ARTICLES

 

Wei-Ming Ho launched his “Art-Qaeda Project” during 2008-2010. This place-specific work is an ephemeral intervention into the urban landscape of the city of Taipei on the island of Taiwan. A series of different nocturnal projections presents the dialogue between individual images on the one hand and the city, nature and consumerism on the other. His projected pictorial and cinematic language allows remains within a socially critical diction and a field of tension with the environment. In the bizarre atmosphere of the night, in different locations, identified in the video with the aid of textual insertions, the “Art-Qaeda Project” seems like a remarkable, mysterious and political, media-related reworking of a spontaneous action. Wei-Ming Ho decided very deliberately on the fact that the name corresponded with that of the Islamist terror organisation: his video work in fact seems like a rapidly executed guerrilla action. Ho is travelling in a car with a powerful, swivelling projector and throwing his pictorial worlds on to façades, walls, shops, the presidential palace and Taipei’s tallest building, the ‘101 Tower’. They disappear again as quickly as they came. Additional information such as statistics, measurements, symbols, Morse code and special electronic music charge the work with mystical signs and convey the impression of an action accompanied by television. An artistic road movie with no decipherable and narrative structure, but rich in tension, subversive and critical.                              (By curator Claus Friede).