Just what are young Taiwanese artists thinking these days?
In a four-minute animated film, a man wakes to find a bird growing out of his body. He then puts the bird in his backpack and goes to a tall building. He climbs to the 13th floor and enters a room. There he opens the window and releases the bird into a forest of concrete buildings.
The short, created by Chen Co-min (陳克旻), a senior at Shih Chien University (實踐大學) is projected on a TV wall made of 100 cardboard boxes and is accompanied by Pink Floyd music. The installation is one of five winning projects of this year's Taipei Arts Prize.
The prize's organizing body, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, received 318 pieces of artwork and awarded the top prizes to Lin Huang-di (林煌迪), Tu Wei-cheng (涂維政), Liang Jen-hung (梁任宏), Chen Co-min (陳克旻), and Chen Ching-yao (陳擎耀). The museum's staff and art critics generally agreed that this year's batch of contestants showed a great improvement in the quality of the submitted artwork. The presentation skills were more mature and sophisticated and the themes clearer and more focused, Chen's multimedia art project being one example. The jury particularly liked his use of a TV wall, which taps into the consumerism of modern life and ubiquity of TV.
The contest's criteria also emphasized the artists' handling of media, technology and modernity. Chen's animation of a bird flying into a forest of concrete buildings is an apt, if not especially subtle, comment on contemporary urban life.
Tu's The Vestiges of Consoling Civilization II puts a modern twist to classicist concepts. Tu uses pieces of murals that appear like ruins of an ancient temple or palace, but a closer look at the images on the murals and one immediately spots icons recognizable from current day civilization, at least in some parts of the world. Microsoft Word and Outlook Express icons are molded into the clay and plaster pieces. The viewer is jolted from an initial experience of antiquity, to a current reality of printers, floppy disks and other digital era imagery. Tu's revised iconography and murals are disturbing as apparent relics of a computerized civilization, while at the same time, the faux temple totems suggest these computer era symbols provide for humans' spiritual needs.
Also showcased are 10 other pieces from the Excellence Prize Winners of the Taipei Arts Prize. Most stunning of these is Liu Shih-Tung (劉時棟), known for his large scroll paintings featuring comic figures against a chaotic background. Liu is also the subject of an ongoing solo exhibition at the same museum.
Art Notes:
What: 2001 Taipei Arts Prize (二00一台北美術獎)
Where: B1, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), 181 Chungshan N. Rd., Sec. 3, Taipei (台北市中山北路三段181號)
When: Until June 17
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