Nightmare City

作品賞析

HUNG Tien-Hsien’s works are powerful artistic fables. Nightmare City depicts an elephant in a calm background of evening blue. An elephant wearing a sad expression wades slowly across the landscape. The city, depicted as a parasite upon the elephant’s back, is packed with building towers and chimneys belching exhaust gases. Public transport routes have created many caves and holes within the elephant’s body that appear like bullet wounds, with mass transport systems hurtling back and forth along the torso of the beast. Even the moon itself could not escape the fate of been harnessed as a power source for the city. Despite these outrageous scenes, many people are still lining up to enter the city. This work is the artist’s metaphor for human development that sacrifices cultural and historical elements, and how development and expansion eventually become mere tools of the politicians and corporations, leaving behind massive debts and overly developed cities.