Scratching the surface

The August transfer of the management of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA) from Taipei City Government to the private Contemporary Art Foundation established the institute as privately run and publicly funded. The plan had been around for at least a year before the museum opened in May and has served as one of the key factors in the museum's young success.

The relatively innovative management and funding situation has by and large freed MOCA from the politics that have constantly plagued its uptown sister and once-intended parent institute, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). For most of its two decades of existence, TFAM has been bogged down by everything from KMT-DPP power plays to bickering between competing government agencies to its mission to establish Taiwanese art history.

So with little more of an agenda than showing new art by quality artists, MOCA Taipei has in its first six months produced three excellent shows, created an environment for exhibiting foreign artists alongside local artists, and established Taiwan's first major public art space for installation, video, and other contemporary media.

The third and latest of the museum's achievements is Labyrinth of Pleasure, a show curated by museum staffer Lai Ying-ying (賴瑛瑛) and independent curator Jason Wang (王嘉驥). Involving 19 artists, half a dozen of whom are foreign, the exhibition opened on Sept. 10 and will run through Feb. 24 of next year.

Though Labyrinth falls perilously close to being just another show about consumerist fluff, digital ironies and other e-generation cliches, it also just manages to push past those themes, embarking on a re-evaluation of what's left of the human element below all the shiny facades and superficialities.

The ideas quite obviously find their basis in those artworks of the last decade that sought to explore the cartoon side of reality, pieces that looked into how we identify ourselves with the cute, the cool, our stuffed animals, emblems, icons and other bits of two-dimensional gloss that often -- whether we like it or not -- mediate our views of things.

What happens in Labyrinth is the re-emergence of depth within that flattened and auto-ironic picture of the world. So the statements in this show are no longer merely about how we are shallow, but also about why we're shallow and the limits of what we can learn from focusing on that single dimension.

Several pieces in Labyrinth start to re-understand humans through their personified, cartoonified and usually oversimplified prototypes, namely children, children's toys and animals. For one work, Peng Hung-chih (彭弘智), a local neo-Pavlovian of sorts, attached video cameras to the heads of three dogs, dressed himself in a full-body bunny suit, put dog food all over his face, then filmed as the dogs licked him clean.

In the museum installation, the action of that scene is visible through three screens, each representing the vantage point of one of the dog-cams. Goofy as the pretext is, watching the simultaneous videos has an almost scientific feel, as if there is some sort of investigation into the dogs' social interaction or perceptions, or maybe even (self-reflexively) into the perceptions of the viewer. One finds oneself examining, on behalf of both oneself and the dogs, how and where information arrives. You can see what a dog sees, but you cannot see what the dog looks like unless you switch to the point of view of another dog. The only exception comes when one dog turns towards its own reflection in a mirrored surface, creating a very weird and self-conscious moment.