Measured in feet

“Visual barriers are destroyed by doing away with office walls, so that whole floors will become one vast open space, or there will be a set of private offices on the perimeter with a large open area within. This destruction of walls, office planners are quick to say, increases office efficiency, because when people are all day long visually exposed to one another, they are less likely to gossip and chat, more likely to keep to themselves.”

__Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1978

The exhibition Measured in Feet points to the changing process of the gap between private and public by means of spatial disposition in a spacious soma-sensing state. The exhibition juxtaposes space, body and perception, and uses the multiple systems generated by the works to raise questions about contemporary society: How do we live with individuals? Through the spatial perception of walking, “the memory triggered by habits of the body” and “the political nature of the space” are interactively discussed. The habitual tendency is a mechanism learned through behaviors, which is influenced by events, experiences, environments, collectives and many other factors, thus shaping and changing the memories of the body. This exhibition presents five artists from Taiwan and Hong Kong, Ho Yen-Yen, Cheng Hsien-Yu, Yang Chi-Chuan, Kong Chun-Hei, and Wei Po-Jen. They each disassemble the memories of the body, disturb the balance of order, and expose our privacy being inevitably publicized in today’s “transparent society”.

In the realm of architecture, no matter urban design, architecture design, or places planned in other ways, there has always been a tradition of perceiving space through walking, and the spatial perception has always implied some kind of “itinerary of feeling”. With the development of technology, the load bearing walls have been replaced by beam-column modular structure, the height of indoor ceiling has been lowered. And with the use of permeable materials, the mobility of space has increased, the body has broken free from the sense of bondage, and it has also become our yearning for freedom, equality and public open space. But at the same time, this kind of transparency has also set us under each other’s surveillance, compelled us to self-regulation. In this exhibition space, which cannot be seen at a glance, the old wall structure is replaced by fissures, promenades and partitions created by the works. By the spatial disposition of the works, the viewer is encouraged to wander, cross, shuttle, detour, and make contact with the space.

If the action of walking enables us to perceive time in space and identify the boundary of consciousness, the exhibition Measured by Feet is an attempt to enter and reconcile the emotions of individuals that cannot be alleviated by the social system through the method of curation, and to begin a discussion on the scale of the viewing system, the human body, the social environment and the boundary of consciousness.

Tour Guide｜Wu Yao-Ting

Speaker｜Lu Pei-Yi(Associate professor of MA Program on Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art, National Taipei University of Education), Tseng Che-Wei(Co-researcher & Art worker)

Speaker｜Lin Cheng-Wei, Lin Yu-Hsuan, Tuan Mu, Lu Wei, Lai Hsiao-Ying

Presenters | National Arts and Culture Foundation, Curator’s Incubator Program@Museums, Chew’s Culture Foundation