Taipei-based artist Wu Chi-Yu will host a "Board Game Workshop to Re-Experience the Taiwan Expo from the Perspective of the Colonizers" and a "Talk on the Colonial Perspective Formed by Expos During the Colonial Era."

The workshop will provide an exhibition experience inspired by the 1935 Taiwan Expo held under Japanese rule. Participants will play a game-like role as colonizers and experience both the hopeful vision of the future that the expo created and the dark side of colonialism, interpreting history from a new perspective. Meanwhile, the talk event will use footage of Camphor, a material that Wu has long explored and contributed to modern video production, to consider how the "settlers' gaze" formed by the colonial exposition continues to resurface as media forms change.
These events are happening right in the middle of the Osaka Expo, so perhaps they speak to us more powerfully.
This is a valuable opportunity, so please come and participate.

①Board Game Workshop "Southern Space Expo: Proposal"

Step into the Historic South, a world suspended in parallel time that's at once familiar and strange. World's Fairs have long celebrated visions and imagined futures of prosperity, but behind the glittering displays lies a colonial past that remains unresolved.
Inspired by the spectacular 1935 Taiwan Expo, where colonial rule and modern spectacle collided, the game invites players to move between two actions: "settlement" and "(exposition) exhibition creation." To realize your exhibition proposal, you will exploit the colony's resources and accumulate your own "settlement experience." These are not just paths to success, but the core of your final proposal.
How do you interpret this history?

*This project was born out of collaboration between Wu Qiyu and Rikey Tenn, with game design led by Wu Qiyu.

②Talk event "Regenerating the Gaze: From Camphor to Data"

Wu Qiyu's recent works explore camphor, a plant-based extract that has played a key role in the history of modernity. Originally harvested in East Asia and used as a plasticizer for celluloid film, camphor was not only part of early filmmaking techniques but also a material that connects ecological history and collective memory.
This talk will present a series of video projects and research findings that Wu has developed over the years working with camphor, and will explore how the "settler gaze" shaped through historical visual archives and colonial expositions continues to resurface across shifting media forms. These visual regimes persist and evolve even in contemporary data-driven visual methods structured by the logic of datasets and algorithmic systems.

Wu Chi-Yu |

A Taipei-based multimedia artist working with film, video installations and photography. He delves into the lost and unestablished connections between species, environments and the technologies that construct human civilization, exploring Asia's complex historical geography and the interdependence of various entities through multiple narratives. His work has been exhibited and screened at the Times Art Museum (Guangzhou, 2021), MoCA (Taipei, 2020), the 2018 Shanghai Biennale, the 2016 Taipei Biennale and the Beijing International Short Film Festival (2017), and he was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2014-2015). He is a member of the Taiwanese artist collective Fuxinghen Studio and co-founder of the project Pailang Museum, which focuses on decolonization research in video.
https://www.wuchiyu.com/

Artist page here