Let's link your exhibition up to a residency program in Taiwan. That way you will get your installations and the artists will be able to take advantage of Taipei's recently opened artist village."
Eureka. I looked up from my bowl of tofu, on the final day of a typhoon-tossed visit to Taipei from Seoul back in September. Neil Webb, the cultural officer of The British Council in Taiwan, had not only solved a problem that had been worrying me from the beginning; namely how to give artists a chance to create meaningful installation art works for our exhibition London Underground in Taipei, but had also helped bring London-based Visiting Arts closer to Lung Yingtai's (
Three days before, on the same storm-plagued trip, I fixed the exhibition dates for the Taiwan leg of the exhibition, which had just opened at the Sungkok Museum in Seoul, and realized that the Taipei Fine Arts Museum space was cavernous.
Our tight little Seoul show needed to grow and be a whole lot more theatrical. We had to utilize the 16m-high ceiling space and be bold in our use of the exhibition venue.
I had e-mailed my concerns to my co-curator Lee Jiyoon in Seoul the day before, and we agreed on the need for an art experience rather than just a tame art exhibition.
I knew that the Taipei audience was visually sophisticated and demanding. But how were we going to give the artists sufficient time to be inspired by Taipei and to physically make the work? Now we had the nucleus of an idea that would, we hoped, solve our problem.
Neil Webb's brainwave was approved and developed by Lung. When we left her office the next day, we had two three-month residencies at the Taipei Artists Village on the Peiping E. Rd. agreed and the promise of a reciprocal arrangement for two Taiwanese artists in the UK later on in the year.
We, the curators, in conjunction with The British Council and Visiting Arts, found three outstanding London-based and educated installation artists, Goshka Macuga, Young-in Hong and Martin Westwood.
Macuga and Young, were allocated the two residencies, and Westwood was offered a seven-day stay in Taipei by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in order to install his collection of suspended, colored balloons.
Each of the artists has a quality that we felt would be representative not only of the cutting edge contemporary art world, now centered in London, but that would also transfer effectively to an Asian environment and a particularly challenging space. We also had to consider the existing work which was being dispatched from the Sungkok Museum in Seoul and which, with minor changes, remained essentially the same.
A number of the works in the exhibition, such as Eric Moody's great wheel, Jason's Inner City Seat, plastered with the discarded possessions of his London neighbor, and Gerard Hemsworth's visual metaphor paintings, deal with material culture. So, we felt that if Young and Macuga could draw on Taipei's urban environment this would act as local cultural ballast or a visual counter-balance to these other works.
Young is famous for her huge hand-made velvet curtains, but for this show she promises a floor-to-ceiling 4.5m-high by 6m-wide transparent theater curtain, which will be located just outside the entrance to our exhibition room. She felt a thin chiffon curtain would be more appropriate to Taiwan than the heavy velvet version.
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