan. Their work usually presents in the forms of spatial installation and sculpture combining with sounds. This may derive from their origin, Taiwan, where its people have various collective memories and complicated national identity. The complexity of where they grew up results in their curiosity of migration and the pursuit of vanishing histories under urbanization. Embracing the obsession of history and archive, their work always conveys a distancing when placing a self in the environment framed with foreign language, culture and politics. Their work discloses the transitional and exceptional condition of those survive in the border and the grey zone of the city.
The site-specific installation in the exhibition A Better Tomorrow consists of sound recordings of a group of Indonesian fishermen in Taiwan who named themselves Taiwan ABK*. The sounds were recorded by artists during their participation of migrant workers’ events and gatherings. The reason makes them to focus on these specific migrant groups is their observation on the changes of Taiwanese society within 30 years since the government first started to import the migrant labors from Southeast Asia. The artists focus on the marginal space and the border between ocean and island, because the ocean is not only a resource, but also a battlefield of power and authority. For these Indonesian migrant workers, the shore facing water is a foreign home, a temporary dwelling. The exotic landscape in these transitional spaces have been always highly attractive to Working Hard, seduced them to dive into the complexity of its cultural performance.
Working Hard collected the human voice, humming songs, environmental noises of ordinary daily life of these fishermen from a personal point of view, then recomposed the script of a sound theater and performed a no-man show with soundscape. Although Working Hard were not familiar with the language (Indonesian), but their experience could be similar to the visitor who first encounter the exhibit. They imagined a whole new narrative based on their perception of the soundscape. What would the better tomorrow look like? Is the better tomorrow ever existing? In the artwork, the scenario could be replaced within any culture, and the same question might be proposed too.
Apart from the sound allocation at different corners of the space, Working Hard also built a small village which assembled from the second-hand wooden material in the gallery. There are canvases printed with various picture like a collage, placing and hanging among the village’s structure. At the far end of the gallery, there is a sound of Muslim prayers came from the half-opened door. For Working Hard, what they are exhibiting is a culture survives in a transitional and separated condition in the city.
A canvas printed with the scenery of tropical coconut trees is the flag of Migrant Workers Association. It symbolized the border of dream and reality, and the boundary of exotic landscape and unknown place. Another canvas printed with red and white claw machine with a mark written Lucky Catch is the reflection of migrant fishermen’s leisure activity. It looks like a backdrop panel of theater which presenting the choice and decision of life, also as a symbol of unknown future behind the scene.
----Working Hard