Text in the Room, Deferred curated by Wang Jing brings together six artists whose practices interrogate the fractures, vulnerabilities, and anxieties embedded in contemporary experience. Here, moving image is not a supplement to text but a primary medium—unfolding through bodies, flows, and time, mirroring the incompleteness of lived reality. Each work exists as a fragment, simultaneously subject and object, tracing trajectories within specific social and cultural terrains.
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Cai Guo Jie Working as a self-described “single soldier,” Cai examines power boundaries within urban and territorial fissures. His works Vertical Land and Sea Route focus on the ecological and political consequences of “cross-boundary” disputes in Kinmen waters. By juxtaposing social realities with artistic interventions, his fragmented method resists closed narratives and proposes politics through discontinuity.
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Liu Wei Wei With a background in law, Liu collaborates with lawyers and factory workers to bring justice into artistic practice. Since 2024, he has lived alongside workers in a Shenzhen factory, transforming conflictual realities and legal processes into theatrical form. The Unfocused Ones experiments with “image power”: workers vote on whether their footage may be edited or used, exposing the fragile boundary between art and exploitation.
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Weng Io Wong Through stop-motion animation reassembled as video, Wong continues her exploration of “Macau Baroque.” Her work navigates the paradox of colonial absence and presence, weaving together history, memory, and cultural entanglements. By mimicking what is lost, she forges connections with the ever-present “other” that shapes identity.
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Wu Lao Bai Exhibiting Square and Lovers, Wu traces resilience at the margins of labor and gender. Square follows two women dismissed during automation, documenting their solidarity in struggle. Lovers chronicles an activist action against conversion therapy, where three red trucks traversed six cities. Together, these works ask whether connection remains possible amid systemic adversity.
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Xu Tan Since 2020, Xu has researched social psychological symptoms of depression, using empathetic interviews and repeated dialogues as method. His latest trilogy of videos focuses on rural women’s mental states, revealing how their “abnormal speech” signals urgent realities ignored by society.
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Yuen Nga Chi Transitioning from family narratives to symbolic relations between humans and animals, Yuen’s work centers on the Chinese white dolphin—once a mascot, now a metaphor for disappearance and fragility. Her images are suffused with loss and regression, embedding uncertain political gestures in everyday movements.
The exhibition accommodates peripheral discourses of fracture, fragility, and anxiety. By situating these voices within the gallery, the exhibition insists they be observed, spoken, and contested—transforming the absence of text into a presence of image, relation, and debate.
gdm, in collaboration with exhibition curator Wang Jing, is honored to announce the forthcoming publication accompanying Text in the Room, Deferred. Art historian Dr. Yu-Chieh Li has authored a major essay entitled "Beyond the Image: Affect, Reality, and Ethics in Recent Chinese-Language Video Art." This text will be released in full on 9 July 2026, marking the official opening of the exhibition.
Artist Talk — The Moving Image as Unconcealment
Cai Guo Jie, Xu Tan and Yuen Nga Chi in Conversation with Huang Chien-Hung and Hsieh I-Yi, moderated by Wang Jing
Date: 11 July 2026 (Saturday), 3-6pm
Venue: gdm Taipei, 390 Ruiguang Road, Neihu, Taipei
Text in the Room, Deferred unveils as the deeply personal creative journeys of six different artists. The exhibited works come together as a “room”, in which text functions not merely as a tool for recording or depiction, but as performance; at the same time, the historical trajectory of images and the language of media are repeatedly evaluated and applied.
At once unique and reproducible, the works on show juggle with the realities of social interaction, which may be fractured, fragile, and rife with anxiety. Presenting the participating artists in conversation with two guest speakers from related fields, this forum expands upon the artists’ processes of video filming and editing, expounding upon their artistic interventions that are oriented towards the unravelling of images.
Huang Chien-Hung is a curator and professor at the Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts, and director of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts at the Taipei National University of the Arts. Hsieh I-Yi is an assistant professor at the Institute of Visual Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.