日日暖暖的浴池-百美藝伎,影像,5分20秒,2023
《日日暖暖的浴池——百美藝伎》以1920年代日本殖民統治下的臺灣大正時期為背景，探討殖民視覺文化與女性身體的敘事。本作靈感來自1926年《臺灣日日新報》 刊登的一則歷史廣告，該廣告由東光油脂株式會社發佈，推廣其產品「東光石鹼」，並發起以臺灣各地藝妓為對象的「百美藝妓寫真徵集活動」。這場活動既是商業策略，同時也作為殖民統治下的文化治理手段，透過浴場文化來推動政府規範之下的衛生現代性與身體管理。
藝術家透過AI 生成影像與電腦動畫重新詮釋這段歷史，批判性地檢視女性身體、商品化與殖民凝視的交織關係。作品探索了美的展示與身體治理之間的緊張關係，揭示殖民權力如何將女性身體塑造成既是欲望的對象，也是國家現代化計畫中的象徵。透過數位技術重構這段視覺檔案，作品將這些轉瞬即逝的藝妓身影置於運算合成的空間之中，質疑科技如何調停歷史記憶。在對殖民影像的重構過程中，《日日暖暖的浴池》反思殖民時期的視覺文化如何持續滲透並轉化為當代數位美學的一部分，揭示幽靈般潛伏於當代敘事中的性別、權力與再現問題。
Daily Warmth of the Bathhouse – One Hundred Geishais a video work set against the socio-political landscape of Taiwan’s Taishō era under Japanese colonial rule in the 1920s. The work draws from a historical artifact: a 1926 advertisement published in the Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō by the Tōkō Oil & Fat Corporation, promoting Tōkō Sekken (Tōkō Soap). The campaign, which sought photographic submissions from geisha across Taiwan under the banner of One Hundred Beautiful Geisha, served as both a commercial strategy and a colonial instrument for reinforcing state-sanctioned ideals of hygiene and modernization through bathhouse culture.
By reinterpreting this historical narrative through AI-generated imagery and computer animation, the artist critically examines the entanglement of female bodies, commodification, and the colonial gaze. The work navigates the tension between beauty as spectacle and the biopolitical mechanisms that framed women’s bodies as both objects of desire and symbols of a disciplined, ‘modern’ society. This digital retranslation situates the ephemeral figures of these geisha within a computationally synthesized space, interrogating the ways in which technology mediates historical memory. In reconstructing this archival past, Daily Warmth of the Bathhouse questions how colonial-era visual culture persists and mutates within contemporary digital aesthetics, exposing the spectral undercurrents that continue to shape our understanding of gender, power, and representation.