Vernacular is pleased to present the exhibition I May Doze for Millions of Years by Taiwanese artist Val Lee. The title is taken from her latest film which will be premiered alongside Buenos días mujeres and N. Three works comprise the trilogy to outline Lee’s research on contemporary violence in society, following her interest in experimental documentary. 

The history of violence culminates in this merging of victim and perpetrator, of master and slave, of freedom and violence. (Topology of Violence, Byung-Chul Han)

Focusing on the sociological investigation of violence and complex political situations, Val Lee explores the psychological state of perpetrators and the theoretical context on the spatial and psychological characteristics of the total institution. The concept is associated with the thesis of the sociologist Erving Goffman, where a great number of individuals are isolated from the wider community for a considerable time, together with leading an enclosed, formally administered life. 

In the film N, the characters V and T met in a hotel room in Manhattan and performed 'action scripts' for an appointed duration. As the first work in the trilogy, it elaborates a social relation experiment based on Lee’s field research of the young prisoner in New York.

Buenos días mujeres depicts two others, M and A, who encounter in different sites around Escandón following action scripts that designate their journey. Confronted with several scenarios, the main characters dwell in the narrative as if on auto-pilot. Devising a wholly cinematic language between auto-cinema and auto-documentary, Lee’s ‘action script’ is designed beforehand but played out in the absence of the director. Buenos días mujeres deals with the theme of gender crime, also referred to as femicide. With a rare poetic take on the subject, the work provides insight into the inner system governed by a pulsating toxic masculine behavior. 

In the new work, I May Doze for Millions of Years, M comes across C and other characters who perform in various fable-like sets that lead their journey to an unknown destination. Staged in the surreal cantina La Faena, the scenes are forged with ‘trance’ and ‘hypnosis’ which serve as metaphors to interpret the unstable collective consciousness while confronting politics with diversified ideologies.  

The exhibition I May Doze for Millions of Years encompasses film, installation, a sound piece made by Marcos Lutyens in collaboration with Val Lee, fragmental writings that sketch the scenes behind the screen, and a reading corner with a selection of books that draws the artist’s research path.

Val Lee is a director and co-founding artist of Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel, an art collective employing constructed, ephemeral situations as a form of live art where the audience enters a poetic constellation of action script, installation, sound, hypnotic rhetoric, composite structure, and mise-en-scène. GMGS is drawn to urban violence, criminal act, political riot, abrupt historical reenactment, and the diversified modes of psychological absorption and participation.

The exhibition I May Doze for Millions of Years is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan. The film I May Doze for Millions of Years is supported by the The National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF), Taiwan. The film Buenos días mujeres is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan. The film N is supported by the Asian Cultural Council (ACC).