"Ferrying: Looking Back at the Folk" New Taipei City Art Museum Collection Exhibition

The land of New Taipei City has been woven together by diverse ethnic groups living in symbiosis, accumulating rich and varied folk cultures and humanistic landscapes. Rituals, ceremonial codes, belief symbols, and living customs passed down through generations are systematically organized historically and researched through fieldwork from the perspective of cultural heritage preservation. Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of modern and contemporary art, artists, through creative transformation and critical interpretation, ensure that folk culture is not merely an object to be preserved but a living scene that thrives in the viewing and interpretation of each generation.
Since its preparation, the New Taipei City Art Museum has centered on constructing the art history of New Taipei as its core context, gradually shaping a collection system with a local perspective through different keywords as research approaches. Among these, "the folk" serves as an important observational dimension, reflecting the museum's long-term focus on local knowledge, folk culture, and everyday life. This exhibition departs from the museum's collection, using the folk as an index to select works by ten artists. Through different generational perspectives and diverse media, it showcases multiple cultural spiritual forms, expanding more diverse possibilities for dialogue between the collection and the public.
The exhibition is structured into three sub-themes: "Folk Customs in Painting," "Ritual Scenes," and "Human Observation Room." It demonstrates how artists, through observing and translating folk symbols, belief themes, and ritual scenes, use artistic methods to record, deconstruct, and recode these cultural elements, or reveal contemporary social phenomena and the spectrum of humanity through the lens of folk beliefs. "Ferrying" implies shuttling back and forth between riverbanks and also represents a position of viewing and understanding. The artist's perspective is like a ferryboat, leading us back to look at the folk, shuttling between decoding and recreating folk symbols, and moving back and forth between understanding and questioning society.