by CHEN Kuan-Yu

 

In a manuscript titled Tacuinum Sanitatis written by the 11th-century Arab doctor Ibn Butlan, there is an illustration named “Mandrake Dog.” It is said that mandrake has humanlike roots and possesses magical healing effect as an edible ingredient; however, the shriek emitted by the plant when it is plucked out of the ground might drive humans mad or even cause die. As a regimen manual, it is suggested in Tacuinum Sanitatis that when “hunting” or harvesting mandrake, the planter should tie the plant to a hound, which can conveniently pluck out the plant when it runs away; and during the entire process, humans should stay as far as possible.

 

Taking a careful consideration of this literary and somewhat fantastic medieval legend, one can see that it in fact presents a rich tapestry woven with the interaction and relationships between humans and the plant, humans and dogs as well as dogs and the plant, and brings to mind the connections between the lives of humans, plants and animals in the form of resistance, nurturance, hurt and collaboration. Perhaps, what sets these dynamic connections of life into motion is the running hound.

 

The Political Position of the Canine

 

This hound in the manuscript and legend, which is about to dash out, is probably no longer a free and carefree wild animal in nature; instead, it is a domesticated animal, “working” and “carrying out a mission.” From the perspective of social symbolism, it already has its political position in the human society. This ready-to-sprint hound is rather suitable to serve as a starting point to enter Wu Chuan-Lun’s No Country for Canine. Naturally, it is not simply because it is a hound; although there are a large number of dogs in the exhibition, there is even more thinking triggered by various kinds of political relations between humans and dogs. In No Country for Canine, the relational network constructed with dogs, along with the related context of history and scientific knowledge, is rather extensive, but it does not blur the distinct issues discussed in the exhibition. With a comprehensive look, one can see that Wu’s point of departure in his creative work is to analogize the lineage of dogs to the national consciousness of humans. To a certain degree, he juxtaposes “the breeds of dogs and the races of humans.” Interweaving breeds, pedigrees, images and porcelain statues as metaphors, the exhibition opens up a gateway to criticize and re-examine “anthropocentrism” and “human exceptionalism.”

 

The exhibition presents the investigation, research, collection and creative results that Wu has accomplished in the past few years while integrating archaeological history of dogs as well as the histories of domestication, objects, craft, military, ethnicity, trade and personal collection, which are axes radiating from the lineage of dogs and the rich history of dog’s domestication. Meanwhile, he also embeds a rather implicit context of his personal relationship with dogs, which is challenging to discuss from a third-person point of view—perhaps it is a companionship in his artistic journey or the best friend in a certain stage of his life. Though implicit, such a relationship permeates every single work; though implicit, it serves as a driving force behind the entire exhibition. Overall, the background narrative of each work made possible through varying tasks – whether gathering online information, contacting dog owners, extensive field trips, literature compilation, collecting and reproducing historical photographic images, all sorts of serendipitous situations and negotiations in the process of collection, producing documentaries, etc. – has demonstrated that the entire project revolves around an encounter centering on humans. In short, No Country for Canine attempts to reveal the fact that the body of canine has been involved in all sorts of historical situations as well as issues about ethnicity, authoritarianism, war and economic development.

 

One can be sure that the exhibition is not a canine related, scientifically themed pavilion nor an exhibition about the knowledge of canine genealogy organized by some organization that certifies dog breeds. The spatial layout in No Country for Canine unveils the mirroring fate of humans and dogs. The questions proposed by the artist are interwoven in this cross-shaped space. What we need to ask is: how do we re-think an exhibition as an event through the narratives of art and exhibition space between the vision of canines and that of humans, between the non-human subject and the human subject, between documentary archives and collection of objects, and the ethic relationship between humans and animals?

