LEE Yung-Chih

Venue│ MoCA Plaza TV Wall

Neo N’ Old is a site-specific work that creates on the uniquely proportioned MoCA Video TV wall neon signs that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s but have now become outdated. Old photographs or videos of neon signs in bygone urban landscapes are collected, and the patterns of the light tubes on the signs are then redrawn. Contemporary high-brightness LED display screens are used to propose an “alternative” simulation and representation of neon lights through the change of the display medium. Like a retro sci-fi movie that depicts a future metropolis speckled with neon lights, it now appears like a temporally displaced “future in the past.”

The 2024 edition of Neo N’ Old extends from the 2021 edition of the series. Shown on the TV wall’s current outdoor location by Changan West Road, more signs that used to glisten on the streets of Taipei are incorporated, offering a cityscape of the past that the city’s natives may recall. Contrasting the past and the present and with cars coming and going on the adjacent road, as people take a momentary break here amid their busy lives today, spend a moment and look up at this fictional animation of neon lights and feel the flickers of those scrolling lights, where time seems to dissipate like an illusion.
The series, Neo N’ Old, “imitates” neon signs that are no longer popular today. It is an attempt to interpret and represent the neon signs that were once widely prevalent in Asia in the 1980s. More than just a collection and collage of historical images, the series is also a paradoxical representation that traverses between illusion and reality and seeks to stir up personal memories and experiences.

Neo N’ Old- Outdoor Cinema (2024) is an extension of the series that began in 2021 and uses the MoCA Video TV wall as a medium for showing outdated neon signs. Situated by a bustling road, they are “screened” as “movies” in a loop.

Through a process that transforms the images into an installation, the historical archives become the artwork, as the three-dimensional neon light tubes and the luminous geometric patterns express the oneness of duality. Employing the notable characteristics of the material used to create those neon graphic images, “displacement” that occurs through actions of archaeology and renovation is where time is imagined based on the concept of a “future in the past,” or it is “time” itself. The irrelevant transitions that must be taken are the public’s hazy impressions and memories of different space-times, and between illusion and reality and with the past overlapped with the present, questions are raised and representations produced.