Candy Bird

This work is named after a scene in Japanese author Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask, describing the time Mishima spent during his military service with the Shonenko. The Shonenko were the Taiwanese child laborers whom were recruited to manufacture the Japan Imperial Navy's fighter planes at the Koza Naval Arsenal in Kanagawa Prefecture from 1942 to 1945 during the World War II. Many of them were only teenagers, where some of them had only finished their elementary studies.
These victims of the ideological conflict had also been silenced in the course of Taiwan history, where the stories of the Shonenko were only being noticed increasingly after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan.
Fried Rice with Flavor of Gear Oil debuted at the Koganecho Area Management Center, Yokohama. It had painstakingly delved into the history of Shonenko and re-presented this past through art-making to open up future imaginations of the East Asia. At the same time, connection of the past in the structural aspects of the contemporary society was also examined in order to interpret the historic recurrence and the destiny of humans.