Awards reward young

The Taipei Art Awards (台北美術獎) have been in their present form for three years, disposing of the long-time categorization of designs and fine arts while placing an emphasis on innovation by having younger artists and critics on the jury. As such, they aim to reward aspiring artists in Taipei.

The organizer, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), received a total of 248 submissions this year, a reduction from 353 last year. A board of judges, who are mostly artists themselves, selected three winners from the pool -- though it was going to choose five, as in previous years.

"The great variety of the submitted works gave the judges a hard time debating who should win. In the end, the [eight] judges could not come to an agreement so that three instead of five were selected," said Huang Tsai-lang (黃才郎), head of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

That diversity among the submissions also led to a significant increase in honorable-mentions. Seventeen works won the title, an increase from 11 last year. Despite the different media, most of the submitted works do have something in common.

"The participants, being mostly very young, show a predilection to engage in private and peculiar monologues in their works. A large part of them even indulge in personal reveries, narcissism or their physical existence," Huang said. "Eroticism, physical violence, off-beat humor, kitsch fashion and a sense of nihilism have all been subjects of their works."

The first two of these popular subjects explain the relatively large number of "Restricted" signs in front of the curtained compartments that house the works, featuring nudes in most cases. The middle generation of Taiwanese artists have repeatedly shown nudes in works that deal with gender or sexuality. To see so many young artists allowed to choose nudes for their works that deal with issues other than those, but just as an individual expression, is equally, a welcome development.

Although object installations are still dominant, videos are a burgeoning trend, with a quarter of the participants making videos and video installations.

Surprisingly, two of the three winning works are paintings. Liao Yu-an (廖堉安), a 24-year-old graduate student, won the NT$200,000 prize with Self-portrait(自畫像), an acrylic-on-canvas series of poultry in G-strings. These fat-bottomed birds who cannot fly, pout in a silent yet obstinate revolt, fixing their stare at viewers from the corner of their eyes. Liao said that a bird set against a pastel-colored background is a portrait of everyone living in a big city like Taipei. "The cooped bird is trapped in an urban jungle that deprives it of its privacy, but it is unable to fight back at the city crowd. It can only put up a hopeless gesture of resistance."

What may appeal to viewers most, however, is the meticulous execution of the painting and the originality of the bird character, whose eerie stare is certain to leave a strong impression.

Also working in painting is Lai Chiu-chen (賴九岑), who won with his A Part of Toys (零大於一) series. A fervent collector of toys, Lai made 27 panels of toy parts ranging from Lego blocks, a broken Mickey Mouse head, to the foot of a robot -- all painted in the style of portraits of people.

"When I looked at the broken toy parts, they seemed to emanate a power even greater than the complete toy," Lai said.