This is an unexpected shortlist. It baffles me. For once I’m stumped.
Best known for his quasi-documentary films on Irish peace activist Bernadette Devlin and ill-fated car-maker John DeLorean, Duncan Campbell is nominated for his film installation in the Scottish pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, It for Others. Campbell’s film was concocted from a strange mix of footage: African masks and other artefacts, images of perfume bottles and snack packaging and shots from a dance piece by British choreographer Michael Clark in which the performers, shot from above, contort themselves into the shapes of equations. Campbell’s film was not without its pleasures, but was terribly long. It lost me somewhere. Bravely, and perhaps unwisely, he paired this work with a projection of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s 1953 film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die), about the commodification of African sculpture. It was all too easy to abandon Campbell for Resnais and Marker.
Also showing at Venice, film work by James Richards paired censored images in a state art library in Tokyo — imported art books in which customs officials had scratched out depictions of genitalia using sandpaper (an act that seems to be as prurient as the pictures they are trying to protect the public from), with languorous underwater footage shot by the artist with a cheap camera. Except to note the denial of pleasure in the censored images, and the sensual image-grabbing of the underwater shots, I didn’t make much of this either. Richards, for me, is an unknown quantity.
I have never understood Tris Vonna-Michell’s melange of film and video footage, photographs and objects, which often entail a peripatetic quest: looking for obscure French artist Henri Chopin; revisiting the sites of his own adolescent rites of passage (including a trip to Japan where he slept rough for a while); and travelling to Detroit or Leipzig (where Vonna-Michell destroyed his entire archive of photographs and student work in a shredder). This comes together in his films, photography, objects, live performance and concrete poetry — and takes a lot of unpacking.
Canadian-born, Glasgow-based Ciara Phillips is a printmaker who mostly works in silk screen and often works collaboratively. Her images flow from the wall onto banners and textiles. There are signs, abstractions, patterns, words. It is her lightness that seems to be the point in a Turner shortlist that’s intent on being more serious — or at least more difficult and demanding than usual. Apart from the work of Phillips, there are few concessions here to visual pleasure or the easy headlines the prize often attracts.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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