T'ien-Kung-K'Ai-Wu: Picture of an Overlock Machine

作品賞析

CHEN Ching-Yao uses humorous and funny disguised photograph to make people reflect on the global issues hidden in life. “Picture of an Overlock Machine” is one of the artist’s “T'ien-Kung K'Ai-Wu” series that re-interprets an industry scene mentioned by the industry encyclopedia, “T'ien-kung K'ai-wu: Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century,” that was passed down from the Ming Dynasty of China. In this photo, the artist is disguised as a peeper behind the window, where a girl on the left is dressed up in ancient clothing and picks up the symbolic Taiwanese traditional flowery cloth with confidence. The other side shows a Southeast Asian foreign worker dressed in modern clothing who imitates the finger pointing of oriental women, implying the issues on cultural adaptation and loss of identify faced by foreign workers. The artist uses foreign workers from Southeast Asia to lead the viewers with reflection on the transition of Taiwanese labor-force and industrial structure under globalization.