Jui-Chung Yao and Chien-Hui Kao in conversation: Landscape as Storytelling: The Journey of "Yao’s Black Divine Comedy"

Every landscape is a storyscape, shaped by narratives beyond its borders and beneath its surface. How can art reveal concealed histories and reshape what it means to belong to a place? If the land could speak, how would it tell its own story—and how might its gaze unsettle our own?

For over three decades, Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-Chung has worked across media to explore how ideology, faith, memory, and desire shape the places we inhabit. In this program, he will take us on a visual journey through selected works, organized along Kao Chien-Hui’s narrative arc of “Yao’s Black Divine Comedy.” Moving from reimagined shanshui and abandoned infrastructure to contemporary sacred sites, his presentation will reveal landscape as a charged field of power, belief, absurdity, and longing.

Yao will be joined by critic, curator, and cultural historian Kao Chien-Hui, who will open the program by situating Yao’s practice—and landscape art more broadly—within Taiwan’s layered histories of migration, colonialism, martial law, and contested boundaries. Following Yao’s presentation, their dialogue will draw on Kao’s conceptual framework for Landscape as Storytelling to consider landscape as a reflexive mirror, a field of resistance, a mode of seeing, an awakening to boundaries, a shift in perception, and a form of situated knowledge.

4:00-5:00 PM: Reception with light refreshments, hosted by the UAAT Mandarin Education Program Liaison Office for the University of Illinois System

Presented in tandem with Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition, Krannert Art Museum, November 5, 2026--February 27, 2027.

Hosted by: Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies

In conjunction with: Asian American Cultural Center, Center for Global Studies, Department of Anthropology, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Department of Political Science, Humanities Research Institute, Illinois Global Institute, Illinois International | Global Relations, Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, Krannert Art Museum, LAS Global Studies, School of Art + Design