The opening work of small worldthe latest Taipei Biennale, which closed on Sunday, is as edgy as any mildly provocative exhibition ever gets: the first section featuring pioneering Palestinian digital artist Samia Halaby, Next is a wall of photographs by Hsu Tsung-shu documenting Taiwan’s transition from military dictatorship to flourishing democracy in the 1990s.
It was co-curated by Reem Shadid, a Palestinian curator based in Beirut, Freya Chou, a Taiwanese curator based in Hong Kong, and Brian Quan Wood, a Taiwanese-American writer based in New York. small world We apply the perspectives of very small but troubled places like Taiwan and Palestine to big issues of humanity, security, and community.
“After that, there were no structural changes.” [Hamas’s attack on Israel on] “The first day on October 7th was filled with a lot of passionate statements and passionate discussions,” said Quan Wood. “The original show is up and running. We’re the same curators as before. Mr. Reem is Palestinian, so we were worried about what kind of attention it would get, but the local reaction afterward was, ‘It’s great. It was a thing.”
“The world has changed since we started planning,” says Wang Junjie, director of the government-supported Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). He has been organizing the Taipei Biennale since 1992, making it one of the oldest biennales in East Asia and the first in all of Asia. TFAM celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, and a new building expanded on the original site is nearing completion.
Wang said the biennale is “ostensibly apolitical, depicting how the pandemic has since changed life globally. There are many different kinds of politics, and there are critical ones. But there are also meditative ones.”
Su Tsung-hee, The more we gather: the annual autumn workers’ struggle (1996) Courtesy of the artist
Hsu’s historic photographs cover a wall of deep green, hosting a veiled reference to Taiwanese politics (the recently re-elected Taiwan Progressive Party is omitted from green to the opposition’s blue) The person neither confirms nor denies it.
“People would rather forget [the pandemic], it’s been very painful, but we’re seriously overdue some self-examination. “I understand the desire for ‘normality’, but we must have learned something nonetheless,” Quan Wood suggests.
era of transparency
Reflecting unapologetically and clearly on illness, lockdown, and loss; small world It argues that moving forward requires openness, transparency, and honesty. In a time of “extreme conflict,” the show “in a way deflects the geopolitical and transforms it into something mundane, personal, and painful,” says Quan Wood. . “In this polarized political landscape, we are finding a place for complexity.” The coronavirus has “divided the fabric of society, but it is also a strange confinement, a contest of whether we can call ourselves alive.” It brought the world together.” Rather, just as the particles of the coronavirus destroy the host’s body long after an acute infection, the whole world seems to have been suffering politically from the coronavirus for a long time. The rifts that existed before the pandemic have only deepened since then. But our shared trauma can be a starting point for empathy.
Atomization in intimacy gave form to popular favorites The Wall: Asia (un)real estate project (2023) Aditya Novali’s work, which imagines the madness that pervades being trapped inside a miniature version of a giant Asian high-rise apartment complex, was planned by Aditya Novali before the pandemic. The Indonesian artist’s background in architecture and shadow puppetry is evident in the theatricality of each small room’s specific paintings, ranging from the silly to the gory to the perverse.
Nadim Abbas Pilgrim of the Microworld (2023) Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Next to that, in the last hall on the first floor, an installation by Hong Konger Nadim Abbas is on display. Pilgrim of the Microworld (2023) inverts a diorama with a room-sized sandbox microchip. It is considered a symbol of Taiwan and a shield of safety. Rendered in steel and sand and reconfigured daily, these works subvert any sense of permanence, security, and known conditions.
The surrounding walls are reinforced or unreinforced with structures by Paul Virilio. bunker archeology (1958-65). Ghost photographs of decaying Nazi bunkers along the coastline of his native France, some embedded in sand dunes, highlight the impermanence of the regime and the futility of Europe’s defensive identity. All that remains is the merciless ocean facing us.
Paul Virilio bunker archeology (1958-1965) Courtesy of Sophie Virilio and Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Jen Liu digs beneath the waves with a fantastical allegory land under the sea (2023) is the final part of her long-running film series pink slime caesar shift. The disappearance of South Chinese immigrant women labor activists becomes a literal reckoning, as they become underwater beings, finding beauty and hope in a world in which their survival has always been politically and economically impossible.
philosophical dilemma
Quan Wood said, “America’s influence in the world extends to water and air. We see the peculiarities of that division in many parts of the world, scrolling the fate of the planet. There are so many divisive situations all over the world that share a political bankruptcy. It requires attention, not independence or belief.”
video what is your favorite primitive Taipei-based Taiwanese artist Li Yifan takes fantasy in a convincingly cynical direction through violent confrontations and philosophical dilemmas with absurd digitally rendered characters. . Just as the screen illuminates human cruelty through anonymity, the godlike Lee transforms the cursor into a kind of obsessive empowerment.
The entire hall is filled with works by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gauke. Not exactly a B flat (2017), columns and walls expand and collapse, like the lungs of a giant or the ebb and flow of time. The half-dark, cold space is wheezing and overwhelming, comforting and unsettling at the same time.Special emphasis is placed on sound and music small worldincludes the likes of DJ Sniff and several local indie labels, in part in recognition that musicians and other performers have been the creators who have struggled the most during the pandemic. Quan says. As more grassroots artists, “musicians feel out of place and not respected within institutions.”
Doubly excluded are immigrant musicians, and a January-long exchange led by Julian Abraham “Togar” and Wok the Rock introduced Indonesian musicians in Taiwan. “We have a very vibrant immigrant music community here, like an underground volcano on the verge of exploding,” says Quan Wood, mixing Indonesia’s rich musical history with Taiwan’s.
Karen Mok, a Hong Kong pop star of Persian descent, provides audio for a sound installation basin (2023) by Natasha Sadr Haghigian, an Iranian artist based in Berlin. In TFAM’s garden atrium, Walker’s effervescent mass pops out singing Mok’s 1999 ballad of hers suddenly, created in honor of how caregivers can often become self-conscious in their hidden roles. The song, mixed with the low-pitched planes that fly frequently to and from nearby Matsuyama Airport, promises that a bigger world is possible, even for caregivers and those isolated during the pandemic and currently confined to small spaces. are doing. Or maybe better times will come after today’s ups and downs.