 

In the exhibition, Wu does not show real the canine body or any taxidermy rugs; he does not show pictures of dogs, either. The only two named dogs are from the portrait of Hitler’s German Shepherd Dog, “Blondi,” photographed by Walter Frentz, and the image of artist’s fabulous dog, “Jabu,” displayed on the board at the entrance of the gallery room. In my opinion, porcelain dogs are the symbolic replacement of the canine body as well as the canine image shaped by human perspectives and technologies. In No Country for Canine, we seem to subtly move along the history of the artist’s collection of porcelain dogs. This is similar to the following experience: we enter a carriage of an urban Ferris wheel in an orderly fashion, and as the carriage is elevated and the field of vision extends, we slowly grasp the idea that the canine-related issues are connected to a wide range of viewpoints, networks and their confluxes, like a city’s roads or a river’s tributaries, which comprise of main lines and secondary lines. When the carriage finally returns to the ground, our understanding of the city becomes multi-layered and multi-faceted. Similarly, after viewing the exhibition, the ordinary, inexpensive porcelain dog statues seem to possess new meanings and associations for us. Therefore, through the spatial arrangement of the exhibition, dogs as animals, the porcelain statues as objects, the domestication genealogy that brings together the aspects of nation, politics, economy and fate, as well as humans that dictate the lives and evolution of dogs have formed the narrative network of the exhibition, which is precisely the “human-animal” life politics that Wu invites the audience to contemplate on.

 

On the other hand, although Wu’s research seems to be a survey of the canine history from a human perspective, several drawings and a set of works, entitled B_EEDS, N_ TION, ETHNI_, R_GION, constituting of brass letters cast from sheep-skin dog treats, are embedded in the exhibition in a manner that seems to reveal the artist’s projection of personal sentiments towards dogs. In my imagination, such sentiments resemble a tranquil sea with gentle waves, softly rocking the groups of porcelain dog statues on the plinths, which are displayed in a way that is reminiscent of god statues worshipped on the altars of Taiwanese temples. What I mean to say is that when the dominant narrative of the exhibition is composed by works such as the When Collecting Becomes Breeding series that gives out a shine that makes the porcelain dogs look like god statues, the photographic portraits of colorful, forward-looking dog statues leaning against the walls, the medal-wearing, deity-like Slacks Special NO IRONING CHINA NO IRONING ROC, or the dignified, complacent white German Shepherd Dog porcelain, entitled Allach Nr. 76, which adopts a pose informed by a sacred rhetoric, there are several works that contrarily overflow with subtle emotions through the space, creating the rhythm of the exhibition

 

Domestication or Anti-anthropocentrism

 

“So that terrier, that spaniel, that retriever that you know so well… it's a wolf at heart. But a much friendlier one.”[1]In Tamed: Ten Species that Changed our World, Alice Roberts infers that it was not farmers who first kept dogs but the hunter gatherers during the Ice Age; and in the book, it is confirmed that the ancestors of dogs are domesticated gray wolves. Nevertheless, the book reveals that our scientific examination of dogs based on genetic studies on various fossils, evidence based conjectures about the origin of their relation to humans, the genealogy of interbreeding with their distant relatives, the genealogical bifurcations throughout the process of evolution and the issue of breeds and classification have been woven together to unfold “a world map of dogs” informed by archaeological discoveries and unresolved scientific controversies.

 

