New-age Taiwanese curators show off themselves and their artists

The position of curator is a burgeoning field in Taiwan and is not as well-established as in Europe. Besides selecting the artist and the artwork, the curator has to raise funds and act as a mediator between the exhibition space and the artist. In the past, it was art history majors that often worked as curators and who often treated the artworks like museum artifacts for a usually uninspiring show.

Today's curators come up with interesting ideas like creating a dialogue between provocative artists and the interested audience. We can see the results of some young curators' works as there are two stimulating shows on view now in Taiwan.

The first show is curated by Sean Hu, one of the founders of Unison 8 that recently organized the 25 Years of Ars Electronica art at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung. He helped arrange a mini-

retrospective of the Buddhist-inspired video works by performance/multimedia artist Chen Yung-hsien (陳永賢) titled The Song of Body, currently on view at the Hong-gah Museum.

In the video Release Flesh, the artist's head is covered with bacon attached by elastic bands. As scissors snip away at the bands, the slabs of bacon fall away with the fleshy meat symbolizing that lower-level desire must be removed in order to attain a higher plain of awareness. As we live having to digest and retain information instantly and regurgitate it just as fast, this exhibition is refreshing in that, paradoxically, these time-based videos force you to slow down, to sit and watch the events unfold slowly. The video works are hypnotic and you will feel refreshed and rejuvenated to have given them the time they deserve. This is an exhibition well worth seeing.

The other exhibition requires the city's fast pace. Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo (羅秀芝) is the curator for Border Crossing: The Shadow Dance of Cities, which is a group show of foreign and local artists. The diverse works she brings together touch on topics popular among local curators: belonging/alienation, insider/outsider and domestic/exotic.

Often, art exhibitions that include Western artists will display art that exoticizes Asia, the equivalent of the aesthetic of "East meets West."

So, images of temples, architectural details of Chinese-style buildings, smiling school girls running in uniform or installations made with paper money and incense are what many Wes-tern artists typically produce.

For Border Crossing the foreign artists are as much a part of the society they live in rather than being outsiders and as a result give hypothetical solutions to living in the rapidly urbanizing environments of Asia. It may even be hard to discern the Western artists from the Eastern ones, and that is how it should be. Art should be judged on its own and not by the national identity of its maker. Artists include multimedia artists Lin Pey-chwen (林珮淳), Peng Anne-Anne (彭安安), Lindsay Cox, photographer Daniel Traub, and social commentators Lin Hong John (林宏璋), Ella Raidel, the group Channel A, and myself.

And also this summer several Taiwanese artists will participate in a group show at the Helsinki City Art Museum, in Finland, titled A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography. It includes the work of 42 artists from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and is organized by the Hong Kong-based Hanart Gallery. Eight well-known artists from Taiwan are included. Unfortunately none of the Taiwanese artists are women, a gross misrepresentation of Taiwan's contemporary art scene abroad.