With a poetic and refined arrangement of works, Project: The Folly re-explores C-Lab’s architectural texture and a sense of place in the urban environment. Moreover, with a precise selection of works, such as CHEN Wan-Jen’s Redundant Tales, TAI Han-Hong’s From One Corner to the Other, CHIU Chen-Hung’s Plant Stand 05, etc., the exhibition highlights and expands the spatial characteristics of the various rooms in C-Lab’s Art Space V, and enables the audience to bring about and conjure up diverse and changing interpretations and imaginations throughout viewing the exhibition. In contrast to C-Lab’s grand mission of serving as a cultural lab, Project: The Folly specifically delineates the temporality of C-Lab in reality, as well as its polysemic state that is still evolving.(Commentator/WU Meng-Hsuan)

Project: The Folly starts from Taipei City, in which C-LAB is located, and unfolds from the meaning of “folly” in architecture. As an attempt to investigate the connotations and implications of C-LAB by referencing its polysemous spaces, the project also reflects on the historical changes of the site. It gains fresh perspectives on contemporary life through the intervention of architectural/artistic projects, relational reversal, and non-consecutive change in viewpoint. In addition to exploring the nature of the spaces, the project invokes the metaphor of structures to alter the human-space relation, with the aim of blazing a trail beyond benefit-oriented utilitarianism and urban-planning concepts.

CHUANG Wei-Tzu is a curator at the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) and the former editor-in-chief at the art magazine, Artist. Before online media became popular, Chuang worked in the field of journalism, and later switched to arts and cultural reports and art criticism based on her training in journalism and professional analysis and review of art. Her main interest lies in the changes of artistic concepts and technologies employed for their exhibition, as well as gender issues in art history. Her recent curatorial endeavors include “Performance Process” in Re: Play (2020) and Project: The Folly (2021).

The Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) was founded in 2018. It has been planned and operated by the Taiwan Living Arts Foundation affiliated to the Ministry of Culture. The objective of C-LAB is to craft a culturally innovative ecosystem for promoting cultural experiments and social innovation, while offering the public a platform for cultural experiences and exploring the futurity of culture. 

The site of C-Lab was once an air force base, and before that, the Industrial Research Institute of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office. After the war, the facility was taken over by the Taiwan Provincial Administrative Executive Office and converted into the Taiwan Provincial Government’s Central Research Institute at Da’an. In 1950, it became the Ministry of National Defense’s Air Force Command Headquarters, the highest organization for air defense and military operation in Taiwan. 

C-LAB revitalizes usable space, and converges contemporary creativities and cultures through an abundance of programs, such as artistic and cultural innovation and experimentation, exhibitions, performances, screening events, interdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation, international cultural exchange, educational programs and workshops, the magnetic cultural field for communities, the establishment of urban aesthetic parks, and other diversified multi-purpose functions and facilities. It is expected that C-LAB can serve as a site that is built on a vision for continuous socio-cultural experimentation and practice.