A Call of All Beings

The Taichung Art Museum opens with the inaugural exhibition A Call of All Beings: See you tomorrow, same time, same place, situated within the unique landscape of Central Park where the museum stands. Once the site of a military base and the Shuinan Airport, the area has since been transformed into a metropolitan green space, layered with memories and entangled in histories of spatial, cultural, and ecological governance. Departing　from this evolving terrain, the exhibition explores the intertwined—sometimes visible, other times invisible—relationships among humans, animals, plants, and their shifting environments, reflecting on the modes of their coexistence that traverse across natural and urban worlds.

Jointly curated by the Taichung Art Museum curatorial team, Taiwanese curator Ling-Chih Chow, American curator Alaina Claire Feldman, and Romanian-Korean curator Anca Mihuleţ-Kim, A  Call of All Beings is conceived as an invitation to communal gathering and collective reflection —a meeting ground where artists, audiences, and the narratives of human and non-human beings across different times and places converge. The exhibition invites visitors to explore the multilayered relationships between humans and the environment through themes such as the histories of flora and fauna, fables and mythologies, migration and movement, and language and storytelling. The exhibition also probes the tension between body and spatial perception, as well as the resilience of the wildness and the agency that persists within systems of rule and domestication.

These inquiries unfold across five interlinked sections: In How to draw a coastline?, artists capture the shifting forms of nature and the world across time, tracing both visible landscapes and inner terrains. In Recalling Fables, artists revisit archives, folklore, and myths as pathways for reimagining our relationship with the world. In The Troubling of Natural Histories, the taxonomies and systems of knowledge that structure natural history and museology are unsettled and reimagined. In Folds and Flows, artists consider how the fundamental dimensions of contemporary existence—space, time, landscape, identity, and remembrance—are multilayered and interpenetrating. Finally, When the World Begins to Speak invites us to listen closely to wounded bodies, displaced memories, repressed emotions, as well as to rivers, animals, and other life forms that elude human language.

Beyond the galleries, several artworks extend into public spaces throughout the Green Museumbrary, engaging in dialogue with their surroundings. They question the boundaries between the public and private, the wild and the domesticated, and the architectural traces embedded within geological layers. These gestures weave the exhibition’s concerns into the very fabric of everyday life.

A Call of All Beings is not only a response to present predicaments but also a weaving together of future visions. The act of gathering here signifies more than physical presence—it is a rethinking of how knowledge is produced, a challenge to established systems of classification and value, and an opening for multiple narratives to emerge.

A Call of All Beings seeks to observe and inquire across multiple scales, reconsidering art as a means of reawakening perception and unlocking new understandings—ones that might hold room for richer and more expanded narratives yet to be told…

See you tomorrow, same time, same place—a gentle promise of the museum as a host and keeper of memory, and a gesture toward a future of shared responsibility.