The Recasting / 再鑄

2025
sound installation
3 channels sound, 3 vitrines, LED lights, fog machine, 30 min on loop
graphite drawing, 42 x 42 cm x 3 P
work commissioned by 14th Taipei Biennial

The Boai Ding (Tripod), displayed in front of the National Palace Museum

How do museum artefacts, through processes of circulation, exhibition, and transformation, contribute to the formation of ideological perceptions of history and temporality? The Recasting centres on the Boai Ding (Tripod)—currently displayed in front of the National Palace Museum in Taipei—to critically re-examinethe entanglements between war, collection, and display technologies through the lens of its complex and multi-layered history of remaking.

Installation view at Taipei Biennial in Taipei, Taiwan, 2025

Amidst the upheaval of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army occupied Nanjing in 1937. To commemorate their military triumph, they extracted confiscated metal from the captured Nanjing Arsenal to recast a ritual bronze tripod—marking the earliest prototype of what would later become the Boai Ding (Tripod)—which was subsequently enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.

Following Japan’s defeat, the Chinese Civil War erupted, prompting repeated relocations of the National Palace Museum’s collections. In 1951, the Japanese government decided to return the tripod to the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan, where it was received by the Central Museum and Library Institution. The object’s trajectory has been defined by successive acts of remaking, shaped by the shifting ideological and political forces of the time. Ultimately, it was reconfigured into its present form as the Boai Ding, now installed at the entrance to the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The plum blossom motif and the inscription “Boai” (“Universal Love”) were superimposed over the original cherry blossom emblems and imperial waka poems—symbols of Japanese sovereignty—thus transforming the object into a palimpsest of political and cultural inscriptions.

Installation view at Taipei Biennial in Taipei, Taiwan, 2025

Unlike the Qing imperial treasures typically associated with the Palace Museum’s holdings, the Bo’ai Tripod occupies an anomalous status. It does not derive from dynastic inheritance, and its repeated recasting has disrupted the presumed “authenticity” conventionally valued in museological discourse. Yet precisely because of this instability, the tripod exposes the technologies of collecting and display as mechanisms of state apparatus—where objects serve as vessels for ideological reconstruction amid regime transitions. It thus invites a reconsideration of museum collections not as fixed repositories, but as dynamic fields of symbolic negotiation.

Installation view at Taipei Biennial in Taipei, Taiwan, 2025

The Recasting continues Chihying’s sustained inquiry into museums and technologies of collection. Focusing on the Bo’ai Tripod and its three major transformations, the work reflects on how the mobility and metamorphosis of objects echo broader socio-political contexts. The installation takes the form of a “museum theatre” composed of three fractured, vitrine-like sound-and-light structures. These vitrines, hollow and broken, do not contain material artefacts but instead stage a fragmented narrative—serving as temporal vessels that traverse history and articulate elusive meanings that resist taxonomic classification. The work draws inspiration from the 1929 essay Phantasmagoria by British art critic Francis Ayscough, in which the author imagines East Asian objects housed in European museums coming to life after nightfall, whispering their origins and anxieties to one another—a literary forerunner to the contemporary Night at the Museum trope. Yet unlike the displaced and pristine relics depicted in Phantasmagoria—sacred vessels and mythic beasts that retain their original forms while exiled in foreign institutions—The Recasting conjures an object whose form has never stabilised. It is a shape-shifting entity, perpetually dismantled and reassembled, akin to a chimera—stripped of divine aura and historical splendour, yet animated by a different kind of vitality: one rooted in its continual transformation and irreducible uncertainty.

Installation view at Taipei Biennial in Taipei, Taiwan, 2025

Special thanks for the support from Taipei Fine Arts Museum team,
Shepherd Technology Art and Mothra Productions

Related Information ︎
︎︎︎ 2025 Taipei Biennial
︎︎︎ e-flux
︎︎︎ ARTFORUM
︎︎︎ OCULA
︎︎︎ FRIZEZ
︎︎︎ SLEEK

© 2025 Musquiqui Lab

The Recasting / 再 鑄

© 2025
Musquiqui Lab

The Recasting / 再鑄