Recently in Taipei there is a trend in contemporary art exhibitions of barely matching up to the stated intentions of the curator. Trading Place: Contemporary Art Museum, currently on view at MOCA until May 22, is one of these.
In the show, curator Kao Chien-hui (
This exhibition does raise necessary and provocative questions, such as what are the functions of art, the institution, the curator and the audience? Kao, who is based in Chicago, brings a perspective of institutional critique that has been going on in the US since the 1980s, but which is a fairly new idea to Taiwan.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SUSAN KENDZULAK
As artists are becoming curators, curators are also becoming artists. One of the first rooms of the exhibition wasn't created by an artist, but was created by Kao and is called The Acting Director in Contemporary Art Museum.
Decorated and furnished like the office of a Taiwanese museum director appointed by the government, the viewer is invited to sit at the desk and write down new plans on how to run the institution. Here, Kao touches on a crucial nerve. Institutional museum policy is rarely if ever decided by the masses and here she provides a space for people to air their views. Though a symbolic gesture, it is a start in the right direction for a cultural debate.
Another room shows objects that have special significance to the curators who donated them to the exhibition. Here one sees Sean Hu's credit card that helped him finance an exhibition and a set of drums that inspires Huang Hai-ming.
Yet, instead of being informative to the general audience about curatorship, this room reeks of cliquishness and seems gratuitous rather than insightful.
Beijing-based artist Qiu Zhijie (
Cai Guo-qiang (
Tu Wei-cheng's (
One theme that emerges is a short history lesson of art: both Western and Chinese. Zhang Hongtu (
Mei Dean-E (梅丁衍) shows a brilliant piece. Redoing Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs semiotic piece, which is considered the seminal work of Western conceptual art, and which consisted of a wall text of a dictionary definition of a chair, a photo of a chair and an actual chair, Mei recreates the piece using all Chinese elements: Chinese text and a Chinese chair. This clever recontextualizing of art history speaks volumes about Western and Chinese art.
Works that stand well on their own but do not engage with the show's premise include Lin Jiun-shian's (
With so many provocative women artists working in Asia it is quite surprising that there is only one included in the exhibition. Liu Shihfen's (
Astute in some parts, the exhibition feels overall like an inside joke made especially for those working in the arts, and is not particularly generous to the general audience. As a result, the show backfires, as some intelligent ideas may be interpreted by some viewers as elitist.
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