![]() Other highlights include rainbow-coloured costumes and masks from northern Thailand’s Phi Ta Khon ghost festival, which are beautiful albeit unsettling.īoth informative and visually arresting, the exhibition has captured something of the Taiwanese spirit. The exhibition gets lighter as it moves through later rooms, with more playful examples of Thai and Japanese horror film posters, visually lighter and less terrifying artwork, and a stunning ceramic sculpture of joss paper seemingly floating in the air by Taiwanese artist Hou Chun-ting. These make way, in turn, for artwork themed around wandering ghosts, from Japanese woodblock prints of mournful female spirits to a terrifying sculpture of the krasue or ahp – among other names – of Southeast Asian folklore embodied as the floating head of a woman connected to dangling internal organs and nothing else below. The theme of judgment is everywhere in the exhibition, which features rare historic paintings depicting the 10 kings of diyu, the Chinese version of hell, as well as a vision of its Buddhist counterpart, Naraka, by contemporary Thai artist Preecha Rachawong. There is the god Yan Wang who is going to judge you: what you have done, before when you were alive, now he needs to see if you are a good person or not,” according to Chiou. On the wall behind a seated deity are the the words: “Here you are.” The sound of bees echoes in the entryway from an unsettling video installation nearby, also entitled Hell, depicting creepy shots of religious objects and temple displays. One of these newly commissioned mixed media pieces, Hell by Taiwanese artist Yan Chung-Hsien, greets visitors to the exhibition with a Dante-like entrance. Hell by Taiwanese artist Yan Chung-hsien at the entrance to the exhibition. For this reason, the Tainan exhibition is more East Asian than its original version, with the additions bringing a greater sense of terror. Tainan Art Museum has added nine pieces from Taiwanese artists and another 16 from other local museums and private collections. Many of the items from the show come from the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, which originally commissioned the exhibit back in 2018. ![]() The practice would enter folklore – and later horror cinema - as a jiangshi vampire zombie. ![]() Transporters would tie them upright with their arms attached to bamboo poles – which made them look like reanimated corpses walking with outstretched limbs. In places like Hunan, a mountainous province in southern China, carrying the bodies was challenging. ![]() The zombies, museum exhibition designer Chen Han-yang later explains, came from the Chinese custom of “corpse walking” to help bring the dead home. “Most people found it very cool that this was the first time they could see such things in an art museum.” The Chinese “zombies” exhibit at the Tainan Art Museum. “I think it’s because in our childhood, we watch a lot of horror movies from China, or Hong Kong or Japan, and we have a huge emotional connection to zombies,” says Chi-Lien, a member of the museum’s education department, as he takes HKFP around the exhibition. Special ticketing arrangements have been in force to ensure visitors get equal opportunity to wander through the “gates of hell” or examine amulets to ward off evil spirits. In Taiwan, an exhibition exploring the afterlife of East and Southeast Asia captures the spirit of the island - Hong Kong Free Press HKFP Close
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