Neon Urlaub - Agency version 1997-99
Web site (http://www.icf.de/neonurlaub) and installation comprising plastic, acrylic screen, stainless steel, monitor, video, computer, sound, lights, colour prints
Dimensions variable
Collection: The artist

Jun-Jieh Wang’s Neon urlaub - Agency version combines art and technology. The artist has created a travel agency, complete with plastic palm trees and access to a booking service. The futuristic travel agency offers customers virtual trips to real locations. These adventures, though, only exist in cyberspace. They are a set of fake tourist packages, which Wang presents to ‘consumers’ on the internet. During the APT3 opening events, a performer in futuristic costume distributed fliers advertising the virtual travel agency. The Neon urlaub travel agency is one of a number of ‘fake’ businesses and products that Wang has developed over the past five years to satisfy consumer’s desires. The artist says: ‘Everything exists merely as a virtual reality and nothing is what it seems...’. Wang is a pioneer of the use of multimedia in Taiwan – his work crosses the boundaries of what is seen as consumable culture and the role of technology and the media.

Artist's statement:

The weirdness of the all-encompassing fin-de-siecle atmosphere of the 1990s appears amid a tightly controlled chaos; One feature of the state of society today is the attempt to further fictionalize the space in which we live. People imagine themselves entering a situation that is divorced from reality, or inadvertently fall into call kinds of designed traps. The mechanism that works behind it is the enlarged gap between reality and illusion in people's lives. Every thing exits merely as a virtual reality and nothing is what it seems; the current crazes for Techno-Style and the Internet are prime examples. Amid these products of civilization, have people noticed that traditional values are changing? Who are the real masters? Who is Who? Perhaps it is just an illusory game.