Battleground Girls

作品賞析

Artist Chen Ching-Yao based this video on three war paintings by the painter Chen Chin: Women’s Volunteer Corps, Looking Out, and One Day and reinterpreted them. Chen Ching-Yao believes that Chen Chin, Taiwan’s first female painter during the Japanese colonial period, is very special. Her paintings neither praised the soldiers nor depicted the cruelty of war. Instead, she used a woman’s perspective in showing how people continued to go about their lives peacefully despite the flames of war. The figures she depicted remain calm and composed even in the face of suffering. Chen Ching- Yao’s video work uses modern scenes to recreate the situations in Chen Chin’s paintings. The tension and destructive power of bombing in wartime contrast with the calm attitude of the female characters. Chen Ching-Yao uses the past to satirize the present, and connects the Japanese colonial period and contemporary Taiwan by interweaving the real and the imaginary, as well as time and space, hoping that people will face turbulent international situations with a calm attitude.