Have you picked up strawberries on campus recently? The graduation exhibition, called “Let’s Criticize Media” and organized by the 18th anniversary graduates-to-be of Department of Mass Communication, has started its advertising activities, which fill the whole campus with posters and postcards of strawberries and create an illusion of being at strawberry orchard.

In fact, the two graduation exhibitions are the results of four years’ learning of the graduates of Department of Mass Communication, who entered Tamkang in 2000 and are about to leave this year. Exhibitions outside campus will be held at Taipei Juvenile Education and Entertainment Center, Y17 (2 Fl., No. 17, Section 1, Jen-ai Rd., MRT’s NTU Hospital Station), 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., May 1 and 2. Exhibition on campus is from May 4 to 6 at Carrie Chang Fine Arts Center, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibition includes short films, documentaries, multimedia and advertisement PR designing.

These “seven-grade” graduates were born in the time of Taiwan’s rapid economic growth; therefore, they grew up in a more prosperous condition of living and are labeled by the media as “strawberries.” Responding to such a label, they think the environment is already there, and they are the products of the environment. In Taiwan’s open society, they contend, the so-called “strawberries” are victimized by the media, which tend to observe them through partial perspectives. They have already had enough of all those chaos and commercialization created by the media

The 18th anniversary graduates of Department of Mass Communication think that most people have become aware of media’s chaos; that’s why they set up the theme of exhibition as “Let’s Criticize Media.” They use “cult film” style of violent aesthetics in the poster of exhibition: a knife inside the television set dashes into a strawberry with barcode on it, representing the fact of the media’s absurd and violent impacts on the pure strawberry. They borrow the lines “If you tolerate this then your children will be next “ from Manic Street Preachers to be the red words inside the television set, warning against the indifference to media’s negative impacts.