To a certain degree, No Country for Canine, also attempts to employ survey as a point of departure as the pedigree diagram comprised of twenty-seven documents displayed on the wall near the entrance of the exhibition. The diagram marks the breeds of dogs, their pedigrees and the complexity involved in naming; and the extremely extensive title of the work[2] implies the challenging undertaking and uncertainty in ascertaining canine pedigree and genealogy as well. Meanwhile, this work also seems to expose the anthropocentrism in the work of domestication and breeding. However, many of the companion animals tamed, changed and even “invented” through breeding have lived and formed an intimate relationship with humans. Therefore, I believe that when critiquing the issue of anthropocentrism, the ethical issue involves more aspects in discussing the relationship between companion animals and humans than that of wild animals and animals captured and bred for food. Among all the companion animals, dogs have the closest relationship with humans. In the primitive era, humans and wolves – or rather the primitive dogs that first stepped over the boundaries between species – began learning to share food and collaborate in hunting after the initial stage of suspicion. At the same time, children also started playing with wolf pups in early human settlements—this means that the historical development of human and wolves/dogs becoming close partners was not a unilateral process entirely dominated by humans. The prominent question we need to ask here is: is domestication definitely a unilateral anthropocentric attempt? Scholar Ng Chen-Siang contends that “the domestication of animals and plants is not a single ‘incident’ but a ‘process’… after humans domesticated these animals and plants, humans have also been changed by them.”[3] In fact, there are not many animals and plants on Earth that can be domesticated; and humans, as part of the animal world, have also continuously domesticated ourselves to counter the influence of natural selection on the fate of the human race.

 

To discuss the anti-anthropocentrism in issues about domestication, I should temporarily move away from my discussion about No Country for Canine. When talking about human beings as part of the Earth community, the first biologist, I think of being Jacob von Uexküll and the concept of “Umwelt” developed from his study of tick (Ixodes rhitinis) at the beginning of the 20th century, which has enabled us to change our subjective perspective in discussing animals. In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans published in 1934, Uexküll invites his readers to embark “on a journey into unknown worlds; a journey not into a ‘new science’ but unknown worlds as well as multiple universes that are like bubbles and co-exist with human beings.”[4] These worlds refer to the “Umwelt” of animals, meaning the surrounding environment, proposed by Uexküll. Embodying their own meanings and carrying their own interests and influences, animals are part of the environment and its inhabitants. This viewpoint conveys the idea that all animals are creating meaningful lives in a meaningful environment, which dissolves “human exceptionalism” and the violence it imposes on other species. The concept of “Umwelt” allows us to think about the human and the non-human worlds—that is, how human beings and animals have shared and collectively formed the environment.

 

Specifically speaking, the argument proposed by the world of animals is defined by their sensory limitation and the range of their reaction, particularly those creatures that do not “return the gaze.” Regarding this, Giorgio Agamben, in his The Open: Man and Animal, focuses on Uexküll’s distinction between “Umgebung” and “Umwelt,” and assesses Uexküll’s contribution to the issue of humans and animals in two short essays, respectively entitled “Umwelt” and “Tick.” Especially when debasing anthropocentrism and the legitimate image of human’s dominance, Agamben points out that “classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to the higher organisms, Uexküll instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score.”[5] He discusses this in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, and explains the aforesaid mechanism, with which humanity has been able to separate itself from others, in a more succinct manner: “For the living being, something like a division, which reproduces in some way the division that the oikonomia introduced in God between being and action. This division separates the living being from itself and from its immediate relationship with its environment—that is, with what Jakob von Uexküll and then Heidegger name the circle of receptors-disinhibitors. The break or interruption of this relationship produces in living beings both boredom—that is, the capacity to suspend this immediate relationship with their disinhibitors— and the Open, which is the possibility of knowing being as such, by constructing a world.”[6]

 

The Open: Man and Animal can be seen as an extension of Agamben’s analysis of “bare life” and “the state of exception,” in which he examines the non-human life through reading Heidegger’s discussion related to the “world-poverty of animals.” It is not difficult to see that the attention towards the “animal turn” has been rather major in criticism about issues of anthropocentrism in the past two decades and the field of contemporary art, among which Agamben’s focus on animal-related issues has frequently been engaged in dialogue by different fields. In contemporary art, Giovanni Aloi, the author of Art and Animals, is a representative critic when it comes to animal-related issues. With cases studies similar to art criticism, Aloi has brought vivid colors to the bodies, sounds, gazes and traces of animals, which are all new questioning entities in contemporary art. When dealing with the relation between art and animals, Aloi asks, “can art then contribute to the defining of new and multi-focal perspectives on nature and the animal in order to move us beyond ourselves?” I believe that such a fundamental question can be lesson number one for all contemporary creations and exhibitions featuring animal-related issues. As a matter of fact, I also often think about the following questions: in the contemporary art scene that is highly controlled by human intellect and desire, what do we aim to achieve when we criticize and reflect upon anthropocentrism as human beings with works that “lend a voice to the animals”? What do we really get? Do the animals get their subjectivity or are they further instrumentalized instead? Why animals and why this interest in all kinds of non-humans? In truth, it is not difficult to understand that human being needs a constant self-reflexive position in the human-animal-art connection because introspection and self-critique are important capabilities to humans.

