The Serene Gallery
Born in 1983 in Kaohsiung, Ming-Hwa YEH graduated from the seven-year program at the School of Dance, Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) in 2006. She is a Taiwan-based independent choreographer and dancer. Her more recent creative ideas explore and interpret time in the cosmos through body movements, senses and aesthetics. She began her creative career in 2008. Her work Seize was selected as "30 Performance Arts to Watch 2009" by United Daily News, and presented in the "Young Stars, New Vision" project in 2009 and 2010. In 2010, Seize was invited by La Biennale di Venezia, the 7th International Festival of Contemporary Dance. Sponsored by the LO Man-fei Dance Scholarship and the National Culture and Arts Foundation, she was an artist in residence at AiR Bergen, Norway in 2013. Then in 2014, she presented Nordic working in progress with subsidies from the My First Show Program initiative of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Lo Man-fei Scholarship. In 2015, cidroN was featured by the National Culture and Arts Foundation. She was invited by the Women In Dance Leadership Conference in Louisiana, USA in 2015. In the same year, Nordic was commissioned by the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park under its New Points on Stage@Lab project, where she presented the full three-hour Nordic and was nominated by the fourteenth Taishin Arts Award. In 2016, she received grants from the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) to be an artist-in-residence in Japan.
Graduated from the Department of Sculpture, National Taiwan University of Arts, Yu-Ting TUNG is now a freelance artist, living and working in Taipei. Having dove into the world of theater and stage design and viewing space as the 3-dimensional presentation and experimentation of imagination, TUNG is always seeking collaboration in various creative fields, brainstorming how to transform visual arts experience into different vocabularies. Her design can be seen across a range of productions, including the stage design for Ming-Hwa YEH's Nordic as part of the New Points on Stage@Lab project in 2015 and YEH's personal presentation of Nordic in 2014 ; installation design and production of Hsiao-Tzu TIEN's Out of Blue in the 2012 Young Star, New Vision project and TIEN's personal presentation Pause in 2009 ; and the props production for Robert Wilson & Haiming Wei's Orlando.
MoNTUE Museum of National Taipei University of Education Art museum: a place that houses a kaleidoscope of artistic expressions. But is that all it is? Since its inception, the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE) has been breaking boundaries by coalescing artistic energies from diverse backgrounds in the creation of imaginative dialogues between art and the people. True artists are always seeking ways to break with existing conventions and play with innovative and creative mediums through experimentation and exploration. In view of encouraging artists to dream outside the box, the MoNTUE launched the Dreamin’ MoNTUE initiative in 2015, consolidating resources and professional opportunities to present a stage for artists to create art to their hearts' content.
The 2017 Dreamin' MoNTUE exhibition features Ming-Hwa YEH's The Serene Gallery and Fangas Nayaw's masingkiay. These two performing artists will each, in their one-month long exhibition period, move with the time to create a new sensory experience that marries "exhibition" and "performance", two seemingly different forms of art belonging to divergent spatial realms. The open engagement approach merges the two functions into one space. Artists, artwork, visitors are no longer bound by time in the museum. Together, they give birth to an organic exhibition.
Mixed suspension installations (bulk bags, recycled plastic particles), sound loops, single-channel digital video, performances 2017 Mixed space installation, performances
Mixed suspension installations (bulk bags, recycled plastic particles), surround sound recordings, wireless headphones, loudspeaker components, performances
Single-channel digital video loops, surround sound recordings, loudspeaker components, performances
Plastic particles used in this exhibition come from recycled materials, all of which will be recycled again for future use. Your One-and-Only Moment: daily visitor hours 15:00-18:00; online pre-registration required. After getting confirmation email, please check in at the Information Desk on the first floor 15 mins before your reserved visiting hours. Sat
Who comes knocking on the night's door?—Special Guests I Guests│ Ming-Hwa YEH and Jun-Honn KAO (artist) Wed
Who comes knocking on the night's door?—Special Guests II Guests│ Ming-Hwa YEH and Fu-Kuen Tang (Independent curator) Sat
Artist's Night: Special Performance (admission begins at 18:30) Guests│ Ming-Hwa YEH and Shu-Yi CHOU (choreographer) For more information, visit us at
"If nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living." - Jules Henri Poincaré
Born in 1985 and grew up in Tamsui, SHENG's experimentation on sounds spans film and theater, psychedelically wandering in between acoustic and glitch. He offered his expertise in the surround sound mixing and sound design for "Giuseppe Castiglione－ Lang Shining New Media Art Exhibition" at the National Palace Museum; music design for Ming-Hwa YEH's Nordic as part of the New Points on Stage@Lab project; sound design for CBMI's Render Ghost; foley sound editing for the movie The Laundryman; sound mixing and sound design for the film Pan Zhog as part of CMHK SoundAnchor #22 in the Taiwan-Hong Kong Exchange Project; and the sound design for LEE Chen-wei's Together Alone stage performance in the 2016 Innovation Series of Dance launched by the National Theater & Concert Hall. His sound design for the film Plastic China was selected in the International Sundance Film Festival.
