Text in the Room, Deferred is featured in "Unfinished Rooms" by Tseng Che-Wei in ArtReview Chinese Edition.
"Walls, doors, windows, and stairs initially subdivide living space in order to tie it point by point together again." [1]
This summer, the group exhibition "Text in the Room, Deferred," curated by Wang Jing, brings together six Chinese-language video artists and divides the gallery space of gdm Taipei into a series of "unfinished rooms": the rooms are connected, sharing walls, living side by side yet separates each other. It presents a configuration that may well mirror the condition of the world we inhabit today.
From the "trans-experience" proposed in 1998 by the China-born, Paris-based artist Chen Zhen (referring to the "cultural homelessness" produced by the acceleration of globalization) to the optimistic slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, "One World, One Dream," a vision of a borderless, freely mobile "global village" was sketched out. Yet the optimistic promise of cultural pluralism around the turn of the millennium has yet to be fulfilled.
Looking back at the exhibition title, the negation in the Chinese name ("no/there is not") and the English title "Text in the Room, Deferred" with the word "deferred" implying a historical debt still awaiting repayment, precisely refract this gap: they point both to the universal legacy left by "modernity" as an unfinished project, and to the postcolonial condition now saturated with fragmented identities, experiences of exile, and diaspora.
[1] Siegert, B., & Peters, J. D. (2012). Doors: On the materiality of the symbolic. Grey Room, 47, 6-23. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00067direct.mit+2)
Text translated from original in Chinese. Courtesy of ArtReview Chinese Edition.
Images: Text in the Room, Deferred, gdm Taipei, 2026 (installation view). Photography by Anpis Wang.
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ArtReview Chinese Edition | Text in the Room, Deferred
