Highlights of the Asian Art Biennial

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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.