If deconstruction tends to be confusing and elitist, it's been admitted. As part of the 2002 Taipei Biennial currently being held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Dutch artist Edwin Zwakman said, "What we [the artists] are doing here is very specialized and not to be understood by everybody. It's like we're scientists and we're showing people math equations or something; of course they're not going to understand. But if I say this and I'm very elitist, at least my work is very accessible. Normal people can see it and understand it."
Zwakman makes miniature models that are slices of cityscapes -- an apartment facade, a fence around a construction site -- then photographs details of these scenes and prints them large. Most images are around 1.8m by 2.5m. Except for one print including a veiled and faceless figure, the pictures are completely unpeopled, and they very nearly pass for photographs of real urban architecture. But because they're uninhabited and because, if you examine them closely, you can see the artifice in the details, the photos -- like movies with not-quite-real-enough special effects -- deconstruct themselves, or break down and admit how they're fooling you.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TFAM
Zwakman's photos, which are somewhere between real and fake, relate to one of the major philosophical questions of deconstruction, namely: What is an image and what is reality? Deconstruction says that images -- including words and other signs -- are how we interpret reality and that all meaning comes out of the interplay of images. In other words, images are reality, even if some of those images are fake.
The theme chosen for this year's biennial by curators Bartomeu Mari and Jason Wang (
For the biennial, Mari and Wang have selected several works that focus on blank stages and show how dead those stages are. Swedish artist Miriam Backstrom's series of photographs of film and television sets show how the sets break down around the edges and dissolve into blank studios. Taiwanese photographer Hou Tsung-hui's (
Chinese artist Shao Yinong (
Yuan meanwhile has used digital photography to compose day and night scenes of Taipei's most bustling spot, Hsimenting. And he's removed all the people. He did so by combining 15 to 20 main photos of each scene with a huge number of detail shots, and the effect is eerie. Hsimenting -- a ghost town.
For Zwakman, all these portrayals of empty spaces are about "the presence of absence." What's not present in these assembly halls, public squares, movie sets and other stages -- their actors, their histories, etc. -- is extremely important to understanding what those places are. Because according to deconstruction, an empty stage is just an empty stage. But that stage will come to life when filled with images.
For Mari and Wang, that's how the Great Stage of the World operates. Though it's not the only statement of the biennial and it does not involve all of the 31 artists, it's an example of how they faithfully present certain philosophical programs at the exhibition -- programs that will be appreciated by some critics, but not all viewers.
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