Born in Hong Kong, Adrianne CHIU took classes in painting and photography at the Hong Kong Arts Centre and graduated from the Department of Motion Picture at the National Taiwan University of Arts. She was the Art Director of ARNIE, a short film selected in the International Critics' Week of the 69 th Cannes Film Festival in 2016, and Sea Breeze, a short film invited to be screened at the Palm Springs ShortFest and Aspen Shortfest in 2015. She designed the stage for Assembly Dance Theatre x TIEN, Hsiao-Tzu“The Hole". Her video works can be seen in Ming-Hwa YEH's Nordic as part of the New Points on Stage@Lab project in 2015, and Cloud Gate 2's Campus Tour sponsored by Cathay Life Insurance. As a director, her film Drifting Dust was a finalist in the InShadow Dance Video competition in Portugal.
The Serene Gallery is the third phase of its precursor Nordic, a two-phase theatrical presentation. It's about moving the theatrical stage to a museum to re-imagine and create a sensory experience unique to each viewer. Infused with the movements and scene changes from the theater, and suffused in the meandering in a museum and meditative ebb and flow of senses, viewers have the option of visiting the gallery space alone, and get in touch with the blurry grey area between the internal and external world in serenity and solitariness. "Inspired by nature—from a scene in the theater to the heart of an art museum."
Virginia Satir said, "A person's ego is like an iceberg. Our extrinsic behavior is only the tip of the iceberg—a small part that's above the ocean surface. The underwater part lies the unspoken, unknown thoughts and desires, which are in fact greater and more complex, unfathomably vague to the extent that they are sometimes unbeknownst to the person." "Landscape of the body calls upon nature in the external world to return to the body, seeing itself as the reincarnation of nature."
"This unexpected body stumbles into a space. Is somebody there? Music? Singing voice?" "Setting out from the duality concept of the iceberg, sound is split into top-down layers by the floor that resembles the ocean surface.”
"The imagery of melting attempts to transform the process of physical change into a formative change. The amplification of pseudo-natural man-made state in an unnatural location, where artificial and plastic army continues to march on. Who is mourning nature in a low-humming sound?"
"The red velvet theater chairs are filled with memories—a play, a man, and half a life." "Scars on the skin, twisting of the bones, thick black eyebrows, the engorged genitals, golden-agers and newborns, a microscopic look at the human body always suggests the two ends of life."
"Sometimes you can't hear what you see. Other times, you can't see what you hear."
"This was once a fantastical turning point for me as one person. In the frozen land in the far north, I discovered the connection between nature and life and that time seemed to be malleable. I wanted to deliver an experience that centers on feeling rather than viewing."
The speed and direction with which the world is evolving have become impossible to predict. An object's life span can be defined and changed by artificial intelligence. As if entering a magical stage where words can be continually spoken, the stage constantly expanding, its meaning ever growing, meanwhile, our physical presence is nothing but a manifestation of creation. The flesh is decomposed into atoms that are breaking through boundaries, roaming in between different mediums—videos, sounds, installations— and reverberating in spaces as free elements. I'd like to invite you to walk in the museum by yourself. Natural wonders, once a turning point in life, transformed into a magical time in the theater. Now, it's your personal moment in an art museum. Enjoy.