The little art space that roared

The Kwangju Biennale, the Asian counterpart of the Venice Biennial, is going to exhibit not just works of art, but art spaces in the Kwangju Municipal Art Museum. In addition to Hong Kong's Para-site and Loft Media Center from China, it has enlisted Taiwan's IT Park, among other alternative spaces in Asia, in one section of this year's biennial, which is aimed at giving voice to aspiring artists, instead of established ones.

According to Hou Hanru (侯漢儒), IT Park become Taiwan's alternative space at the show because it best represents all the alternative art spaces in Taiwan. With around 700 visitors to each exhibition, many of whom are art students accompanied by their professors, the space's influence on the contemporary art scene is clear.

For this occasion, Chen Huei-chiao (陳慧礄), owner of IT Park, and her friends, the core artists who have taken turns exhibiting their works in the space throughout its 13-year history, were enthusiastically preparing for the biennial which acknowledges the influence IT Park has had on the contemporary art scene in Taiwan.

The group includes Tsong Pu (莊普), Ku Shih-yung (顧世勇), Chu Chia-hua (朱嘉樺), Wang Jun-jie (王俊傑), Yuan Kuang-min (袁廣鳴), Peng Hung-chi (彭弘智), Chen Suen-chu (陳順築) and Chen Huei-chiao. The preparations by the first three artists, together with Chen, has become "Distant Reality," IT Park's current exhibition which opened yesterday and will continue through March 2. They will then reconstruct the space in Kwangju.

One of the works planned for the Biennial is Ku's installation meant to represent IT Park. In his work, photos of random stretches of its walls and corners will be put on the corresponding walls and corners at the Biennial exhibition. The minimalist and somewhat nostalgic work serves to highlight IT Park's uniqueness as an alternative space.

In an unlikely setting -- a Korean restaurant to its right and a Chinese noodle shop to its left -- IT Park has kept a light on for the art-interested late into the night. Squeezed between buildings on Yi-tung St, its narrow stairway leads to a photo studio on the second floor, exhibition space and a bar on the third, and a rooftop.

The simple yet flexible structure of the place -- combined with the exhibitions it has held -- has polarized people's opinions, with some finding like-minded friends at the exhibition space and others left feeling puzzled.

Opened in 1988, installation-heavy IT Park was, at the time, part of the burgeoning art scene in the post-martial law era, which allowed for freer artistic expression and a marked increase in media other than paper and canvas.

IT Park first gained international attention in 1991 by curating "International Mail Art Exhibition." At the time the art form -- exchanging works created on postcards by mail -- was virtually unheard of in Taiwan but gathering force in France, Germany, England and other countries. IT Park invited artists from Hong Kong, Italy and Yugoslavia to join the event.

In IT Park's tenth year, it was once again ahead of its time in organizing the "Magnetic Writing" exhibition, which showed the works of 83 artists of Chinese descent. Drawing on the revolution computers had brought to art, all works were made on A4 paper. Many of them were print-outs of computer-generated images or integrated sound-files that viewers could listen to while seeing the works on screen.