Cabinet of Curiosities by LIU, Yu

Cabinet of Curiosities by LIU, Yu

DATE｜2021 / 1 / 30（Sat.） - 3 / 7（Sun.）

Opening｜2021 / 1 / 30（Sat.）15 : 00

Forum｜2021 / 1 / 30（Sat.）15 : 30

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【Statement】

Georgo Eberhard Rumphius (1627-1702) was a biologist employed by the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. He arrived in Ambon, Indonesia, with a fleet of ships in 1654 and had since lived there for 48 years until his death. Rumphius was particularly enthusiastic about researching plants and shellfish. His important work Herbarium Amboinense covers up to 1,200 botanical species, 930 with definite species names, laying the biological groundwork of Maluku, Indonesia. The extensive research data left by Rumphius also indirectly led to the formalization of Carl von Linné’s binomial nomenclature. Some supporters even believe that Linné had stolen Rumphius' research. This era of big nomenclature became the beginning of species documentation and has evolved into the scientific basis of our current understanding of plants and animals.

In contrast with other biologists, Rumphius became completely blind due to glaucoma in 1670, but was able to continue his research work on species. If we look at Rumphius' descriptions of plants in his notes, we would realize that he used a large number of comparisons to describe species, including olfactory and tactile ones, and he even described plants with human personalities. By using a personal and perceptual interpretation to remember, map and document these creatures, he had created another kind of abstract database in his mind.

The exhibition Cabinet of Curiosities is a collection of Liu Yu’s research and extended interpretations of Rumphius from 2018 to the present, including documents on Rumphius, dozens of drawing exercises, and two documentaries. The text of the drawing exercises is from Rumphius' book The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, in which the forms of the species are transformed into abstract textual descriptions. Liu Yu attempted to retransform Rumphius' adjectives into images. The two documentaries Caecus creaturae, respectively shot in Indonesia and the Netherlands, include interviews from scholars of different fields, on-site filming and data collection, retracing the contours of Rumphius' past and present from two different cultural and geographical contexts.

Liu's study of Rumphius does not focus on the reorganization of natural history, but on capturing a certain way of interpreting the world by human beings. Comparing the world we know after the scientific era and the world of primitive cultures, is there still some kind of sensibility interwoven in the way people interpret everything? In either cultural system, the process of "knowing the world" requires another kind of reverse productive activity: the explosion of imagination, which is also some kind of original state when art is created. No matter how hard we try to depict more things in this world, whether through "comparisons," "personification," or "metonymy," we still fail to describe what makes humans frenzy.

【About Yu Liu】

Born in 1985. Lives and works in Taipei. Employing a variety of mediums such as video, installation, and texts, Yu Liu’s gradually develop a series of field studies of documentary nature as a kind of working methodology in relation to her artistic practice. How human visions the world, how attributes of spaces change, and how things are constantly being defined in a system — these all contribute to giving an account on the progression of humanity. A series of works are later created with a research focus on less visible communities marginalized by structural societal factors. The existence of these communities often reflects the intricacies of its contemporary society, and, furthermore, offers a sample of a specific historical moment with regard to a grander context—a boundary-breaking reexamination that helps disrupt strictly defined scientific methodologies and the science institution with which we are all too familiar.