Venice about to be turned on by Taiwanese artists

The Venice Biennale in Italy opens on Sunday. This granddaddy of international art exhibitions began in 1895 at a time when world fairs and international exhibitions started growing in popularity, and was founded with the idea that nations can showcase the best of their talents, just like the Olympics that were founded the following year.

The Venice Biennale is in two sections: national pavilions, and a curated international exhibition. The national pavilions are determined by the individual participating countries, so the Taiwan Pavilion is organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and funded by the Taiwan government.

And even though this is an art exhibition, politics still come into play as in all the printed documentation -- such as catalogs and Web sites? -- Taiwan is listed not as a participating country but under the organization of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, due of course to pressure from China.

The curator for the Taiwan Pavilion, Wang Chia-chi (王嘉驥) takes Luis Bunuel's film The Spectre of Freedom as a starting point for this group exhibition of four artists.

The Spectre of Freedom implies death and the desire to get rid of the limitations of life. The four artists in the exhibition, Kao Chung-li (高重黎), Tsui Kuang-yu (崔廣宇), Lin Hsin-i (林欣怡) and Kuo I-chen (郭奕臣) all live and work in Taipei and their works share a vision of coming to terms with the uncertainty of Taiwan's stability and status. A pang of uneasiness lies just beneath the surface.

Kao Chung-li (高重黎) creates installations of altered 8mm-film projectors that noisily hum and whir while projecting his hand-drawn animations of personal mementos that are combined with historical images. For Venice, he is showing images that show people fighting and wrestling as a metaphor to show the daily human struggle.

Tsui Kuang-yu (崔廣宇) gained immediate recognition for his single channel videos where he, as both director and filmed subject, showed the absurdity of contemporary life in a Buster Keaton-meets-Chinese-Kung-fu-masters-metaphysical kind of way. The city is his stage, while his performance shows us how to simplify our lives in a consumerist society.

Lin Hsin-i (林欣怡) is known for her oversized digital self-portraits that combine futuristic images with cannibalism and eroticism. For Venice, she has an interactive Internet installation titled De-strike, housed in a Panopticon structure, in which she can observe the on-site action via a Webcam linking her studio in Taipei to this former Venetian prison.

Kuo I-chen (郭奕臣) recreates his enigmatic moving plane piece that was shown at the Taipei Biennial last year onto the vaulted ceiling of the old prison for Invade the Prigioni, evoking the ominous feelings evoked by planes flying overhead.

Huge speakers periodically emit a low rumbling sound that grow ominously louder as if to signal an impeding disaster, stopping viewers in their tracks.

In addition to the works in the Taiwan Pavilion, artist Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁) will be showing his filmFactory. This documents unemployed garment workers in Taoyuan and is in the international section curated by Maria de Corral.

His inclusion is a boost for Taiwan's contemporary art scene as his work was not a regional choice but was instead accepted to be part of the larger international discourse that the Venice Biennale represents.