24 March - 4 May 2019 | A Concept Gallery

This exhibition is a metaphor from the history of the individual, combining writing, fiction, and the exchange of perspectives. From the mother's story, the artist derives three virtual archives: "Mr. Han", "Miss Shu" and "Attic".  They are intertwined and reflect on the concept of the exhibition.  It is a re-writing experiment of personal history, projecting multiple connotations across regions and time.

The story starts from a trip.  In 2010, Candy Bird traveled to Shanghai with his mother, who was born there. It has been 20 years ago since the last time she returned. Candy Bird asked her personal experience in detail during the journey, and it triggers the distant memory of another journey in 1959.  It was the year after the outbreak of the ‘823 Artillery Bombardment’ between China and Taiwan. On one early autumn morning, the 10-year-old mother left Shanghai with her grandmother. She still remembers to this day the rush that it was too late to say goodbye to her classmates. The mother and daughter came to Taiwan to reunite with their grandparents via Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Macau and Hong Kong. They stayed in Hong Kong without any identification for almost one year, living in the factory near Pak Kung Street at that time. In the hidden attic on the second floor of the factory, the mother and daughter were waiting for the identification documents and ferry tickets from Taiwan.

"Arrived, us" is a sentence without context. It expresses the actual arrival of the body or implies the achievement of an intangible goal.  It’s subject points to an individual, a group, a society or a country. Through juxtaposition and fabrication, the Taiwanese-born artist Candy Bird experiments with the rewriting of personal history, expresses contemporary sociality and ideology.  The exhibition is also his discussion of the past, future, hometown, and the distant.