The 13th Taipei Biennial opened on Friday at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, with the curators expressing hope that it would reflect artists’ musings over social alienation and the essence of the arts during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Featuring works by 58 local and international artists and musicians, the exhibition — curated by Freya Chou (周安曼), a Hong Kong-based Taiwanese independent curator, New York-based writer Brian Kuan Wood and Beirut Art Center director Reem Shadid — covers a wide range of art forms, including painting, photography, sound installation, installation art and short film.
A series of music-related events including live performances, guided listening sessions and forums began yesterday. The events are to run through March 17 in the Music Room on the museum’s basement level.
Photo courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum
The Psychedelic Spiritual Ceremony by Taichung-based artist Li Jiun-yang (李俊陽) blends ink paintings, fluorescent pigment paintings and live music performances.
The paintings were improvisations by himself and his artist friends during parties, Li said.
The works embodied their reflections and musings on some of life’s most profound questions: “What is love?” and “Should people get married?”
At the center of the room, a door leads to a smaller room where fluorescent pigment paintings glow on the wall.
The paintings depict seemingly random cartoon characters, mythical beasts and gourds — an auspicious symbol in Chinese-speaking communities that Li says represents his hope for world peace.
Your Tears Remind Me to Cry by Taipei-based artist Yang Chi-chuan (楊季涓) belies its soothing appearance and is actually a “microscopic examination” of fear, with the sculpture embodying the artist’s imagination of what fear would look like if it had a form, a description provided by Yang said.
Down the hall, seven large China vases command visitors’ attention. The vases, crafted in China’s Jiangxi Province by Berlin and Beirut-based artist Raed Yassin, have the appearance of a typical China vase, but they depict scenes from the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990.
The exhibition runs until March 24.
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