Rock Wang – Taiwan

(Residency at HIT – Holon Institute of Technology)

Rock Wang is an industrial designer from Studio Qiao, Taipei, and was a resident artist at the Holon Institute for Technology. ‘U Need Code’ is a blue and white tile panel of QR codes that enables viewers to explore Taiwan’s colonial histories, under Dutch (1624-1662), Japanese (1895-1945), and Chinese occupations (form 1662, 1949-now) via a website that proposes 729 images.  The title is a pun on ‘Unicode’, a code in the computing industry to standardise the encoding, representation, and handling of text. Unicode’s set of code charts cover most of the world’s writing systems, with more than 128,000 characters representing 135 modern and historic scripts and symbol sets. According to Wang, Unicode has been made accessible by QR codes. QR codes allow people to communicate across languages in a new, creative ways.  

For the designer, post-colonialism is a lived experience, and visible in everyday life. The projected images that are linked to the QR codes include architecture, objects from daily life (teapots and ceramic objects), ceremonies (for example the tea ceremony and religious ceremonies), clothes, adverts, food and beverages.

Advice

Line application is advisable for optimum viewing of the panel.  

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