 

 

The Gaze That Is Animal

 

Returning to the gallery room of No Country for Canine, we begin to receive the gaze from the porcelain dogs on the plinths and be viewed by the canine portraits surrounding us. The problem resulted from such description is rather obvious—they are not real, living dogs. No matter how vivid their postures and looks are, or how versatile their coats and eye colors are made by the expressiveness of glaze, they are after all porcelain dogs, photographic images and drawings; in short, they are “objects.” For me, to draw out the voice of “objects” is the unique ability of a text of art; in other words, it is the presence of a semiotic substitute. Or, it is similar to the experience of watching a god statute in the temple; in fact, it is very difficult to say whether a god statute is or is not the deity per se. The real question lies in whether one can feel the connection with the divine presence through the half-closed eyes of the god statue. In this light, can we take this different experience of viewing the bodies and eyes of porcelain dogs that are “objects” and those of living dogs, and extend it to the different experience and memory of the mutual viewing between humans and animals?

 

In No Country for Canine, the colors and variations of the porcelain dogs’ looks and their portraits in the series, entitled When Collecting Becomes Breeding, leave the deepest impression in my mind. The viewing of these canine groups is like demonstrating the pressure when humans are gazed by animals. Regarding the return gaze of the animal, I would like to first talk about the Derrida’s famous cat, despite the exhibition is solely about dogs. One of Derrida’s focuses in his late years has been to link his philosophy of “différance” with issues related to the animal. Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (L'animal que donc je suis) is published posthumously, and includes his ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" in the seminar at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1997. Derrida mentioned that the issue of the animal had already appeared in his writing repeatedly; ever since he started writing, the question of the animal and life had been an important and key issue.[7] It is fair to say, the lecture provided Derrida an opportunity to reflect upon and re[1]examine the main clues about the animal and animality in his work over the years; and among these clues, the key idea has been the dichotomy between humans and the animal. “Speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughing, tears, respect, etc., ” according to Derrida, are things that the animal does not possess in the dichotomy between humans and the animal; that is, the animal has been denied by logos, which also violently homogenizes the concept and classification of animals. Derrida wanted to challenge the philosophical foundation that established the opposition of humans and animals. As this is a fundamental issue about life, it is not only related to philosophy but also surpasses philosophical thinking. Therefore, Derrida suggested that people should carefully reconsider it instead of simply defending “animal right” or “human right.”

 

Taking a closer look, Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am from his late years has also been an important reference for the theoretical discourse of the “animal turn.” Because the animal has been viewed as a homogeneous concept, he believed that it has been a blind zone in philosophy as well as a foundation of humanity as a constructed concept that has never been questioned. From his description of the classic scene of facing his cat in nude in the bathroom, Derrida saw his own shame and vulnerability as he was gazed by his cat. “The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.”[8] The moment we realize that animals are gazing at us indicates that we are placed in the context of another world, where the so-called life, talking and death might mean different things; and it is in the moment and the space of bathroom that “I as an animal” encounters “the animal that is not I.” Derrida thinks this provides a basis to contemplate on the ethics of the human and the animal. In other words, in this encounter with the cat, before Derrida’s reflection and consciousness were present, the “viewpoint” of the cat was already present; when Derrida realized he was looking at the cat, the cat had already been looking at him. In Derrida’s opinion, it is incident like this – before one actively sees, one is already being gazed by the animal other, meaning being gazed by the animal before the self-consciousness is established – that many philosophers have overlooked. On the other hand, there are scholars like Sharon Sliwinski, who has interpreted this as a kind of “primal scene”: “(Derrida’s) efforts to deconstruct the traditional determinations of the human have exposed an anxious encounter with the gaze called animal,” and “the centuries-old debate about what it means to be human necessarily begs the question of the animal.”[9]

