What's not there: absence

If deconstruction tends to be confusing and elitist, it's been admitted. As part of the 2002 Taipei Biennial currently being held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Dutch artist Edwin Zwakman said, "What we [the artists] are doing here is very specialized and not to be understood by everybody. It's like we're scientists and we're showing people math equations or something; of course they're not going to understand. But if I say this and I'm very elitist, at least my work is very accessible. Normal people can see it and understand it."

Zwakman makes miniature models that are slices of cityscapes -- an apartment facade, a fence around a construction site -- then photographs details of these scenes and prints them large. Most images are around 1.8m by 2.5m. Except for one print including a veiled and faceless figure, the pictures are completely unpeopled, and they very nearly pass for photographs of real urban architecture. But because they're uninhabited and because, if you examine them closely, you can see the artifice in the details, the photos -- like movies with not-quite-real-enough special effects -- deconstruct themselves, or break down and admit how they're fooling you.

Zwakman's photos, which are somewhere between real and fake, relate to one of the major philosophical questions of deconstruction, namely: What is an image and what is reality? Deconstruction says that images -- including words and other signs -- are how we interpret reality and that all meaning comes out of the interplay of images. In other words, images are reality, even if some of those images are fake.

The theme chosen for this year's biennial by curators Bartomeu Mari and Jason Wang (王嘉驥), "Great Theatre of the World," provides several metaphors they use to illustrate how images play with each other and the viewer. The major one is "the stage," the site where images play. The paradox of the stage is that it can carry all possible meanings, but it can only do so because it's a neutral space with no meaning of its own. Between plays, the stage is empty and conveys nothing. The same could be said for movie screens, TV screens or the unprinted pages of a book.

For the biennial, Mari and Wang have selected several works that focus on blank stages and show how dead those stages are. Swedish artist Miriam Backstrom's series of photographs of film and television sets show how the sets break down around the edges and dissolve into blank studios. Taiwanese photographer Hou Tsung-hui's (侯聰慧) series Filmmakers turns the lens back against film crews, showing generic scenes that could come from the production of any movie. Unfortunately, while these works are important for the curatorial statement, photographically they're not particularly engaging.

Chinese artist Shao Yinong (邵逸農) and Taiwanese artist Yuan Guang-ming (袁廣鳴) achieve something more. They evoke a fuller sense of drama and meaning, as well as their lack, by looking at empty real world sites, the stages of history and culture. Shao's photo series of communist party assembly halls shows how in the years since the Cultural Revolution they've been abandoned, converted, left to rot or preserved as fading relics. These halls are the stages of specific histories, but unless you already know those histories, there is no way you can imagine them. In the context of the show these photos admit their own historical context, and that's why they're interesting.