The Venice Biennial comes home

In 1993, Lee Ming-sheng (李銘盛) bought his own plane ticket to Venice where he gave an art performance that ended with his collapsing on a paper tree stump doused in a mixture of alcohol and cow's blood. In doing so, he became the first Taiwanese artist to ever participate in the Venice Biennial, the exhibition which has indisputably become the world's single largest showcase for contemporary art.

At the next Biennial in 1995, Taiwan went on to institute its own pavilion, a practice that has been repeated at every biennial since. But it was not until last Saturday's opening of the exhibition "Homecoming: Reviewing the Venice experience in Taiwan" at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) that any of these government-sponsored road shows ever made it back home.

"Venice is like a directional pointer. Young artists look to it for the next new wave," said Kao Chien-hui (高千惠), an expatriate Taiwanese art critic living in Chicago and curator of the 2001 Taiwan pavilion. "After the 1997 Biennial [the wave] was video and film, and the effects were not just seen here, but in New York and everywhere else."

In Kao's introduction to the exhibition, she went even further in emphasizing Venice's importance to local artists, stating: "Over the last 10 years, we cannot deny that the version of Taiwanese art displayed in Venice has made its mark on the entire Taiwanese contemporary arts scene."

Yet in spite the profound influence Venice has imparted upon the local art scene, TFAM's Hu Hui-ju (胡慧如) noted that the absence of previous homecomings extended "a distance between local viewers and the work. We were sponsoring this each year and some of the artists were starting to get international name recognition, but people in Taiwan still didn't know who they were."

According to Hu, between 1999 and 2001, the necessity of holding the Homecoming exhibition emerged as both obvious and overwhelming, with support coming from media, artists and government camps alike.

Thus TFAM got the Homecoming of 2002, a distant ripple of the "new wave" that Kao calls Venice. To be sure, the show, which takes up little more than one gallery in TFAM's contemporary art basement, presents signals of a departure from the past, especially the gangbuster theme shows of the 1990s.

To put the changes in perspective, Kao recalled the first Taiwan pavilion of 1995, which was incorporated into the overall Biennial theme of "Identity and Alterity," a curatorial near-mandate that attempted -- on the massive scale of the entire exhibition -- to build a discourse on the homogeneity of globalism and its coexistence with the "differance" of localism.

"At the time, it was perfect for Taiwan, which was working through its own crisis on identity," said Kao.

Locally, the last two Taipei Biennials, held at TFAM in 1998 and 2000, followed the trend of heavy theming with "Site of Desire" and "The Sky is the Limit." But Venice 2001, in terms of the exhibition as a whole and the individual Taiwan pavilion, is beginning to be seen as a break from exhibitions that stand largely as curatorial statements, and in a number of important ways.

Flash Art, a leading international journal of art criticism, viewed curator Harald Szeeman's 2001 Biennial mostly for its excesses, setting the tone for its commentary with the headline: "Venice Supermarket." In the text that followed, the magazine's four reviewers then went on to describe the exhibition as something between a trade show and a department store -- not to mention the pinnacle soiree of what now stands as a 40-plus biennial-triennial party circuit for the art world's jetsetting elite. And as if to underline the century-old show's decadent dissipation, three of four reviewers commented on the footwear of the patrons, two directly noting the brand Prada.