UPCOMING

Remote Viewing takes a thought experiment as its point of departure. On June 24, 1931, an innovative experiment conducted in Japan sought to capture an image of the moon’s far side—an achievement no telescope on Earth had yet accomplished. The resulting image, reportedly transmitted mentally by Koichi Mita from Suma, Japan, was registered on photographic plates under the supervision of Tomokichi Fukurai, the controversial psychologist and psychical researcher. His experiment demonstrated the force of senrigan (千里眼), a concept that claims the ability to perceive distant events solely through mental faculties. Fukurai stood at the nexus of an international movement investigating the hidden capacities of the mind, to which he brought a distinctly Asian perspective. His research intersected with emerging global interests in the unconscious, hypnosis, clairvoyance, and latent human potential. Although professionally ostracized for his work, the striking photographs produced through these experiments remain a testament to Fukurai’s radical proposal that the mind as a form of imaging technology is relevant to creation today. In an age in which digital culture and advanced technology have vastly expanded our visual field, it is still the mind’s eye that enables us to perceive what lies beyond conventional visibility. The exhibition presents works by fourteen contemporary international artists who employ moving images to construct perceptual architectures. These are juxtaposed with historical artworks and archival materials. Within these artistic expressions, the screen functions as a psychic interface, reconfiguring our understanding of time, voice, and identity across distance.

The exhibition title references “remote viewing,” a term for extrasensory perception across distance formalized in parapsychological and Cold War military research during the 1970s and 1980s. Clandestine Soviet, Chinese, European, and US programs investigated the phenomenon and incorporated variations of remote viewing into their operations. The archival materials presented here, however, place these modern practices within a much longer history of efforts to extend perception beyond the limits of ordinary sight. Such concepts are already embedded in folk and animistic belief systems, where they reflect a personal and collective investment in the life-affirming idea that all things possess vitality, affect one another, and are subject to transformation through relation. This idea finds a distant resonance in quantum physics. Across cultures and over time, divination, trance, dreamwork, spirit communication, and ritual have treated perception not as a fixed faculty, but as a mutable capacity that can be trained, intensified, and redirected.

In the context of the exhibition, Remote Viewing is understood metaphorically—not as a paranormal claim requiring verification, but as a conceptual framework for tracing how mind and perception are historically and technologically mediated. From the mid-twentieth-century expansion of broadcast infrastructures and satellite imaging to contemporary networked visual regimes, systems of vision increasingly extend sight across distance while reorganizing attention, visual culture, and the very conditions of knowledge. The exhibition foregrounds two interrelated tensions: consciousness as a generative field of imagination, memory, and innovation, and consciousness as an instrument within structures of power, control, and governance shaped through visual regimes. Working within this friction, the exhibition invites viewers to rethink perception from within, reclaiming the agency of imagination and experience.

At its core, the exhibition advances a central proposition: remote viewing transcends the notion of simple observation across distance. Rather, it articulates the ways in which individual and collective psychic experiences are shaped within the frameworks of subcultural modernity. These frameworks encompass the processes through which bodies, histories, and testimonies are alternatively visualized in evolving visual languages. In dialogue with contemporary works, the exhibition critically engages archival materials through multiple epistemological frameworks, positioning them in a reciprocal relationship with art.  By connecting the practices of participating artists through a nonlinear and cross-cultural perspective, the exhibition challenges established art historical narratives and proposes new possibilities for perception.

Spanning three floors of MoNTUE—Museum of National Taipei University of Education, the exhibition opens with a constellation of previously unexhibited historical archives, assembling a set of “mental images” around Fukurai Tomokichi and his psychological experiments. The exhibition features works by artists from Taiwan and various international locations, including Annie Besant × C. W. Leadbeater, Hippolyte Baraduc, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Louis Darget, Max Ernst, Falconer Brothers, Harun Farocki, Madge Gill, Lady Frieda Harris, Susan Hiller, Ho Tzu Nyen, Sky Hopinka, William Hope, Che-Yu Hsu × Wan-Yin Chen, Shigeko Kubota, Gerald Light, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Chizuko Mifune, Koichi Mita, Sandra Mujinga, Henry A. Murray × Christiana Morgan × Cecilia Roberts × Charles E. Burchfield, Ikuko Nagao, Jakob Ottonowitsch von Narkiewitsch-Jodko, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Trevor Paglen, J.B. Rhine, Hermann Rorschach, Jeremy Shaw, Lieko Shiga, Hélène Smith, Chulin Sun,  Jenna Sutela, Ingo Swann, Sadako Takahashi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Karl Zener.