The three works – The Chat, The Lighting, and The Kung Flu, in Musquiqui Chihying’s There Are Lights That Never Go Out unveil a new possibility for thinking about the essay quality of image. While the artist contemplates on the use of contemporary machines and technologies, as well as how they influence the production of meaning on a perceptual level, he also touches upon the historical framework that sustains the genre of essay. Through creating an entanglement of light, movie, digital image, racial image, and the artist himself, the three works constitute a discourse about “the biased errors of technologies,” and offers a rather convincing form of expression for the essay narrative regarding the image of our time co-created by human and machine.(Commentator/WANG Po-Wei)

There Are Lights That Never Go Out uses an algorithm created by a Taiwanese company as a starting point to explore how this technology has now become the most widely used smartphone camera algorithm on the African continent today. At the same time, the exhibition examines the exchanges between Asian multinational companies and the countries in the Global South to critique contemporary image politics from the critical perspective of image history. The exhibition title is inspired by the Mandarin title of one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films (Blow-Up), and engages in the deconstruction and a dialectic process based on objects, photographic technologies, image history, and the generative network of digital image apart from discussing the power relation between a photographer and his subject.

Musquiqui Chihying specializes in the use of film and sound to create his work, through which the artist investigates the relations between the human condition and the environmental system in the age of global capitalization, while inquiring into and researching about issues related to the subjectivity of contemporary society in the Global South. In addition, he is a member of the Taiwanese art group, Fuxinghen Studio, as well as the founder-director of the Research Lab of Image and Sound (RLIS), which focuses on media and image research.