The Taipei Biennale was a mid-size show with more than eighty artists. It was housed at the Taipei Fine Art Museum and was easily viewed in one day. The show ran from September 10, 2016 until February 2, 2017 and Corinne Diserens was curator.
By not aspiring to be a mega-exhibition, overvaluing young “it-artists,” or running after an overwhelming amount of new work, by not spending its time inventing new worlds or imagining new futures from scratch, by shunning the shallow glitz and gimmicks of so many other biennales, the Taipei Biennale managed to be one of the most exciting shows this year. It was a quiet, serious, mid-sized biennial that was interested in the shifting meanings of landscapes. And though the biennial had its share of new works and young artists, it spent a good amount of time looking back at older works by established artists, often finding interesting ways to reconsider their work.
The biennial explored landscapes whose meanings had been transformed by particular events. Sntu Mofokeng’s photographic essay Chasing Shadows explored locations that were imbued with significance by the religious services held there. Jo Radcliff’s photographs looked at South African landscapes charged with meaning by violent events, even though few traces of the violence remained. Hsu Pin Lee’s series of photographs Disastrous Landscapes considered the banal realities of areas of the Taiwanese countryside that had been invested with spectacular meanings by media coverage of natural disasters.
Another way that the biennial explored the shifting meanings of landscapes was by examining two or more moments over which the meaning of a landscape changed. An example of this was Fei Hao Chen’s small conceptual project, Family Album. This work looked at the shift from the Japanese colonial period to Taiwan’s transition to the Republic of China; and the move from Taiwan’s official language being Japanese to Mandarin. This change shaped people’s private lives; the work explored the effect this change had on the artist’s own family. Family Album expresses Chen’s feelings of alienation from the life experiences of his grandparents, which were lived out in a different language
Tiffany Chung’s Remapping History: An Autopsy of a Battle was another example of a work that explored two different moments to track the changing meaning of the landscape. Chung not only related her father’s experience as a pilot and prisoner in the Vietnam War, she also analyzed the 1971 operation Lan Són 719, and the 1972 Easter offensive, and remapped her father’s war experiences onto contemporary Vietnam. Chung drove the runway where her father, a pilot, took off. Forty years separate her remapping from her father’s experience and the landscape has significantly changed. It is likely that many may have already seen this work elsewhere; Chung is a perennial favorite of the biennial circuit. But seeing it in the context of a show devoted to this type of reimagining comes with the advantage that one focused less on Chung’s father’s heroism and more on the remapping of the past onto the present.
Like Chung, Chen Chieh-Jen is a biennial favorite. His project Realm of Reverberations explored the different meanings of a landscape by viewing it over a number of different moments in its history. Realm of Reverberations was a powerful work. It was a four-channel video installation that explored the Losheng Sanitarium in terms of its multiple meanings, through the many stages of its existence: the sanitarium had been a Japanese prison, a Taiwanese sanitarium, and is now a maintenance depot for the Department of Rapid Transit. Viewers saw its story through the eyes of four characters, three real and one fictional, who lived through the building’s different stages. Chen’s work was linked to a protest movement that, in the name of the sanitarium’s remaining inmates, had fought its recent transformation.
The Taipei Biennial’s film series showed a number of Chen’s films, including Empire’s Borders I and The Route (click to see the films online). These films grew out of projects which included photographic series with texts. The photographs have been shown at a number of different biennials. They are quite good. But seeing the films was a real treat—they carry a lot of punch.
A number of other works in the biennale’s excellent film series also expressed this interest in the shifting social meaning of space. Two films considered the expectation that statues will anchor our collective memory. Balman Kiarostani’s Statue of Tehran and Huang Mingchuan’s Flat Tyre both dealt with the roles that statues and monuments played in reflecting a culture’s understanding of itself. Both trace the history of monuments that in the past had social significance but were later removed. Kiarostani’s film is a documentary that traces the fate of sculptures created to celebrate the Iranian revolution that years later were replaced by kitschy apolitical decorations. Mingchuan’s was a Taiwanese fictional film that, among other things, traced how the once ubiquitous sculptures of Chiang Kai-Shek, long Taiwan’s president, were, over a short period of time, replaced with religious works.
It is interesting to consider how Kyungah Ham’s Embroidery Project fits into this show that tracked the changing meaning of landscape over time. The Embroidery Project’s meaning shifted as its location changed, transforming during the work’s production, as it was moved from South Korea to North Korea and back again. From a distance, the work looked like paint on canvas with very pronounced brushstrokes. It was easy to miss the fact that the works’ meaning was carried both by their surfaces and by the history of their production. Without reading the project’s title, one’s first impulse was to reduce the works, with what seem to be their prominent brush strokes and the pop lyrics scrawled across their surfaces, to a kitsch return to abstract expressionism. Like abstract expressionism, they seemed to insist on the individuality of the work’s creator. Closer examination revealed that the images were not made of glossy paint but very fine needlework. It was so fine, in fact, and covered so much surface, that it suggested that many hands were involved in the work’s production.
