MillerComm Lecture Series | "The Journey of Yao's Black Divine Comedy" | Yao Jui-Chung in Dialogue with Kao Chen-Hui

About the Lecture

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

About the Speakers

Yao Jui-Chung
Yao Jui-Chung is a Taipei-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, photography, installation, video, and documentary research. His work examines Taiwanese identity, ideology, religious belief, historical memory, and the absurdity of the human condition. Major projects include Mirage: Disused Public Property in Taiwan, a long-term collaborative investigation of abandoned public infrastructure, and Incarnation, a photographic and video study of Taiwan’s monumental religious statues that received the 2018 Taishin Arts Award for Visual Arts. Yao represented Taiwan at the 1997 Venice Biennale and has exhibited internationally at major biennials and museums. His Land is Wealth: Money God (2025) is featured in Ink Shower at the Krannert Art Museum, which also recently acquired a work from his Small Landscape series. He currently teaches fine arts at Taipei National University of the Arts.

Kao Chien-Hui
Kao Chien-Hui is a Taiwanese art and cultural researcher, critic, curator, writer, and educator. Her scholarship spans modern and contemporary East Asian art, cultural criticism, the sociology of art, museum and curatorial studies, and the relationship between aesthetics and ideology. Her recent work includes Curating Art: Appropriating Institutions (Routledge, 2021); Folk Reoriented: The Decolonization and Praxis of Locally Rooted Art (2025), which she edited and contributed to; and Di: Shanshui Across Distances and Shifting Media (2026), for which she served as project director and author. Kao curated the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale and has held teaching and visiting appointments at universities in the United States, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

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This event is presented as part of Yao Jui-Chung’s 2026 George A. Miller Visiting Artist Residency and in conjunction with Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition, curated by Kai-Ching Hsiao and Maureen Warren and organized by InART Space and Krannert Art Museum (KAM) in partnership with the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies (CEAPS). The residency and related programs are coordinated by CEAPS in collaboration with KAM and supported by the Center for Advanced Study George A. Miller Programs and the MillerComm Lecture Series. 

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Taiwan's Ministry of Culture and our campus co-sponsors and partners, including the 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 Programs, Global Relations, Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, LAS Global Studies, School of Art + Design, and the UI UAAT Mandarin Education Program.

Related Events:

• Opening Reception | Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition (November 5, 2026, 5-7 pm, Krannert Art Museum)
• Exhibit | Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition (November 5 – February 27, 2027, Krannert Art Museum)
• Curator Talk & Tour | Ink Shower (November 7, 2026, 10:30-11:30 am, Krannert Art Museum)