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Dear all,
I am fully aware - it is hardly “to become yet another” memorable moment.
Since the dawn of 2020, it has been an instant beyond words. Whatever it is. Be that more or less, it makes an exceptional key prone to collapse of sense and sensibility without warning. What and when to stop? It is not just a large scale in medical and political isolation, but also in arts! “A hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. Yet, it is amidst the weightless puff of smoke that the very reason to fight for survival shines! …,” Albert Camus once noted in The Plague. Hence, we ought to say art cannot stop, nor will art stop. All the bizarre scenes of cruelty arising from “the plague” are no longer fictional, as all the “evil” that has been bringing woes to humanity loses the metaphorical dignity of all it has in terms of literary meaning. The brutality of transnational markets, the globalized cyber warfare, the new form of crossover resurrection of the Nazis and totalitarianism in history, the sufferings in life, the perpetual returning of divorce, solitude, illness, exile, separation by death, etc., emerging as a whole.
Remember this day,
for we shall henceforth learn to speak the artistic language in the face of a halted, powerless world.
Kai-Huang Chen
President, Taipei National University of the Arts
Chairperson, Asian League of Institutes of Arts
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