Degree Show 2023
Tim C Huang
BA Art and Design
Tim C Huang created a performance-integrated installation, The Museum of Truth; it recreates an imagined excavation scene with three miniature landscapes on plinths, which critiques the inadequate storage management for excavated artefacts in some practices of the museum industry and preconceptions in the traditional museum’s reconstruction scenes of artefacts.
The imagined excavation site is a behind-the-scenes area with nine groups of soil bricks; each contains contemporary objects. The excavator came from the Sanxingdui culture that existed about 4800 years ago in China and time travelled into the future to unearth objects of our current society. The excavator conducts similar procedures to current archaeological practices in China, which keep the artefacts in plastic cases; the cases sit in a small area.
The ongoing excavation of objects accumulated the cases into a tower which will eventually collapse, highlighting the urgent issues of over-excavation and the lack of professional archaeological storage in England.
Installation view, Tim C Huang, The Museum of Truth, 2023.
The artefacts shown in the following images are not historical objects but contemporary objects. The three plinths each display a CPU fan, a set of fishnets, and a mobile phone. Huang imagined the curator of the scenes as a person who also time-travelled from the past into the future. The installation represented a situation in which the curator had false knowledge of the human scale and the function of objects in the 21st century. In such a manner, the three landscapes ironically critique the preconceptions in the traditional museum’s reconstruction scenes of artefacts.
