LIKAT LIKAT The Light in the City - Urban Indigenous People Special Exhibition (20250926-20260331)

Taoyuan is home to migrants from all 16 indigenous tribes and is the city with the largest population of urban indigenous migrants in western Taiwan. Why did they come? What are they doing now? Where do they live? Are they being assimilated, or are they slowly developing a new lifestyle that coexists with the city and their original homelands? "LIKAT LIKAT The Light in the City - Urban Indigenous People Special Exhibition" takes us to appreciate the first, second, and third generations of urban indigenous people in Taoyuan, showing how they carve out a piece of their own pure land in the urban jungle, maintaining their connection to their heritage while progressing harmoniously in the city, becoming the light of the city!!!

This collection retrospective features 35 works by 11 resident artists selected by the Taoyuan Indigenous Affairs Council since 2018: Chiu Yi-cheng, Chen Chen, Huang Hui-chuan, Chiu Ya-ru, Lin Ting-en, Huang Wei-che, Amay Silan, Li Zong-ling, Hsu Pao-yuan, Chen Xiao-wen, and Wu Zhi-hong. Each work embodies the creator's unique way of perception, whether capturing moments through outward observation or exploring the inner world.
This exhibition uses the "Gaze" theory from psychology as an analytical tool, categorizing the 35 works into "Self-Gaze," "Non-existent Existence," and "Me and the Other" to provide an interpretive path for detecting the artists' creative intentions and a contextual viewing path, offering a perspective on the long-term residency project.

"Gaze" is a term used in psychology and cultural studies. Originally meaning simply to watch, Lacan (1978) defined the gaze as a mirroring relationship between the self and the other; people's self-representation is formed by the reflection of how others see them.

Self-Gaze
A process of self-awareness, as if one can detach from the subject to view oneself, emotions, feelings, or states from an objective or neutral perspective like a spirit or deity. We see some works capturing this moment of awareness, depicting the process or representation of consciousness, making the abstract concrete without hidden motives. The self-image in self-gaze is still a projection of expectation, transformation, and imagination. When the work is completed, they also define how the artist, as the master/subject of the work, should or expects to be viewed.

Non-existent Existence
In this section, artists describe dreams or beautiful moments in memory as a symbolic sustenance or emotional home. They believe that when things that once existed but have faded are reproduced in paintings, they become an eternal existence.

Me and the Other
In this section, we see artists re-representing the external world through observations of the relationship between their tribe and others. It is a process of establishing relationships with things, deducing how something is lost, traversed, transformed, or decided between stages.
By revealing the development of self-identity and the relationship between "Me" and the "Other" through gaze theory, this exhibition helps us understand that self-construction is not just internal development but a result of interaction with the outside world. Through the 35 collection works, we find that the artist's subjective viewing attempts to reproduce the invisible thoughts in "Self-Gaze"; "Non-existent Existence" is the artist's non-ontological but related representation, such as memories or beautiful inner places; and finally, "Me and the Other" is the process of re-establishing the relationship between the subject and the other through the representation of others or the overlapping of traditional indigenous crafts, further establishing self-identity. As visual art theorist John Berger said, we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. These works show how something or someone once looked, thereby implying how others once saw them.