05/05/2022 – 15/02/2023
Soulangh cultural park, Tainan, Taiwan
More info HERE

iii artists Wen Chin Fu and Marije Baalman will present their work at Tainan. 

Sails, Sugar & Silicon is an exhibition in which two Dutch and Taiwanese artists reflect, through performative experiences that play with technology and the senses, on the 400 year history of material exchanges between The Netherlands and Taiwan. 

The exhibition presents works by Dutch artist Marije Baalman and Taiwanese born, naturalized Dutch Wen Chin Fu. Both artists approach the intertwined history of their native countries by making audiovisual creations using invented instruments. 

Marije Baalman makes music out of the wind playing with kites, electronic sensors and software. She grew up on the coastal province of Friesland where the strong winds make an ideal environment for flying kites. These same winds in the 17th century filled the sails of Dutch ships making their way towards Taiwan. In Frisian the word for kite ‘draakje fleane’ is closely related to the English word drake or dragon. During her stay in Taiwan Marije Baalman will be learning about Taiwanese kiting traditions. Taiwan today is also the world’s larger exporter of silicon chips, the basic building blocks of the mobile digital instruments that Marije Baalman engineers to sonify the wind.

Before exporting silicon, during the Dutch colonial period Taiwan was an exporter of sugar, with the Dutch establishing sugar plantations on the island to expand the production of what was then a new colonial good. Siao-Long Cultural Park, which hosts the exhibition, was itself in origin a sugar refinery. Wen Chin Fu works with sugar as primary material. She was inspired by a candy whistle from her childhood, a sweet that made sound until it melted in the mouth. Wen Chin Fu uses candy making techniques to create simple percussion instruments, which she calls Tang, the Chinese word for sugar, which also conveys onomatopoeically the sound of the instrument. Tang is an instrument that can be played musically, but who’s chemical cristallisation process becomes a source of fascination for the experimental film made in collaboration with artist Tseng, Li-Chun, also featured in the exhibition. 

Sails, Sugar & Silicon is the first exhibition starting the 2022-2024 exchange program between iii in The Hague and Siao-Long Cultural Park in Tainan, leading up to the 400 anniversary of relations between The Netherlands and Taiwan. The participation of iii in this exchange program is supported by The Creative Industries Fund NL.