Taiwan holds two major art exhibitions that are links for its artists, providing them access to the international art world. One is the Taipei Biennial held every two years at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (last held in November of last year) and the other is the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which opens next month on June 12. Well, if you haven't booked your pricey ticket to gondola city, you can get a taste of previous Venice exhibitions for the price of an MRT ticket to Yuanshan Station. This weekend Contemporary Art from Taiwan at the Venice Biennale, 1995-2003 opens at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and runs until Aug. 14.
Taiwan has been exhibiting at the Venice Biennale since 1995 and each year's presentation is organized by a local curator working with several artists and the museum. At the museum, you will get to learn about the various art projects Taiwanese artists have shown in Venice. For example, in 2003 New York-based Lee Ming-wei (
Each night for a week a guest was chosen who could sleep in a bed near the artist's bed. The two beds on rollers could be moved closer or further away to manipulate the level of intimacy filling the exhibition space.
Some of Taiwan's successes besides the conceptual artworks like Lee's include documentary photographs such as Chang Chien-chi's (
A group of five graduate students from the Taipei National University of the Arts in Guandu will be going to this year's Venice Biennale to hand out art awards they claim come from a Taiwanese point of view. Their conceptual art project titled the Taiwan Award Goes to Venice Biennale is based on the argument that all contemporary art is Western. What's unfortunate about this point of view is that even though it is a fallacy similar to the idea behind bra-burning, many people from both the East and the West continue to promote it. Luckily for the students, this fallacy helped them get big sponsorship from the National Cultural Association and interest in their project from Chen Yu-chiou (
Maybe these art students and culture policymakers need a short art-history lesson. It can be agreed that the art market and its auction houses are Western-dominated -- but only that. Here are some questions that readily come to mind. Who is one of the pioneering video artists who made installations with video monitors and experimented with the latest in video technology? Nam Jun Paik, an artist from South Korea. Who is one of the most famous conceptual artists in the world? Yoko Ono, from Japan. Where was some of the most experimental avant-garde art happening in the 1950s and 60s? In Japan. And to go back even further: who threw their ink pots at the paper and painted wildly? No, before the abstract expressionists in the 1940s, there were the Tang dynasty experimental poets and calligraphers.
And talking about history, if you're in Kaohsiung this weekend, check out the latest exhibition in the basement of the former British Consulate and former prison. Five dynamic women artists -- Hsu Su-chen (
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