Artwork Appreciation
CHANG Teng-Yuan is skilled in deriving artistic inspiration from everyday objects, using painting, comic, and animation devices to reflect upon our visual experiences in modern life. The work Suspect Terrorist is set several thousand years after the end of the world. A humanoid parrot has managed to track down Earth to conduct archaeological studies after receiving a message broadcasted from the planet. Atop a navy blue background, a group of humanoid parrots wearing lab suits are using binoculars to carefully study a suspicious-looking object in front of them. This object is actually Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha that depicts a Buddha staring into a TV screen displaying his own image. To CHANG Teng-Yuan, a parrot is only capable of mimicking our actions, and so has copied our actions and behavior as a means of studying the Earth’s civilization. This has led to erroneous judgment of objects that they cannot understand. When creating this artwork, CHANG Teng-Yuan has thought of an end-of-the-world scenario and attempted to introduce various symbols and systems in order to ponder about the possibility of such a scenario. CHANG Teng-Yuan hopes that this work would renew people’s attention to things that they have often neglected or callously tossed aside, and highlight the confusion that characterize this day and age.