In South Korea, Ham created the designs for her works in Photoshop, and then had the designs clandestinely smuggled to North Korea, where workers created needlepoint versions of them. These finished versions were then smuggled back to South Korea. Faced with this history of production, one found oneself imagining the meaning the work must have carried in these different locations. In totalitarian North Korea, the work’s design must have spoken strongly of individuality, often seen as a key to resisting totalitarianism. Back in South Korea, the works’ needlepoint must have manifested the collective nature of the work, and pushed against the West’s version of the role of the artist as the ultimate individual. The Embroidery Project was interesting because of its ability to suggest its own meanings in different locations. Still, it ran serious risks. One of the smugglers or other North Korean workers could have ended up in prison. This would have been much too high a price to pay for a work of art.
The Taipei Biennial’s commitment to reimagining space made it unsurprising that there were two lovely projects that touch on the Situationists. The first was a film called Wild Architect (1936-2016), a film written to Vincent Meessen, and credited to Anonymous. The film’s title comes from Guy Debord’s Preface to Ezio Gribaudo and Alberico Sala’s Jorn / Le jardin d’Albisola and follows Asger Jorn’s many phases moving from being a supporter of Le Corbusier to being an important member of the Situationists. The film explores the aesthetics that Jorn developed for his Villa in Albissola Marina. This same aesthetic also appeared in the second project, Meessen’s three-channel video installation, One, Two, Three, which looked at the Situationists through the eyes of one of its Congolese members, M’Belolo Ya M’Piku, and the protest song which he wrote for May 1968. But far from being an uncritical assessor of the Situationists, M’Belolo looked back and criticized them for not having given women enough say in the movement. In his own story, M’Belolo has to some extent tried to remedy this problem. Back in Kinshasa, in an atmosphere of civil unrest, M’Belolo ran a recording studio. He sings his protest song as an all-women band plays along. The recording studio is called One, Two, Three. It is a terrific location where clashing tiles create the aesthetics that one associates with Jorn and his Villa in Albissola Marina. One, Two, Three, is an intelligent, engaging work.
There were a number of other works in the Taipei Biennial that shared the disjunctive aesthetics of Jorn’s villa. An example of this was Lin Yi-Wei’s beautiful series of paintings. The unity of these works was constantly being undermined either by clashing elements in their compositions or inconsistencies in their illusions of depth. There were also works which were disjunctive in other ways. Reinhard Mucha’s work Coesfeld left viewers unsure whether to see it as a sculpture or as a functional object. In spite of Its formal beauty, one continually wanted to open it like a cabinet. This disrupted our habitual categories of objects, bemusing viewers in interesting ways.
Like the Taipei Biennale’s engagement with the Situationists, one of the show’s greatest strengths was its ability to engage and sometimes even reimagine the practices of important historical artists. Occasionally, the biennale simply showed the artist’s work, like the three wonderful films by Yvonne Rainer which appeared in the show’s film series or the paintings by the important Chinese/Taiwanese artist, Yeh Shih-Chiang. But more typical of the way that the show used these historical artists and works was Yeh Wei-Li ‘s project which revisited Yeh Shih-Chiang’s work by looking at a number of the spaces where Yeh Shih-Chiang worked. Yeh Wei-Li created new works out of the remnants of these old spaces. Of course, Yeh Wei-Li’s work also fit the show’s concern with the shifting meaning of location.
In Retrospective, Xavier Le Roy revisited his own work from 1994-2014. But this was not a simplistic return. His gestures were transformed into loops by other dancers, who mixed the dance with their own autobiographies. The dancers reset their actions each time a new viewer entered the space. They would focus on the viewer moving toward them in very particular ways. Then one dancer from the group would approach and explain how a particular gesture fit into the dancer’s own biography.
Two of Manon de Boer’s amazing 16mm films revisited historical artists. Her works Sequenze and Two Times 4’33” revisited the work of Luciano Berio and John Cage, respectively. These two films were interesting, but her third film, Resonating Surfaces, was amazing. It was firstly an incredibly beautiful portrait of the city of San Paulo, its images reminiscent of Bernice Abbot’s photographs of New York. It fit into the show’s emphasis on location. Second, the film was a portrait of Suely Rolnik. In the film, a voiceover which seemed to be extracted from Rolnik’s article Deleuze, Schizoanalyst (Click to see the article), gives an account of Rolnik’s suffering and imprisonment under Brazil’s military dictatorship, and how a research project proposed by Félix Guattari helped Rolnik heal. Resonating Surfaces was a beautiful and important work.
Quietness and seriousness are not qualities commonly associated with contemporary art biennials, much less the contemporary art world. But these were the qualities that made the Taipei Biennial important. Its interest in the shifting meanings of landscapes and willingness to reconsider the practices of established artists made the Taipei Biennial one of the most exciting shows this year.
©Vincent Pruden