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Highlights of the Asian Art Biennial

EXHIBITION NOTES: WHAT: 2009 Asian Art Biennial (亞洲藝術雙年展) WHEN: Through Feb. 28, Tuesdays to Fridays 9am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays 9am to 6pm WHERE: National Taiwan Museum of the Arts (國立台灣美術館), 2, Wuchuan W Rd Sec 1, Taichung City (台中市五權西路一段2號) ADMISSION: Free

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The second Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung takes on grand themes, but unlike much of last year’s Taipei Biennial, it doesn’t shove any particular ideology down visitors’ throats. Curator Tsai Chao-yi (蔡昭儀), head of the museum’s exhibition department, chose the title Viewpoints and Viewing Points well: The show challenges visitors to ponder Asian art’s place in the world through the work of 56 artists/artist groups, 18 of which are Taiwanese, including several of the country’s best-known.

For viewers interested in Taiwanese art, the simpler, broader issue is how Taiwan’s artists compare with their international counterparts. More interesting is how the country’s artists address its ambiguous international status.

By displaying stodgy old Sinophile Lee Shi-chi’s (李錫奇) new mixed media work just around the corner from pieces by Tsong Pu (莊普) and several Taiwanese 20-somethings, the show addresses the refrain so often repeated by artists in this country: “Who am I?” To Lee’s credit, he pointed out in a rousing Artists Forum presentation on the show’s opening day that he had “been there/done everything” before arriving at his current style of Taiwanese art with Chinese characteristics.



The 20-somethings hint at the diversity that makes the younger generation of Taiwanese artists so difficult to pin down. Mia Liu’s (Liu Wen-hsuan, 劉文瑄) work was inspired by a job she had at the Guggenheim in New York for about a year, selling tickets to hundreds of visitors a day. As any young artist might do, she dreamt of one day showing her work there. “It started as a joke,” she says. Liu had Guggenheim tickets printed with her name on them and handed them out to friends. Later she ordered thousands and arranged them into the decorative patterns displayed in the exhibition.



Hsu Yin-ling (許尹齡), 22, is a first-year graduate student at Taipei National University of the Arts. If her acrylic paintings look familiar, you may have seen the one hanging at Salt Peanuts Cafe near Taipei’s Shida night market. Hsu said by e-mail that she “started scribbling pictures at about five years old and never stopped; every day it’s the same as eating or sleeping : )” The paintings don’t look like they were done by the kind of person who ends messages with an electronic happy face.



After Lulu Hou’s (Hou Shur-tzy, 侯淑姿) show on foreign brides in Taipei last month, Chang Chien-chi’s (張乾琦) Double Happiness series on the same subject didn’t sound too exciting. But I found his documentary photographs of Vietnamese women and Taiwanese men who traveled to Vietnam to find wives the most powerful exhibit at the show. The 48-year-old, currently one of four artists representing Taiwan at the Venice Biennale, shows an extraordinary ability to capture desperation in its many forms: loneliness, resignation, frustration. Positive aspects are also explored: practicality, courage and hope.

The weightiness of Chang’s photographs juxtaposed nicely with the first work viewers see after passing through the lobby into the exhibition area of the museum: the Guinness Book of World Records largest-ever photo book, made by Japanese artist Hitomi Toyama. She proudly says the 3m-by-4m, 26-page monstrosity Women of Vietnam weighs in at 200kg. My request to turn a page was curtly dismissed by museum staff.



Also Japanese, two-boy group (or two-man group — Yusuke Nakano is 33 and Yasuhiko Hayashi 38 years old) Paramodel filled a 58 ping (193m²) gallery floor, walls and ceiling with toy car tracks, toy cranes and Styrofoam mountains in an installation they said they’d shown, with little variation, in six countries. It was hard to get a word out of the Osaka-based pair through the museum’s inept Japanese-to-Chinese translator. “We like toys,” is about as deep as the 20-minute interview got. Nonetheless, the room is fun to walk through. Once. Then you feel like a grup and never want to see it again.



Pakistani artist Rashid Rana had no such trouble describing his Desperately Seeking Paradise, a 3m cube that from one angle looks like a block of mirrors. Walk around the piece and a cityscape comes into view. Then look closer and discover the image is composed of tiny pictures of his hometown, Lahore. The artist doesn’t claim to have invented the technique, which is perhaps most popular from advertisements for the 1998 movie The Truman Show. Rana said he had no idea how many images went into making the work, but that he started with about 100,000 digital photographs and worked from there. He wants “geometric abstraction and representation to coexist, something often thought impossible.”



Malaysian artist Justin Lim said he thought his paintings were going to be shown in Taipei, but happened to be in Taichung with his 11-man percussion band Aseana — no relation to the airline — for the Taichung Jazz Festival just down the street from the museum last month. Lim’s paintings explore Malay ghosts from folk legend. “I use the ghosts and apply them to current political situations,” he said. In Oil We Trust is based on the story of a serial rapist called Orang Minyak who covers himself in black oil to sneak around undetected.

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