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​南勢庄故事集

The Lâm-sè-tsng Tales

2015-2023

Artist's book, designed furniture

南勢庄位在彰化鹿港鎮,藝術家的叔公阿頂擔任當地角頭廟乩童,跳的是李府千歲。阿頂對藝術家講述很多乩童「辦事」的經歷,以及「借名」,這是一種透過姓名的有無來辨認是神是邪的運作邏輯,但在特定條件下,邪也可以透過向神借名字來得到原本沒有的力量。藝術家模仿喬叟《坎特伯里故事集》的敘事結構,將這些經歷寫成《南勢庄故事集》,在阿頂帶領的簽亡途中,四個角色分別講述關於死亡、生存、及借名的故事。

 

2023年在「無垠之森」的展覽中,策展人邀請藝術家將《南勢庄故事集》轉變成散落在四個子展區之間,擔任索引功能的過道。短篇小說中包含非常多的索引,如同借名那樣曲解並超譯了小說中的詞條,最終連結起展區其他作品背後的世界觀。

Lâm-sè-tsng is located in Lukang Township, Changhua. The artist's great-uncle, A-Ding, served as the tang-ki (spirit medium) for the local neighborhood temple, channeling the god Lord Lee (李府千歲). A-Ding told the artist many stories about his experiences "handling affairs" as a medium, including the underworld logic of "name-borrowing" — a system in which the presence or absence of a name is used to distinguish deities from wandering ghosts. Under certain conditions, however, even ghosts can borrow a name from a deity to gain power they wouldn't otherwise possess.

 

Drawing on the narrative structure of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the artist transformed these experiences into The Lâm-sè-tsng Tales. During a spirit-summoning journey led by A-Ding, four characters each tell a story about death, survival, and the borrowing of names. In the exhibition Forest of Being Time in 2023, the curator invited the artist to transform The Lâm-sè-tsng Tales into a passageway scattered across four sub-exhibition areas, functioning as an index. The short stories contain a dense web of index entries — much like the logic of name-borrowing itself — which distort and over-interpret terms within the fiction, ultimately linking together the underlying worldviews of the other works throughout the exhibition.

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