Bat Night Market, which will be premiered at Taipei Arts Festival this August, is a three-year-developed project by artist Ku Kuang-Yi. Combining ‘art’ and ‘science’, it integrates bioart, speculative design, participatory performance and so on to construct a new form of performance and a method of knowledge experience.
In this talk, Ku Kuang-Yi will share about this project from the perspective of ‘bioart’ and ‘speculative design’ which are relatively unfamiliar to the public, to uncover the creative concept, content and development process. Meanwhile, Wang Po-Wei, the artistic director of Digital Art Foundation, is invited to respond to it as well as lead a discussion.
Artist/Speaker: Ku Kang-Yi
Assistant Professor, Institute of Applied Arts, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.
Ku Kuang-Yi was born in Taipei, Taiwan, recently based in the Netherlands and Taiwan. He co-founded TW BioArt (a bioart community in Taiwan) to stimulate the fields of BioArt and Science+Art in Taiwan. He has graduated with triple master degrees with social design from Design Academy Eindhoven, dentistry from National Yang-Ming University and communication design from Shih Chien University. Formerly a dentist, Ku is a bio-artist and speculative designer. He attempts to expand the possibilities of combining arts, design and science. His works often focus on clinical medicine, human body, interspecies interaction and sexuality. He tries to explore ethical issues in the scientific field through artistic practice and design methods, aiming to investigate the relationships among technology, individual and the environment. Ku Kuang-Yi’s “Tiger Penis Project” has been awarded Gijs Bakker Award 2018, the annual prize for the best project by a graduating master’s student in Design Academy Eindhoven. He has also won the 1st prize of Taipei Digital Art Awards in 2015 with “The Fellatio Modification Project”, where he involves body modification, gender studies, queer theories, and dentistry all together. His works were featured in international media such as New Scientist, The Huffington Post, Elephant Magazine, DAMN° Magazine, Dezeen, Designboom, VICE, Dazed Digital, Daily Mail, New York Post and so on.
Wang Po-Wei
Wang Po-Wei is the artistic director of Digital Art Foundation, Taiwan. His research interests include Media Theory, History of Contemporary Art, Sociology of Culture and Art, and Art/Science/Technology (AST). Translated Niklas Luhmann’s Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität into Chinese together with Chang Chin-Hui.
