Inside, the gallery was kept in almost total darkness, with any light either illuminating or emanating from the exhibition’s three main pieces. One of these, The Grounds (2017), constitutes part of a larger work, The Other Side (2016–17), which is a response to Chim↑Pom member Ellie’s being denied entry to the United States. Having discovered a network of unofficial tunnels along the border on a subsequent visit to Tijuana, the group dug their own, and documented her treading not onto, but under American soil with a plaster cast of her footprints made there. A short film of her entering the underground passage and crossing the border was projected above the cast in the gallery. In addition to addressing the tensions between “here” and “there,” “inside” and “outside” already evoked in Silent Bells, the piece also poses questions regarding legality and its limits, with a derisory nod to the ways in which legal frameworks are superimposed over physical spaces.

Dimly lit in the center of the gallery was Is Artistic Exchange a Crime (2018), a three-meter slab of asphalt representing one of the group’s largest projects so far, Street (2017–18), for which they created an asphalt road extending from the entrance of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts to the actual public street 200 meters away. The work is a reference to the Sunflower Movement of 2014, during which students took over the Taiwanese Parliament for one month in 2014, and is based on interviews with some of those involved. In creating this new street, the group invited public contributions for how the space might be used, details of which were tellingly exposed in a small room adjacent to the main gallery, plastered with photographs capturing the work’s construction. In addition to these were framed documents pertaining to the regulation of the street, each headed with a request for an activity to be permitted, followed by the discussion surrounding it and the decision regarding its licitness. Each of these negotiations was humorously illustrated on a scale model of the museum, surrounding area and street. The most amusing example, and perhaps the most pertinent with respect to how morality, legality and spatiality interact, regarded public obscenity, and was illustrated on the model with an explicit cartoon, captioned: “No sex in the public space . . .  except for romantic love act . . . ”