Pluto in Scorpio
Pluto, in astrology, is associated with “destruction and rebirth”—a transformative force that brings the dissolution of established orders. The title Pluto in Scorpio refers to a particular astrological cycle, while also offering the artists a point of departure from which to reconsider their own generation. Those born between 1983 and 1995 came of age amid profound social transformation, from the dissolution of authoritarianism to political and economic upheaval. Out of this shifting landscape emerged a generation shaped by an instinct to question and to act, continually seeking a place in which to anchor themselves amid a rapidly changing world and the uncertainty of survival.
Artists LIU Yu and WU Sih-chin came of age within this generation and have been working collaboratively since 2019. Taking “travel” as its central metaphor, the exhibition begins with personal experience and gradually expands towards the conditions shared by an entire generation. Here, travel is not merely a continual displacement across geographical space, but a way of reconsidering how one looks at, and inhabits, the world. Drawing from memories of their own journeys, the artists re-edit and reassemble the people, places and encounters gathered along the way through moving image, text and sculpture. Fragments of personal experience are thus enlarged into an invisible imprint of an era, while the exhibition considers how a spirit of nihilism, shaped by a particular historical context, may become embedded within a generation.
Between movement, departure and return, the individual becomes almost nomadic within an inner geography, where uncertainty begins to resonate across private experience. Through large-scale projection and multimedia techniques, the artists construct a visual narrative reminiscent of a deconstructed film, leading visitors through spatial installations where the real and the imagined continually overlap, and into an immediate experience grounded in the body and its senses. Moving through the artificial dunes, beneath a vast moon emerging almost imperceptibly overhead, visitors encounter objects charged with symbolic resonance. They evoke memories of experiences that may be privately familiar, while opening a broader reflection on the relationship between the individual and the time in which they live.
The exhibition does not attempt to offer a singular or definitive definition of the Pluto-in-Scorpio generation. Instead, by deconstructing their own past experiences, the artists allow each fleeting emotion awakened through the act of viewing to become a possible clue. There is no escaping the time into which one is born; even in the posture of the body continually moving forward, there may already be an unconscious gesture of retreat—a backward escape of the mind. Amid the shifting conditions of time, contradiction, ambiguity, hesitation and avoidance become some of the most honest responses to the experience of living in the present. Immersed in a passage woven from nonlinear narratives and layered sensory encounters, the ever-changing interplay of light and sound quietly reflects the hidden echoes of individual experience.
