Contemporary art has been trying to escape the museum for a long time now. At the Taipei Biennial 2000, which opens tomorrow, that means the inclusion of several artist-entertainer hybrids. It also means live performances and other stranger tangents.
Audition for a porno flick
Conceptual artist and adult film director Shu Lea Cheang (鄭淑麗) is having a crisis. “There are no men in this city,” she laments. It's not that she hasn't been looking for them either. On Wednesday night, she and her producer crawled through the pubs of the Shihda (師大) area until 1am looking for the male lead in her next project, a Danish sci-fi porno called Fluid.
Cheang's quest for the next Ron Jeremy, which has been fruitless so far, is also intimately related to her installation at TB2000. The museum piece consists of a room of seven urinals, which is an approximation of the set she will use when filming the movie. Tomorrow afternoon between 4pm and 6pm, this mock lavatory will double as the backdrop for a screen test that's open to the public.
"I hope a lot of people will come," said the shaven headed Taiwanese director. "We're having an especially difficult time casting the character of Hans."
According to Cheang's casting call, Hans is between the ages of 20 and 30, and described as "sexy man. He has a trained, fit body with a seemingly permanent hard on. Sexually motivated, driven and expressive." He is one of six characters she hopes to cast in Taipei this weekend, before returning to New York where she is having another gallery show that will include "lots of fake sperm".
Saturday's auditions will be a relatively uncomplicated affair, consisting of Cheang snapping a few digital photos of each hopeful star. She says that language ability is not particularly important because, "you know, porn is a totally global language." Those who make her final cut will be flown to location — probably Europe — for filming later this year.
Drum'n Bass Diva
The Japanese vocalist Hanayo started her entertainment career as a junior geisha at the age of eighteen. When she finally quit seven years later, she dove straight into the jagged toothed sounds of European techno, forming a London based band called Vapid Dolly. Somewhere within that continuum between age old Japanese hospitality and screeching electronic beats, she has also found occasion to host a Japanese TV comedy, Chanenten Museum, and publish volumes of her photographs. So what is she really? "I'm mostly a musician," she says, "That's what I do."
But as part of TB2000, Hanayo will both exhibit her photographs in addition to giving an hour long concert at the biennial's opening ceremony tomorrow night at 8 pm. For the performance, she is bringing two musicians and her "scratch guy" from Europe. With their backup, she'll sing, scream and whisper tracks off Gift, the album she will soon release on Digital Underground Records. Musically, her vocals cover quite a range, everything from sugary pop that's as breathy as cotton candy to piercing shrieks of "Itae!" (Japanese for "I'm in pain") over hardcore drum loops. She also sings in at least three languages — Japanese, English and German — and sometimes even she has trouble telling which will come out next.
Her photographs, meanwhile, present an introspective side that is simultaneously sentimental and detached. Streaming by you in books and on gallery walls, her images serve as a more or less unmediated private photo journal. When it comes to their falling under the rubric of art, however, she is pretty nonchalant, saying, "yeah, it's just some photos from my life. Having an exhibition wasn't even really my idea, but Jerome [Sans, one of the exhibition's two curators] and some others helped me arrange it." The casual attitude, however, belies the power of the images, especially Hanayo's oddly heartfelt portrayals of her daughter.
RSS