Pluto in Scorpio: Exhibition Review
New Taipei City Art Museum
Gallery 4A
August 29, 2026 to
November 22, 2026
Yu and Wu, frequent collaborators at the institutional level, typically bring together skillful interactions between narrative history, new media, and sculpture to reveal hidden or even forgotten aspects of the world around us. The transit’s era thus became abundant territory for where their respective practices could intertwine and produce revelatory insights.
According to the artists, the exhibition “explores, through cosmic and celestial energies, the duality of travel and escape, seemingly opposite, yet existing simultaneously in multiple forms.” However, after witnessing the 20-minute presentation in person, it is not clear that much more has been explored other than the possibility that the real crisis is much closer to home and personal: an over-reliance on digital media, generative technology, and unhelpfully complex visual production that appears to obscure more than it reveals. The two embark on what seems like a meandering and multi-sensory data dump, using a mix of found footage, graphics, text, and video in an encyclopedic attempt to interpret this backdrop of chaos and transformation. Yet there are no revelations nor moments of clarity. There doesn’t appear to be anything hidden under the surface, which calls into question the exhibition’s astrological reference. Noise, chaos, and obfuscation are the order of the day, brought about through the sheer volume of incoherent material and symbols that render the work indecipherable. It is certainly possible that sensory overload is the point. However, without a unifying thread between these disparate signals, we’re left grasping for meaning, both intended and otherwise. At best, it is possible that Pluto in Scorpio ends up being neither about travel, escape, any specific period of time, nor any sort of pursuit of spiritual freedom but perhaps instead ends up being a much larger gesture towards a particular generation’s existence during an era presaging and preconditioning the total destruction of meaning.
The presentation opens biblically, with a projected campfire that conveniently sets aflame a small bush sitting at the center of a landscape. In the back stands a full-size pitched tent. Without explanation, we’re left to contemplate the artists’ intent with such a heavy-handed metaphor. Are we coming or going “HOME”, as a painted section in the landscape suggests? As the work progresses, we continue to witness gestures that do little to disabuse us of the notion that the artists appear to be claiming a far more critical position than their found-footage experiment seems to ultimately support. Images and video from diverse locales from Sedona, Arizona to what might be a rural Taiwanese coastal road play on large projection screens above. Two disembodied voices play an associative word game, naming camping-related objects, veering from the mundane to the absurd and playful. Amid provocative lighting shifts, words such as “Doomsday” appear and disappear oversized onscreen juxtaposed with instances of small written text that is hard to read. If it sounds overly variable, that’s because it is. There is no obvious link between these visuals and the dialogue, much less so to a larger idea or concept.
In another scene, we travel down a road in first person through what looks like the Australian interior. As the view moves in and out of focus, it spins around, eventually settling on and moving towards a large animal carcass. We then find ourselves in a dense jungle, presumably still in rural Australia, as we come upon a stream. We dive in and seem to be alone. As we come up for air, there is a figure presented as a thickly-bearded older Aboriginal man sitting in the water. Slightly out of focus, he curiously asks us, “Where are you from?” He then says, “I am lost.” He doesn’t seem lost. The scene repeats itself several times over, the water in which we dive getting murkier and the sky more strangely colored with each pass. The man’s skin tone oddly also gets darker each time. The implication of being lost moves from him to us with his final statement that, in fact, “We are lost.” This strange AI-generated video, which ends the presentation, is so destabilizing to the work and particularly galling in its usage of the image of a synthetic indigenous person, perpetuating racist symbolism about “native knowledge” in the end times while also shamefully reproducing offensive imagery. Given Taiwan’s own fraught history with its indigenous populations, it is hard not to feel as if the artists lack real concern or foresight for how the images they have assembled could come across. Then again, are we to expect much more when artists lean so heavily on technology developed with well-documented biases? Again, we find ourselves in a crisis.
What will the world look like in 2240 when the next Pluto in Scorpio transit arrives? What sort of crises will consume humanity? What sort of ambitions, dreams, and disappointments will those future generations have? How will they cope with the world that will have been left to them by us and our descendants? Will they have finally found something meaningful in our collective struggles? Or will they look back and think, “What was the point of all that?”