2023 Program
Vernacular Waste— Residency Artist Exhibition of 
Chen Sai Hua Kuan & Wang Ruobing

Residency & Exhibition Date:  2023.12.01-2024.02.25

Event:

• Island, Ocean, City: Tainan-Singapore Exchange Forum   2023.12.23

• A Page of Vegetables: Papermaking Workshop at the Farmer's Market  2023.12.30

Vernacular Waste is a duo exhibition by Singapore artists Sai (a.k.a Chen Sai Hua Kuan) and Wang Ruobing – the residency artists of Absolute Space for the Arts (Dec 2023 – Jan 2024). Their exhibition is the outcome of the Space’s residency programme.

Conceived from the perspective of locality, the exhibition attests to the vernacular nature of the artists’ practices, informed by their travels and living in a foreign city. Inspired by the
numerous dental clinics scattered extensively in the major cities of Taiwan, Sai, for his materials, turns to clinic waste – teeth cast – from the dentists. Teeth cast, also known as dental cast, is a copy of patients’ teeth and mouth structures for diagnostic purposes, and are used as models for treatments, such as implants, dentures, bridges, etc., which many of us have experienced before. Coincidentally, the opening of the exhibition falls on the same day of the 8th direct presidential elections in Taiwan in 2024, a pivotal moment in the island’s history. Using a number of dental casts from local individuals, Sai’s “Chitter-Chatter 3” purposefully creates a ‘contesting’ site through mechanically animated conversations echoing this historical moment when Taiwanese exercise their civil rights, and the outcome of the contest will have major implications for Taiwan’s relations with China.

On the other hand, Ruobing is inspired by the everyday organic leftover from Tainan’s local wet markets. During the residency, she spent time visiting various local markets observing how the organic waste was being dealt with. Her artwork “A Day of the Waste: Bing Zi Market” is a contextualisation of her collection of one day of organic waste that she could manage to gather from the largest traditional market – Bing Zi market in Tainan. She extracted the fiber from the collected organic waste, and subsequently made it into paper and then bound into a book. The process means to transfer the direct product of the earth from the leftover of human activities into a book – a medium for recording information in the form of writing or drawing. Such a materialised transformation from one form to another is to leverage the book’s intellectual function in introducing us to things and perspectives, and recording history and spreading awareness. Ultimately, “A Day of the Waste: Bing Zi Market” responds to a moment in time when our food systems are fragile, and there is much to be transformed to achieve healthy living and a healthy planet.

In addition, the video installation “Space Drawing No.7” by Sai is included in this exhibition in response to the many ruined houses and small plots of abundant lands co-existing within
the historical old town of Tainan. “Space Drawing No.7” was created at an abandoned warehouse in the city centre of Limerick, Ireland in 2010. Like many other forsaken urban
spaces in the city, this is a place where emptiness and decay are slowly taking place within a manufactured and civilized urban landscape. “Space Drawing No.7” captures the social life of the warehouse through the energy released from a black bungee rope. The rope bounces from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, from inside to outside mapping the space in an energetic and dynamic way, and disclosing the unspeakable emptiness of the site.

The artists consider a city like Tainan a living, evolving organism, an Anthropocenic form that demands close observation. Their exhibition Vernacular Waste is structured as a journey, incorporating kinetic movement, sound, craft making, moving images and installation in order to explore the ideas of locality through distilling moments of social reality.