International in scope and multidisciplinary in nature, "The Wall" took the National Museum of history three years to prepare, despite having help from more than a dozen organizations at home and abroad. The result is one of this year's most impressive art exhibitions.
Using walls as metaphors, the show features six exhibits with famous walls, such as the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall, and seven artists whose artwork suggests metaphorical interpretations of walls.
Curator Chang Wan-jen (
The exhibition is divided into three theme-based groups: memory and nostalgia, division and integration, and the borderless. Chang said memory is represented by the rich histories of each wall exhibited; division is easily portrayed by the walls' practical use; and a free, borderless world is manifested by the anachronisms that the walls have become.
For the memory and nostalgia section, there are four exhibition rooms showing "The Great Wall of China," "The West Wall, Jerusalem," "Chinese Garden," and the "Ancient Wall of Taipei City."
For the division and integration section, there are four exhibitions as well: "The Berlin Wall," featuring two sections of the original wall, "Viewing doors II "(1994) from Toya Shigeo of Japan, "Marginal People" (2000) from Taiwanese-American Wang Wei-ho and "Lichen" (2000) from Huang Chih-yang.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM
For the borderless section, four artists are featured: Y. J. Cho's "Walls," a series of oil paintings; Anselm Kiefer's "The Sand Spreads Out From Within Our Hair," a 1997 painting from the German artist; Cai Guo-qiang's "Drawing Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters" and installation pieces produced in 11 countries on video by Gu Wenda, a Chinese-American artist residing in New York.
Some realia from the 921 earthquake fallout will also be featured in the last section. Fragments of buildings nearly 100 years old were collected right after the earthquake and became part of the artifact collection of the Taipei museum.
Chang says the borderless section stresses the symbolism of breaking through to the 21st century and its unknown events. "We'd love to think we are heading towards Utopia, but we should always be watching out for the unforeseen natural forces that could be destructive," she said.
The exhibition itself is a breakthrough in many ways. As Chang pointed out, the use of non-traditional materials for "The Wall" is particularly significant for the history museum, which tends to be conservative.
The multimedia applications are perhaps one of the best examples of a looser approach by the museum. A spectacular application that has rich educational meaning is the presentation of the ancient wall of Taipei city. "It's a lively and novel way of introducing the history of Taipei to the public," said Chang. Inside the museum, actual remains of the old city wall, including stone slabs and wooden posts, will be displayed, and video footage will be used to show what life was like in Taipei.
Meanwhile, a computer camera will also be set up in the North Gate, part of the original Taipei city wall that still survives near the Taipei Train Station. And, through the Internet, visitors in the museum will be able to see the site and compare present and past.
The last part of the Taipei city wall section is a computer graphic production by Wang Wei-ho. The graphic, portraying Taipei city 400 years from now, will be printed out, framed, and hung on the wall. The future Taipei in the imagination of Wang looks like a ruin, a vision that offers a warning: if we do not protect the city, its environment and its culture, then Taipei will be destroyed.
Chang said literary citations will accompany the various artwork to lead visitors along an intended route that enhances and connects the themes. In addition, movies with strong images of walls will be showing in the theater on the exhibition floor. Popular films such as The Last Emperor, Raise the Red Lantern, Wings of Desire, and Shawshank Redemption are some of the examples. They will be screened on a weekly rotation basis.
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