‘Re: Battle City’ imagines a Taiwan suffocating under a regime of billionaire power and technological control, offering a rare artistic challenge to the triumphalist story of the nation’s economic success
By Julien Oeuillet / Contributing reporter
In a projection room, visitors at the Re: Battle City exhibition at Kaohsiung’s Neiwei Arts Center are invited to sit and watch a 20-minute animated movie.Artist Chang Li-ren (張立人) created the movie with dolls he made by molding paper into crude, painted figurines. The dolls interact in a detailed and realistic Taiwanese cityscape. Outside the projection room, visitors can wander around a massive model of the city.A sizeable crowd happily takes pictures of what looks like the best dollhouse in Taiwan: the same props that were used to tell the story of the country’s descent into techno-dictatorship in the movie.
The models of streets created by Chang Li-ren are extremely realistic and quintessentially Taiwanese.
The contrast is strong, and that is the whole point.Cheng Ya-Ping (鄭亞萍), a curator for Neiwei who worked with the exhibition’s curator, says that the animation reflects “some problems of Taiwanese society, such as misleading messages.”
