When artist and critic Ni Tsai-chin (倪再沁) penned an article in the early 1990s lamenting the state of Taiwan’s art scene over the previous century, he helped spark a debate over identity and imitation that continues to reverberate today.
“In the past, local art was like a flower without roots in its own land. Lack of a unique consciousness has made our identity very vague,” Ni was quoted by Taiwan Review as writing in an article published in Hsiung Shih Art Monthly (雄獅美術).
Comparing Taiwan’s art scene to Mexico’s, Ni wrote that the latter had absorbed Western art, but wasn’t subsumed by it. Consequently, the country was able to develop an artistic tradition with a “distinct national identity.”
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
“Art in Taiwan now is at transitional stage: Can we show a devotion to Taiwan and at the same time reach out, absorb and transform influences from outside?” Ni wrote.
Though a little overstated — Taiwanese artists had been mulling over these issues for at least a decade prior to the article’s publication — Ni, now 56, has spent much of the intervening years trying to answer that question through criticism, curating and artistic creation. It is a theme that pervades Mediaholic (媒體大哼), a superbly presented retrospective of his life and work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei).
Much has been made of the fact that this is the museum’s first major exhibit of a Taiwanese artist since it opened 10 years ago. At first glance, Ni seems the ideal candidate. His installations, performance pieces, paintings, collages and sculptures span the gamut of contemporary art movements that have exerted influence on Taiwanese artists: environmental art, conceptual art, pop art and Superflat.
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
A former director of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung and dean of the College of Arts at Tunghai University and currently the university’s director of the Taiwan Art History Research Center — in addition to writing dozens of books, articles and essays on Western and Eastern art (many of which are on display at MOCA) — there are few as knowledgeable or well placed as Ni to “absorb and transform influences from outside.”
As the exhibition pamphlet states, his stature in Taiwan’s art world and multidisciplinary approach “expands the definition and scope of an artist.” After wandering through the exhibit, however, the reverse seems to be true: Ni’s considerable output expands the definition of the critic, not the artist.
This is most apparent with two series: Who is Happiest? (怪談) on the first floor and Super Superflat — Parody as Attack (超.超扁平) on the second floor. In the first, Ni takes potshots at the contemporary art industry’s “manufacturing of ... trends, products and superstars,” according to the exhibition catalog.
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
Each of the nine sculptures and color prints in Who is Happiest? shows four subjects — cartoon characters or animals — lined up as if they are mounting each other. Who is Happiest? — New York (紐約怪談), for example, takes aim at Jeff Koons’ kitschy reproductions of banal objects — here four balloon dogs made from stainless steel are depicted in flagrante delicto. Who is Happiest — London (倫敦怪談) does the same with a color print that pokes fun at Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child, Divided, the bisected cow and calf preserved in a vitrine of formaldehyde that took the art world by storm when it was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993.
Though the work of Koons and Hirst could be interpreted as banal kitsch, Ni brings nothing new aesthetically to our field of vision. The same holds true with Super Superflat — Parody as Attack, a series that broadens the mythmaking and cult of personality of artists by lampooning the staggering market value that their works command.
The 20 silkscreen prints in the series imitate the flattened aesthetics of Koons and Takashi Murakami. Ni flattens the paintings even further by using printmaking techniques made famous by Andy Warhol. As the beauty of the work is devalued, Ni implies, its market value increases — a phenomena “that promotes the vulgarization of aesthetics.”
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
But that’s precisely what Ni, as artist, is doing. Calling it parody doesn’t change anything. His criticisms are largely pictorial and sculptural reworkings of what critics have already put down on paper.
Other series in this exhibition, however, move beyond hackneyed criticism and benefit from Ni’s considerable knowledge of art history. The conceptual Back to the Original Landscape and Artworks (原作重現), for example, is a thoughtful and revelatory series for anyone interested in the tradition of Chinese ink painting.
Ni purchased 33 high-quality replicas of famous classical ink paintings and calligraphy held at the National Palace Museum (NPM) and removed all elements — colophons, seals and poetry — that were added by collectors or emperors. Ni then pairs the original with his cleaned-up recreations.
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
The result is a completely different viewing experience. Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew (祭姪文稿), a scroll of calligraphy by Tang Dynasty scholar Yan Zhenqing (顏真卿), is difficult to follow because the red colophons and seals distract from the overall viewing experience. After they are removed, we are able to discern more fully the sadness — as shown by the artist’s redactions and increasingly unsteady calligraphy — that overtook Yan as he wrote his remembrance.
Ni applies the same process to landscape paintings such as Early Spring (早春圖), one of the most famous landscape paintings held in the NPM collection. Again, the later additions are removed to offer the viewer an unobstructed view of the soaring cliffs and delicate brushwork of the trees.
This removes the barriers of history and allows us to observe the work as it was originally intended, while at the same time questioning what makes a work original.
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
There is much else to see in this exhibit: Ni’s series of environmental installations made from found objects such as bark, leaves, wooden boxes, mannequins and industrial cranes intelligently depicts the conflict between industrial civilization and nature. His installation Election Eruption — Play Politics With Art (凍蒜凍未條 — 用藝術「搞」政治) is a powerful indictment of vote-buying practices and sloganeering.
But the question remains: Is Ni the Taiwanese artist most deserving of this kind of large-scale show? The breadth of his work seems to answer in the affirmative. There is little to suggest, however, that Ni is expanding the boundaries of Taiwanese art, as he called on artists to do in the 1990s. Instead, he employs imitation to criticize the practices of other, mostly Western, artists while presenting little in the way of an alternative.
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