Drawing on a rich history of prints

Set up to coincide with the opening of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1983, the Tenth International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition has played a vital role in promoting the traditional Chinese art form of printmaking as well as exchanges among international print artists.

At the sixth biennial, "drawing" was added to the event's name with the aim of promoting the appreciation of a greater diversity of art forms on paper.

Each biennial includes two parts, one of selected works from an international competition and an accompanying exhibition with print and drawing-related themes.

This year, to celebrate the biennial's nearly 20-year history, the invitational exhibition is a retrospective of sorts. "Exhibition of Recent Works by Former Award Winners" on TFAM's 1st floor features 77 artists and 117 works. Their evolved skills and concepts, as the exhibits show, make this part of the biennial even more interesting than the winning works of the competition.

Apart from prints and drawings, installations and mixed media works are on show, as there's no limit on which medium the works employ. Neither is there any limit on the surprise viewers will get when encountering in a single gallery the astounding works by former award winners, many of whom have since gained international renown.

Chung You-hui (鐘有輝), the first biennial's winner of the National Fund for Literature and Art Prize in the print category and a judge at several successive biennials, presents his Being Mini (迷你心情), which just won him first prize at the Tsingdao International Print Exhibition. The mixed-media work is simply Chung's Austin Mini, all over which are prints of leaf images, and 42 T-shirts hung on adjacent walls. On the T-shirts are photos of Chung taken in cities such as Rome, Paris, London and New York, or composite photos of the mini parked next to landmarks in those cities.

Though presented in the cheerful manner of a travel diary, the work was inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Held over in the US on his trip after the attacks, he passed time watching TV and wondering "did the twin towers really collapse? Is it some special effect like in a Hollywood movie?" Chung told the Taipei Times in a phone interview.

Chung began thinking that "what you see with your eyes at the moment might be false, and what you have always kept in your memory might never have happened," he said. "If the line between the real and the unreal can be thus blurred, why not create the reality that I travelled around the world in my Mini? This can be a way to solve the regret that there are things you cannot take with you when you go somewhere."

Another interesting work is Dawn Chen-ping's (董振平) Three of a Kind (罪+罰+愛=1) that surprises viewers in TFAM's restrooms. Since winning the gold medal in the print category at the first biennial, Dawn has expanded his portfolio into the third dimension. Visitors to the male or female rest rooms will find themselves "turning holy" when they look at their own reflection in the mirror, which Dawn has made part of his work. Icons combining the head of Jesus, the torso and hand of the Sakyamuni Buddha, and Dawn's own face are outlined on the mirror.

Under the sink, he placed a head of the devil among stalactites hanging from the underside of the sink. In this way, a small universe is built up in a private space. By using the sink, one not only gives flesh to holy images but water to the devil's land as well.