 

Continuing his thinking about animal at the end of the 1990s, Derrida’s last seminar from 2001 to 2003 adopted the theme of “the beast and the sovereign”; and this two-year seminar was later recorded in The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. I and Vol. II. In the seminar, Derrida not only dealt with the issues of the animal and sovereignty, but also led the students to re-read and re-examine the works he had read as well as the writings and topics he had published. The first-year seminar, to an extensive extent, continued the theme and route of The Animal That Therefore I Am; the second-year theme, on the other hand, showed a distinctive change.[10] In the first[1]year seminar, the strategy that Derrida employs to question the distinction between the human and the animal is to point out that the latest animal studies have already discovered that some animals do possess the capacities of mourning and using language and tools. When humans are confident that animals do not possess certain abilities, we are in fact demonstrating our sovereignty over animals; and the consequence is the invasion and violence against the animal world before we deny these violent deeds. Through discussing “the beast and the sovereign” and “animality and sovereignty” while using approaches of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, Derrida connects the abilities of language, traces and responses (instead of reactions) related to animals, especially “death,” which is viewed as unique to the human (only human beings die, and animals simply perish.)[11] In the second year, in addition to the theme of the human and the animal, Derrida adds the theme that he terms “survivance”: solitude, primal violence, dying a living death, survival, phantasm of survival, choosing between burial and cremation, prayer, archive, etc.[12] From the gaze of the cat, Derrida unfolds a series of thoughts about life, which has not only influenced the rapidly developed field of “Human-Animal Studies” (HAS) but also other relevant contemporary fields, where Derrida’s impact and the issues he raised can be seen.

 

Taking a retrospective glance on Wu Chuan-Lun’s creative thinking, his attention towards animal-related issues informed by an ecological point of view can be detected in his previous projects, which have revealed his contextualized thinking in problematizing the phenomena he observes. His various creative series, including You Are My Nature, National Freeway 1 National Park, Domestication, Museum of Taxidermy and Coast Mining, have shown his questioning of and discussion about the dichotomous approach to theorize the relationship between the human and the non-human. In the meantime, No Country for Canine can be viewed as an important milestone in the artist’s creative career. He has created a site, in which humans are viewed by the animal and immersed in self-reflection. To a certain degree, the audience can be prompted by the eyes of the several dozens of porcelains dogs in various colors, especially the statues and portraits in the two series, When Collecting Becomes Breeding—Europe and When Collecting Becomes Breeding—Taiwan, as well as the white German Shepherd Dog porcelain statue, Allach Nr.76, which is a collectible item that the artist has collected under a rather serendipitous circumstance. Although we can only see porcelain dogs as objects – that is, they are a substitutive presence on the semiotic level; an issue I have mentioned earlier in this article – the relationship between humans and dogs are, after all, different from that with other animals—it is a close partnership, in which both can understand each other’s messages and the communication through looks. Therefore, how do we re-organize our thoughts and perspective through dogs? In particular, humans and dogs have been continuously present in each other’s species histories in regard to nation, pedigree, economy, class and military. Maybe it is possible for me to slightly revise Derrida’s words and say, “perhaps it is not hard to have thinking begin here.”

