台灣藥物裝置藝術

想像一下你推著推車走入超市，貨櫃上琳瑯滿目排列著的既不是糖果餅乾、也不是玩具百貨，而是各式各樣治療病痛的藥物。

若有朝一日藥品可如糖果任意購買，既不需要藥師許可，也不需要處方簽，你會為此便利感到欣喜若狂亦或留有一絲危機意識？

Imagine you walk into a supermarket, where all the groceries on the shelves being not candies and biscuits, nor toys or any other daily products, but all kinds of medicine for illness of every description. Should there comes a day when medicine can be purchased as easily as buying candies, without the permission from pharmacists or any prescription, would you be rejoiced or feel alert?

為了降低人們對用藥的警覺心與危機感，藥物不再只放在寫有小心服用字樣的棕色玻璃瓶內，一顆顆有著鮮豔色澤、甚至包裹著糖衣的藥丸被製作出來。這些藥丸以可愛的顏色與形狀呈現，襯以閃亮的錫箔紙包裝，試圖以糖果的面貌混淆視聽，讓人們把吃糖的快樂經驗置入藥物的使用。

To relax the consumers’ sense of crisis and vigilance against medication, pills are no longer kept in brown bottles covered with words of caution. Instead, they are now often produced in bright colors or even coated in sugar. Packed with shiny foils and presented in cheerful appearance, these medicines strive to replace the bitter memories of taking medicines with the pleasant feelings generated by a handful of sweets.

台灣藝術家吳怡蒨以「藥」作為創作主體，將種類萬千的藥丸製成立體大型裝置探討台人用藥議題。在〈藥。菓 Bitter & Sweet〉的系列創作中，吳怡蒨蒐集了大量的藥物與藥盒進行創作。不論是將盒裝藥品與盒裝零食拼疊呈現、將藥物堆疊成一座座如超市囤貨塔的小山，或是將糖果與藥丸重新組合成煙花一般的歡樂圖騰，一件件歡樂的藥物裝置皆以其繽紛的視覺擄獲人心，凸顯出藥物不同於以往印象的可愛樣貌。藝術家將苦藥與糖果並置，暗喻兩者之間逐漸模糊的界線。當人們忘卻了藥物的病痛象徵，隨之而來的卻是藥物濫用與浪費等社會問題。吳怡蒨回應著台灣人們的心目中普遍存在著的「服藥有病治病，沒病強身」心態，以用藥風氣反思全民健保制度的缺失。

Taiwanese artist Wu I-Chien uses ‘medicine’ as her theme of creation. She turned thousands of pills into installations to discuss the medical situations in Taiwan. In the series of ‘Bitter & Sweet II,’ a large amount of medicine along with their packaging are collected for artistic practice. Whether they are pieced together with boxes of snacks, stacked up to the ceiling like pyramids in supermarkets, or mixed with candies and rearranged into firework patterns, together, various capsules and drugs allure people with their colorful appearance while presenting an adorable facet of medicine that overthrows past impressions. The artist juxtaposes medicine with candies, indicating a gradually blurring bindery between the two. However, when people started to forget the symbolic of illness in pills, an issue concerning uncontrolled lavishness of medicine usage has surfaced. Responding to a general belief by the Taiwanese saying that pills can provides cure in sickness and promote vitality in health, Wu I-Chien reflects upon such medical notion and bring forth the fault of our National Health Insurance(NHI) system.