Issue
Up Close: Xindian Boys

A river passing through a landscape doubles it, offering within its currents a shifting, shimmering doppelgänger world. For their new work Don’t Worry, Baby (2025), the Taiwanese art group Xindian Boys—a four-person, cross-generational, cross-disciplinary collective named after their native Xindian district—collaborated with the new media art group XTRUX to create a digital doppelgänger: a parallel universe of the Xindian River basin that runs on algorithms and game engine technology. Filling three of the four walls of a massive gray-cube hall at the newly opened New Taipei City Art Museum, the commissioned site-specific projection presents a vast, immersive panorama. The imagery transitions between the idyllic and the mischievous, ranging from the dreamlike to the dystopian: scenes of people playing in shallow waters or flying kites over lush greenery are interspersed with stormy skies and wayward floods. At unexpected moments, a man can be glimpsed leading a horse across the landscape, heightening the sense of surreality.