Taipei Fine Arts Museum hosts winners

Emphasizing a contemporary perspective as well as innovation, the Taipei Arts Awards (台北美術獎) replaced the previous Taipei Awards last year as a major event in Taiwan's art scene. In a harsher competition than the first award, the board of judges awarded only five winners and 11 honorable-mentions from 353 submitted works.

With the average age of the winners at only 30, a "Generation Y" viewpoint shows through the works. Moreover, the proportion of multimedia pieces has increased and some of them make use of complicated electronic devices to create audio or visual effects.

A tendency toward confident self-expression is also evident. "The award and honorable-mention winners are generally not trying to respond to the environment in which they live. No one tried to deal head-on with social issues in Taiwan. With the artists focusing on their personal subjects, the works show a wide diversity," said Ku Shih-yung (顧世勇), professor at Fu Jen Catholic University's Department of Applied Arts and one of the judges.

This is in sharp contrast to the older generation's concern with Taiwanese society and their responses to issues in their works.

"Members of the Internet generation tend to express their daydreams and things of personal significance. Their works are like monologues from each [artist's] isolated universe," Ku said. The result is a line-up of lively works of pure aesthetic value instead of social critique.

Wang Ya-hui's (王雅慧) winning video installation Falling (墜) is one such "pure" piece. In her video loop, a myriad of objects from outside the frame begin to fall onto a table. A small fish drops onto the table with a deafening thump just a second before the whole movement is rewound. Then milk is poured in very slow motion, allowing you to see clearly its every drop in mid-air.

"The aesthetics of the video is of a classical kind. ... Not engaging in any social or political discussion, the medium of video is not being used as an instrument of art but as a self-sufficient work," said Yuan Kuang-ming (袁廣鳴), instructor at Taipei Arts College's Digital Art Center and another judge.

The inspiration for Wang's video is hard to trace and she is not trying to start any discourse with the work. "It's probably just I've always been interested in objects themselves. I just want to capture the various postures of falling objects, which are invisible to the naked eye," Wang told the Taipei Times.

Sam Sui's (蘇孟鴻) Material Paradise is also an atmospheric work that simply appeals to the viewer's sense of beauty. For the installation, Sui mounted glamorously framed replicas of 17th-century still-life paintings on three red walls.

Kitsch decorative items like spangled tawdry-colored plastic butterflies and birds are placed on the paintings.

Juxtaposing 17th-century European aristocrats' means of showing off wealth and the items most-often associated with festivities and opulence in present-day Taiwan, Sui raises the question of the value and function of art in Taiwanese society without revealing his personal stand on the issue.

Chang Hsing-yu's (張杏玉) Praise of Skin (膚賦)consists of five long scrolls, each of them with a single photo of a female back, on which traditional Chinese motifs are projected. The projected dragons, children and lotus symbolize what ancient Chinese society required of women, like being fertile, and the fantasies men had of their bodies.