 

The Life Force Qualities of Dog(s)

 

Michel Foucault, in the first chapter of The Order of Things, discusses Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, yet the dog in the lower right corner of the painting seems to be invisible in his detail analysis of the painting. This is the problematic that intrigues me at the beginning of an essay on dogs and scripts written by Claire Huot, who specializes in Chinese scripts and animal studies.[13] As a matter of fact, Foucault does mention “animal”; however, Huot states that there are more French vocabularies for large canines to choose from, such as “mastiff,” “molosse,” “dogue,” etc., than the simple choice of word, “animal.” Perhaps, when Foucault analyzes the characters and their positions in the painting to discuss the system of visual representation, the dog is only viewed as an “object” and therefore not enumerated. Consequently, in this fascinating essay, Huot directly names the dog in Las Meninas, “LeDogue”; and starting from “LeDogue,” Huot moves from the nameless animal in Las Meninas to discuss the topic of the dog as a scapegoat, Cynicism, Nietzsche and the life force qualities embodied by the Chinese character for dog (“ 犬 ”).

 

From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Huot observes that, for Nietzsche, the dog is like the human and possess the potential of being “wild” (howling) and being part of the “herd” (tail[1]wagging); and the existence of dog is an integral part of the human experience. From the philosopher’s discussion about the dog’s life force qualities, Huot further links the Chinese characters associated with the dog and its image in Chinese culture, from which she forms her comparison: Nietzsche’s hound is the Chinese dog. For instance, in Chinese, two dogs (“ 㹜 ”) together refer to two dogs gnawing at each other, hence, “noisy quarreling,” and three dogs together (“ 猋 ”) denote running fast, hence, “anything that is sudden.” The dog in Chinese culture is an animal full of sounds and movements, and such life force is similar to Nieztsche’s “howling hound” (heulende hund). Moreover, comparing to other animals, the dog in Chinese script system (as a radical of a character; “ 犬 ” or “ 犭 ”) is used extensively and carries certain importance. Although it is difficult to trace the origin of the human[1]canine relation in China, the legendary founder of Chinese polity, Fu Xi ( 伏羲氏 ), has the first character of its name a combination of the human (“ 亻 ”) and the dog (“ 犬 ”). In the West, the cultural state of the dog also has a long history; in particular, the name of the ancient Greek philosophical school, Cynicism, founded by Diogenes of Sinope, is derived from the Greek word for dog, “Cynic,” which builds its thinking on the physicality, image and behavioral pattern of canines.

 

There is a set of unique works in No Country for Canine, entitled B_EEDS, N_TION, ETHNI_, R_GION, which adopts the form of unfinished scramble and comprises of English letters made of sheep-skin dog treats cast as brass sculptures. The missing letters from the English words displayed on the floor are scattered in various corners of the gallery room, awaiting the audience to find them and complete the words. From the viewpoint of dogs, the sheep-skin treats are toys, snacks and a hobby. Through this work, the artist helps the audience assume the canine perspective, bringing the human vision closer to the ground; however, the dog treats, which should have been chewed and gnawed, are now cast into brass letters and incorporated with the cultural meaning of scramble, creating a critical reversion. As we embody and assume the role of the canine, we also encounter a dilemma of self-criticism. This critical approach of subjecting the life force qualities of dogs to the human power and desire is also applied to the series of Formation Deformation Dogformation. In this series, the artist uses white porcelain and drawing on paper – that is, “object” and “representation of drawing” as methods – to capture movements of dogs in agility training with a time delay visuality and represent them in humorous, peculiar, elongated, geometric shapes. If the aforementioned Chinese characters with the radical of “dog” symbolize the signification process of concretizing nouns and abstracting adjectives, the Formation Deformation Dogformation series transforms the canine life qualities into aesthetic forms, even into certain abstract states. This is where the charm of artistic creation lies; and the critique of human’s “utilization” of the body of other species also unfolds hereon.

