The August transfer of the management of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA) from Taipei City Government to the private Contemporary Art Foundation established the institute as privately run and publicly funded. The plan had been around for at least a year before the museum opened in May and has served as one of the key factors in the museum's young success.
The relatively innovative management and funding situation has by and large freed MOCA from the politics that have constantly plagued its uptown sister and once-intended parent institute, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). For most of its two decades of existence, TFAM has been bogged down by everything from KMT-DPP power plays to bickering between competing government agencies to its mission to establish Taiwanese art history.
So with little more of an agenda than showing new art by quality artists, MOCA Taipei has in its first six months produced three excellent shows, created an environment for exhibiting foreign artists alongside local artists, and established Taiwan's first major public art space for installation, video, and other contemporary media.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MOCA
The third and latest of the museum's achievements is Labyrinth of Pleasure, a show curated by museum staffer Lai Ying-ying (賴瑛瑛) and independent curator Jason Wang (王嘉驥). Involving 19 artists, half a dozen of whom are foreign, the exhibition opened on Sept. 10 and will run through Feb. 24 of next year.
Though Labyrinth falls perilously close to being just another show about consumerist fluff, digital ironies and other e-generation cliches, it also just manages to push past those themes, embarking on a re-evaluation of what's left of the human element below all the shiny facades and superficialities.
The ideas quite obviously find their basis in those artworks of the last decade that sought to explore the cartoon side of reality, pieces that looked into how we identify ourselves with the cute, the cool, our stuffed animals, emblems, icons and other bits of two-dimensional gloss that often -- whether we like it or not -- mediate our views of things.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF MOCA
What happens in Labyrinth is the re-emergence of depth within that flattened and auto-ironic picture of the world. So the statements in this show are no longer merely about how we are shallow, but also about why we're shallow and the limits of what we can learn from focusing on that single dimension.
Several pieces in Labyrinth start to re-understand humans through their personified, cartoonified and usually oversimplified prototypes, namely children, children's toys and animals. For one work, Peng Hung-chih (彭弘智), a local neo-Pavlovian of sorts, attached video cameras to the heads of three dogs, dressed himself in a full-body bunny suit, put dog food all over his face, then filmed as the dogs licked him clean.
In the museum installation, the action of that scene is visible through three screens, each representing the vantage point of one of the dog-cams. Goofy as the pretext is, watching the simultaneous videos has an almost scientific feel, as if there is some sort of investigation into the dogs' social interaction or perceptions, or maybe even (self-reflexively) into the perceptions of the viewer. One finds oneself examining, on behalf of both oneself and the dogs, how and where information arrives. You can see what a dog sees, but you cannot see what the dog looks like unless you switch to the point of view of another dog. The only exception comes when one dog turns towards its own reflection in a mirrored surface, creating a very weird and self-conscious moment.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF MOCA
Another piece, Silly Goose by Chang Geng-hwa (張耿華), is based on the interaction between real geese and geese robots. The room contains three versions of a robot goose, truly grotesque machines made of real, flapping, stuffed goose wings, stuffed geese's heads and necks, and a mechanical wheel and gear assemblies that keep them rolling around in circles and flapping. In addition, a video projected onto the wall shows one of these cyborgs unleashed into a real gaggle, where it elicits reactions of running and honking in its pseudo-companions.
Even though geese are dumb by human standards, a human viewer still has trouble discerning what is really going on. Among those questions raised in the work are: what is the power of a fake or clone? And how much ability do (we) real McCoy's have for spotting such impostors?
From the toy side of things, Yang Chung-ming's (楊中銘) Memory Box looks at a childhood caught between reality and toydom. A crib, toys and baby furniture fill the room, but the pictures on the wall are of Lego people on vacation (and like real people on vacation, they're obviously posing). Providing further dimension, a View-Master holds slides of the Lego-ites in the more intimate setting of their home. Unlike the posed vacation photos, these snaps show scenes of dysfunction, like when Lego mom and Lego dad sit on opposite sides of the couch as they watch TV.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF MOCA
Hung Dong-lu (洪東祿) also looks at toys as objects more revealing of the adult than the childlike. His most recent series of Cibachrome prints shows a sexy warrior princess, who's sort of a cross between Lara Croft and the women of Sega's Virtual Fighter video game. She poses with guns that approximate both water canons and lasers, and she stands in the middle of a bombed out and burning vision of New York's Times Square. For the record, Hung created these images just a few months in advance of September's terrorist attacks.
Also included in the show are a record of male pregnancy, documentation of a week of dieting and a chapel illuminated by a stained glass window that only after the second or third hard look is found to be made out of TVs. There is also a giant inflatable dog with its head quite literally up its ass.
Not all of these ideas are new. Some of them have been kicking around in other versions, in other works and in other shows for years now. But when Labyrinth is taken as a whole, the new investigation into real instincts and real childlike behavior redeem its caricatures. Like Peng and his dogs, the show dares to point out that if you turn a cartoon dog back into a real dog, you won't understand it nearly as well.
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