A different kind of biennial

This year there will be about 20 major biennials and triennials around the world, on average one every two to three weeks. The art world jet-setters that fill this raucous circuit, hopping from Sao Paulo to Sydney to Shanghai -- all of which hosted biennials this year -- can be a Fellini-like cast: vainglorious, vapid and very full of themselves. The biggest biennial of them all is Venice, and reviews from the last one (held in 2001) spent as much time discussing the Prada shoes of the gallery-goers as the works of art.

American artist and educator, Rita McBride, sneered as she said, "I try to stay away from [the biennial circuit]. I find it disgusting."

Thursday night's opening of the 2002 Taipei Biennial did not seem to aspire to the dolce vita, even though Taipei's past biennials have. It only attracted a moderate sampling of the art world A-list: curators, museum directors, critics and 27 of the 31 artists in the show. By then, a few of the artists had even marked the absence of social functions, like Runa Islam, who'd been in Taipei almost a week by opening night and was at that point saying, "It'd be nice to go out for a drink or something."

However, there was still Thierry Raspail, artistic director of the Biennale de Lyon, one of the major European biennials to take place next year, who strode through the museum corridors saying, "I'm here because I think this show is important." And there were many others there for the same reason.

The exhibition, organized under the theme Great Theatre of the World, is curated by Bartomeu Mari of Spain with Taiwan's Jason Wang (王嘉驥) and runs through March 3, 2003 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In the high profile and highly competitive international biennial scene, it takes an idiosyncratically serious attitude.

The muted demeanor marks a change from past TFAM biennials, which took heavy cues from the international exhibition circuit. The museum's first internationalized biennial came in 1998, when the museum hired Nanjo Fumio, a top independent curator in Japan, to put it on the international map. Surrounding the museum with bamboo billboards and rerouting interior flows, Nanjo deconstructed and reconstructed the museum into a flashy, sexy show called Site of Desire.

"It was very influential on the local arts scene. It really set the imprint for subsequent local exhibitions to follow, said Wang, who admits the influence in his own curating.

Two years ago, the museum teamed a well known French curator, Jerome Sans, with a local curator, Manray Hsu (許文瑞). They created The Sky's the Limit, again reinventing the museum space in a fast-paced show that included a DJ and a few local artist-hipsters with close ties to the Taipei nightclub scene.

This year, the job for Bartomeu and Wang, according to TFAM director Huang Tsai-lang (黃才郎), was simply to "take our budget [of NT$19 million] and make the best biennial possible."

Huang, who's headed the museum for only about a year, made no other demands, giving curators complete freedom from quotas and political concerns.

"Our goal is to be known as a biennial in Asia, not an Asian biennial, he said.

So the austerity and the gravity this year come from the curatorial decisions. One involved the formal character of the works, almost two-thirds of which are two-dimensional of 31 artists, 13 work with video and another nine in flat media like photography or painting. Art on the walls and movie theatres -- it's an uncharacteristically classical approach to contemporary art. And the intensity of classical viewing is amplified by the museum's building, which was not reorganized as in years past.