 

Conclusion

 

When the animal becomes a topic of theoretical and artistic thinking, we can often see some common questions, such as “can animals talk? If yes, how can they be heard and read?” In an essay discussing the animal turn,[14] Kari Weil contends that such questions are certain responses to the theoretical issues regarding the animal turn in Gayatri Chakraorty Spivak’s famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” I believe that this opinion is indeed a worthy reference in terms of discussing the relationship between the human and the animal. On the other hand, I also notice that Donna Haraway has also paid special attention to dogs. A Cyborg Manifesto by Haraway, whose work has consistently engaged in animal-related issues, is also a critical work about the boundary between the humans and the animal. Particularly, in The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway illuminates on a certain post-human mode of cognition—that is, as part of the animal world, humans must co-exist with countless creatures – without animals, humans cannot be humans – and share the environment and resources with these creatures. This echoes Uexküll’s viewpoints from the last century, especially his field work and philosophical legacy about the “Umwelt,” “multiple universes” and “shared environment.” However, Haraway also reminds us that “dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with.”[15] I can see that Harraway’s theoretical work is filled with her love for dogs; and in No Country for Canine, I can also implicitly perceive similar sentiments. Regarding his hand-drawn works, Wu explains that “the drawing with the gold frame depicts a tiny glaze crack; the other three black-framed drawings are more like studies, featuring the shine and reflection of glaze as well as dog hair, an ensemble of different types of dog hair.” From these drawings, I have perceived Wu’s love and tender feelings towards dogs concealed in the expansive human-dog topics, which he might have intentionally revealed. This is also the reason why I have admitted at the beginning of this article that there are things one cannot analyze and make explicit from a third-person perspective. Nevertheless, the emotional undercurrents of memory and love in No Country for Canine are perhaps one of the essential driving forces behind the entire exhibition

 

[1] Alice Roberts. Tamed: Ten Species that Changed our World. London: Hutchinson Radius, 2017, p.68.

[2] The artwork title reads Those Officially Called As, Commonly Known As (Or Not Being Called As), Used For (Or Not Used For) Guarding, Herding Or Driving Livestock—Sheep, Goat, Cattle, Reindeer, Alpaca; Registered (Or Not Registered) With The FCI, Only Recognized (Or Not Recognized) By Local Kennel Clubs; Ever[2]Exist, Rare, Extinct Or Modern-Mixed Pasture Dog Breeds, Their Nationality And Appellation Written In The Language Of The Country, And Their Geographic Origin, Possible Consanguinity And Naming History.

[3] Ng Chen-Siang. “Introduction.” Tamed: Ten Species that Changed our World. Trans. Yu Sih-Ying. Taipei: China Times Publishing, 2019, p.10 (This introduction is included in the Chinese edition of the book.)

[4] Jacob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p.42.

[5] Giorgio Agamben, The Open: man and animal, California: Stanford University Press, 2004, p.40.

[6] 6 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and other Essays, California: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp.16-17.

[7] Jacques Derrida, The animal that therefore I am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p.34.

[8] Jacques Derrida, The animal that therefore I am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p.29.

[9] Sharon Sliwinski, The gaze called animal: notes for a study on thinking. In CR: The New Centennial Review, 11: 2, 2012, p.77.

[10] The first-year seminar includes various philosophers, including Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Lacan, Levinas and Deleuze; but the second-year seminar only focuses on two figures, or rather two works: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger's 1929/30 lecture, which is published later under the title, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.

[11] Jacques Derrida, The beast and the sovereign vol I, 2001- 2002, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

[12] Jacques Derrida, The beast and the sovereign vol II, 2002- 2003, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

[13] Claire Huot, 2017, Chinese dog and French scapegoats: an essay in zoonomastics, In Foucault and animals, Leiden: Boston: Brill, pp.37-58.

[14] Kari Weil, A report on the animal turn, in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 21: 2, 2010, pp.1-23.

[15] Donna Haraway, The companion species manifesto, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003, p.5.

​

​

​

​

​

​