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Wong Wang Chuen: Hakka Sonata

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Post date:2022-11-22

Updates:2022-11-22

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Wong Wang Chuen: Hakka Sonata
Event Time
Tue.- Sun. 11:00~19:00
Event Location
B1, No. 120 ,Yanji Street, Da'an Dist., Taipei City Taiwan, R.O.C
Forces of death and life clash, intermingle, and are synthesized into something anew. This cyclical existence, where everything before me is decaying and regenerating itself at once, has hijacked my consciousness, and to come to terms with this sensation, I have embarked on the search for the concealed interconnectedness between the apparently disjunctive elements in life. 

As an outsider having lived in Beipu for the past 7 years—a Hakka village in Northwestern Taiwan—I encounter, on average, a funeral once every two weeks. I don’t know how many I have seen. It was a hot summer day, and as I was passing by a funeral, there was a sharp putrid smell of decaying flesh wafting out of the bereaved family’s house. A few days later I could still smell it in my head—it’s as if the whole village were rotting (or was it just sleeping?) right in front of me.

For a moment I was, in bafflement and delight, caught in the liminal state between death and somnolence, and I knew I had to come to grips with this pervading sense of decay around me—there was no getting around it.

“All things are impermanent—this is the law of arising and passing away.” Irrevocably, all life leads to death, all desires come to decay, yet I am still intrigued by the eternal—it’s calling to me. Perhaps the river of Life will eventually flow towards nothingness, yet for the moment; at least, the incandescent sky hanging above is still making me feel light-headed.

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