Taipei: Views and Points (台北二三), which is currently showing at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, is really a love song the capital. Organized by the Museum's chief curator Chang Fang-wei, the exhibition seems to be paving the way for the upcoming Taipei Biennial in November as it prepares the audience with a glimpse of the energy that emanates from the local artists and the city itself.
The exhibition tries to define Taipei: its contrasts of light and dark, old and new. It does not come up with a consensus; instead it shows how pluralistic and heterogeneous the city and its artists really are. Showcasing 41 artists, mainly Taiwanese with a few visiting artists from abroad thrown in, this mix of sculptures, installations, sound art pieces, photographs, digital art, painting, and video show the depth and impressive diversity of contemporary art in Taiwan.
Chen Ming-te's (陳明德) Grocery starts off the exhibition. This freestanding sculpture is a facade of a 7-Eleven store, the ubiquitous symbol of Taipei, and is a fitting metaphor for this exhibition that tries to take the pulse of this city. Even though the front of the installation is shiny and highly polished, its back is a traditional mom-and-pop storefront complete with peeling paint, falling tiles, and with bottles of Kaoliang and packets of Long Life cigarettes on sale. The work seems to symbolically say that on the surface, Taipei is gleaming, but peel back the layers to see the real traditional heart of the city.
One of the more provocative works is a conceptual piece by Chou Ching-hui (周慶輝). He collected police surveillance photos of cars running red lights and displays them along with texts he found on the Internet to create an authorless work that is both poetic and eerie.
Certain works act as threads and are woven throughout the exhibition. Yeh Weili's (葉偉立) large photographs are stretched on canvases that are supported on easels and presented as romantic-like paintings. Tsai Hai-ru (蔡海如) shows that it is possible to be a new mother and a working artist at the same time, a rarity for women artists in this city. Her individual cutout photos of mothers with their children are glued to the lower edges of the walls like etcetera dots (…), effectively linking the outside world of caregivers to the inner cerebral world of conceptual art.
Not everything is bright and shiny in this exhibition. Initially intending to recreate a flower market, Howard Chen's (陳浚豪) walk-through tropical paradise evokes sinister feelings and is a big departure from his shiny minimalist thumb-tack floor pieces. One area grouped around the theme of ruins contains photos on black-painted walls by Yao Jui-chung (姚瑞中) and Ben Yu (游本寬), who document abandoned sites with a nostalgic lens. While Takahiko Suzuki reveres the architectural landmarks and created 3-D black and white models of historical buildings.
To contrast the darkness of a dilapidated city, there are several artworks to tickle your funny bone. Tsong Pu's (莊普) playful questionnaire asks nonsensical questions such as what kind of superheroes does Taipei need? Ninja Turtles or Batman, but the underlying message hints at the absurdities we encounter in city life, be it politics, relationships, transportation, work. Yuan Goang-ming's (袁廣鳴) Scream, Therefore I Am existential video installation is quite funny as his projected screaming face disintegrates into phosphor powder.
RSS