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Street art heads on Taipei Artist Village

By Max Woodworth
STAFF REPORTER
Thursday, May 05, 2005, Page 13

Urban grit and humor come together in street art. PHOTO COURTESY OF ROYAL ELASTICS

Starting Saturday, Taipei Artist Village will play host to a three-month street art event called 2005 Free Art, underwritten by the fashion company Royal Elastics.

It will be the third time that the company sponsors a street art event and the first time that it does so in Taiwan.

Royal Elastics has previously been the backer of major street-art exhibitions in Santa Monica, California, and in London.

The Taipei exhibitions will run in three month-long cycles, with walls on the roof of the Taipei Artist Village being given over to eight artists per cycle. At the end of each cycle, the walls will be removed and displayed at the Taipei Royal Elastics flagship store at Renai traffic circle.

An artist from Australia, Yok, and a duo from New Zealand, Bob and Mephisto Jones, will be joined by local artists during the first cycle and will be on hand Saturday for demonstrations and an opening party. They will remain at the artist village for the duration of the cycle, which lasts until the end of May. Two of the local artists who will take command of canvasses in the May cycle go by the names of Pop420 and Citystalker.

Participation is open to local artists and Royal Elastics, which is paying for all the artists' supplies, is currently accepting applications for the second and third cycles.

Street art earned its definition through the artists' characteristic rejection of the art establishment and their use of public spaces, often in illegal ways, to display their work.

But by gaining the cooperation of the Taipei Artist Village, the Free Art event marks another step in the process of street art in Taiwan abandoning its former

guerilla tactics and entering the more institutionalized setting of a formal art space. Street art was embraced long ago by mainstream art circles in North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, where rebellious young graphic designers have made a name for themselves in street art to serve as a corollary to their daytime, money-earning jobs.

Now, street art is more identified with an unpolished, and purposely so, aesthetic that draws from all graphic, artistic and cultural currents, often in ironic ways. Think of Che Guevara in his famous portrait, transformed to look like a character from Planet of the Apes, or a transgender Princess Leia, or a 1m-tall hyper-pixilated alien from the classic arcade game Asteroids spray painted on highway overpasses.

In Taipei, the most numerous pieces of street art are the dozens of simple, comic-style profiles spray-painted on roadside electric switchboxes and on the backs of street signs. These can be found all around the city if you keep your eyes open.

The boundaries and definitions of street art are so loose that it's quickly become one of the most exciting trends in art, and not only because of its easy marketability to young people and connections to urban, hipster culture. It's a fairly faithful reflection of a given community's popular culture, which in the context of Taiwan, holds the promise that the results at 2005 Free Art could turn up some valuable commentary on the state of things here.

To sign up to participate in 2005 Free Art, go to www.royalelastics.com.tw.

The show starts 6pm and Taipei Artist Village is at 7, Beiping Rd, Taipei (台北市北平路7號).
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