Sugar Nocturne – Candy Bird Solo Exhibition

Sugar Nocturne – Candy Bird Solo Exhibition

Hong-Gah Museum is honored to present Candy Bird’s new solo exhibition, Sugar Nocturne. The exhibition features a series of spatial installations that center on the artist’s recent explorations: an inquiry into how migration and memory intersect with contemporary structures of politics. In Sugar Nocturn, Candy Bird situates the trajectories of Chinese migrants who came to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War within East Asia’s enduring Cold War legacies and its newly emerging geopolitics. Through atmospheres that hover between the everyday and the allegorical, he engages the audience’s senses, reflecting on the fragility of contemporary democracy while also confronting the inner tensions of Taiwan’s post-authoritarian society.

The museum first collaborated with Candy Bird in 2018 on the community art project Video On The Phone. In this project, the artist played the role of storyteller, walking from Hong-Gah Museum to Polymer Art Studio while weaving graffiti interventions into the urban landscape with live narration. This marked a shift in his practice from site-specific graffiti toward performative storytelling and narrative installation, aligning his work with broader artistic conversations about how art mediates between urban experience and memory. In 2022, he participated in the group exhibition Where Are You Now? Imagining Distance, presenting video works and paintings that explored the poetics of light and shadow, alongside an outdoor performance The Moment, which intertwined scattered news fragments and daily events into a story of urban resonance.

In recent years, Candy Bird has moved away from direct street graffiti but deepened his reflection on social contradictions. He situates the lingering ethnic and identity divisions between post–Chinese Civil War mainland migrants and local Taiwanese within East Asia’s enduring Cold War legacies. These tensions are further framed against the region’s emerging geopolitical divides. At the same time, he revisits his own family background to probe ideological conflicts and the fragility of Taiwan’s democratic experiment in daily life. This dual lens transforms personal experience into a gateway for examining historical residues, offering an alternative counterpoint to dominant political and historical narratives. Formally, Candy Bird frequently collaborates with dancers and actors, using embodied performance to convey heightened emotion. His video editing juxtaposes the cool detachment of the urban environment with stream-of-consciousness narration, gradually shaping a distinctive aesthetic idiom.

In Sugar Nocturne, he combines moving images with furniture arrangements, constructing an atmosphere of tension between the everyday and the allegorical, where intimacy intersects with estrangement. The exhibition is composed of multiple moving-image works and spatial installations, staged in dialogue with the museum’s elongated corridors and adjacent projection rooms. Domestic motifs—a fragmentary wallpaper pattern, a wooden coat stand, leather sofas and stools—concentrate the narrative within a suspended temporality, evoking both familiarity and unease. The use of Simplified Chinese texts, together with dialogues between male and female characters, underscores disjunctions of identity and belonging, pointing toward a complex, irretrievable state. The exhibition invites audiences to project and imagine, bringing into focus the overlooked textures of daily experience and affect that lie beneath sweeping historical and political narratives.