Trading places at MOCA

Recently in Taipei there is a trend in contemporary art exhibitions of barely matching up to the stated intentions of the curator. Trading Place: Contemporary Art Museum, currently on view at MOCA until May 22, is one of these.

In the show, curator Kao Chien-hui (高千惠) unites artists from China and Taiwan to critique the art institution utilizing post-modern strategies such as appropriation and to show the audience the behind-the-scenes mechanisms, squabbles and dramas of an art museum. While some of the works help to further this inquiry, others simply do not.

This exhibition does raise necessary and provocative questions, such as what are the functions of art, the institution, the curator and the audience? Kao, who is based in Chicago, brings a perspective of institutional critique that has been going on in the US since the 1980s, but which is a fairly new idea to Taiwan.

As artists are becoming curators, curators are also becoming artists. One of the first rooms of the exhibition wasn't created by an artist, but was created by Kao and is called The Acting Director in Contemporary Art Museum.

Decorated and furnished like the office of a Taiwanese museum director appointed by the government, the viewer is invited to sit at the desk and write down new plans on how to run the institution. Here, Kao touches on a crucial nerve. Institutional museum policy is rarely if ever decided by the masses and here she provides a space for people to air their views. Though a symbolic gesture, it is a start in the right direction for a cultural debate.

Another room shows objects that have special significance to the curators who donated them to the exhibition. Here one sees Sean Hu's credit card that helped him finance an exhibition and a set of drums that inspires Huang Hai-ming.

Yet, instead of being informative to the general audience about curatorship, this room reeks of cliquishness and seems gratuitous rather than insightful.

Beijing-based artist Qiu Zhijie (邱志杰) wryly shows in his work a collection of signed affidavits from powerful art people who work in Beijing, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Taipei who attest in tongue-in--cheek fashion that nepotism is too often a deciding factor, not only in art, but for anyone who tries to get ahead in life.

Cai Guo-qiang (蔡國強) teamed up with local TV personality Kevin Tsai (蔡康永) and sold Cai's dynamited art works on the shopping channel last month to show that art is a commodity like anything else and the documentation of that event is on view.

Tu Wei-cheng's (涂維政) Permanent Collection is an ersatz museum within a museum. However, the misspelled wall text does not lend itself to a convincing or paradoxical argument, and the inclusion of the top Taiwanese contemporary artists makes this piece seem more self-congratulatory and self-conscious instead of a deconstruction of the institution.

One theme that emerges is a short history lesson of art: both Western and Chinese. Zhang Hongtu (張宏圖) transforms items of Western detritus such as French fries boxes and Coke bottles into Chinese traditional bronze and blue and white porcelain works.

Mei Dean-E (梅丁衍) shows a brilliant piece. Redoing Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs semiotic piece, which is considered the seminal work of Western conceptual art, and which consisted of a wall text of a dictionary definition of a chair, a photo of a chair and an actual chair, Mei recreates the piece using all Chinese elements: Chinese text and a Chinese chair. This clever recontextualizing of art history speaks volumes about Western and Chinese art.