MOCA Taipei
While on a trip to Taipei, I made sure to stop by MOCA—the Museum of Contemporary Art. Housed in a former elementary school, the building holds a quiet, open stillness that contrasts sharply with the city’s street-level buzz. I hadn’t planned to linger, but found myself pulled in, spending far longer than expected between two distinct yet strangely complementary exhibitions: Humus and Signal Z.
Humus moved at a slower, grounded rhythm. Rooted in Indigenous Taiwanese experience, the exhibition breathed with a sense of earth and spirit. Earthen materials, archival textures, and myth-like forms gave the show a grounded, ceremonial presence—timeless rather than old. The works didn’t demand attention; they invited it. I was especially drawn to how personal and collective memory interwove through natural materials, offering a quiet, reverent experience, as if listening to a story passed down, rather than one declared.
Upstairs, Signal Z struck a sharp contrast. Fast, fractured, and full of glitchy digital language, it mirrored the fragmented tempo of the present. Screens flickered, bodies dissolved, sound leaked from one room to the next. The sensory overload felt oddly familiar—like stepping into a mirror of our current digital state. What stayed with me was the juxtaposition: one exhibition built from land and ancestry, the other from signal and speed. Together, they offered a layered meditation on identity in Taiwan, where past, present, and possible futures seem always entangled in quiet, ongoing dialogue.
