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The artists in this exhibition are participants in an art camp for the past two years. The camp is part of the Looking for Art Series hosted by VT Artsalon. During this Covid-outbreak year, the artists met and gathered once again, trying to find a new lifestyle through the exhibition. On the other hand, they attempt to search for image slices of people’s activities on the Internet and of temporarily restricted physical contact during the pandemic.

These eight artists each established their own set of rules and procedures for their art projects, and they followed the guidelines of individual projects to create their works. In other words, every artwork is a co-creation by the artist who set the rules and the others who followed. Some of these rules are site-specific; some limit the art-making time to only a few days; some regulate the form of images, and others do not restrict the mediums. The artists are intertwined in the network of rules set by one another. They obey the restrictions and, somewhat even more interestingly, go beyond the limits.

In this series of works, some common characteristics can be found, such as “anonymity” formed with the help of the Internet, social media platforms, and even third-party intermediates. The works were responded to and continuously created without knowing the other party, thus affecting or not affecting the final presentation. Under the circumstances, speculation, trust, curiosity, and confusion are also truthfully reflected in the work. Another point is “daily/non-daily.” The artists’ creating period coincided with the most severe months of the pandemic in Taiwan. Therefore, the artists stayed in their living space for a large portion of the time to discuss and take turns creating artwork. In this confined “everyday” context, it ends up presenting a kind of “non-daily” context. Not only because the accidental disease outbreak will become the norm, but when the artists produced works in turn, the transition from the private sphere to the public one that they snooped on also reveals many alien and individual details of the accustomed environment. In addition, the “fragmentary/ experimental” characteristics are also shown in many works. Throughout the creating time from as short as a few days to as long as a few months, the artists followed the instructions to produce artwork by turns and constantly tried the medium they are unfamiliar with. After attempts of image superimposition, sound collection, and text splicing, the final works assembled in the hands of the original project creator look like puzzles, fragmented patterns, and even like arbitrary screenshots in cellphones. Throughout the process, not only the artists who adhered to the rules had conducted experiments, the artists who set the rules also had been exploring and trying how to organize the works. What’s more, they even returned to the fundamental process – how to read and listen to these materials.

Though the artists’ co-creations and discussions with each other in the past few months can’t compare with their common experience of ocean and mountain travels in the previous art camps (part of the Looking for Art Series), they develop another level of relationship that’s different from the actual trip. The artists wander in the living space and even the virtual areas on the Internet. They roam around the mountain paths among the works, circulate in the water basin among the artists, and go through the space to the other side through images.