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March
19 - April 17, 2008
Opening
Reception：March
19 6:00pm~8:00pm
Open
hours：Monday - Friday 9:00am~6:00pm,
Saturday 9:00am~11:00am
Taipei
Cultural Center
Tel:(212)697-6188#6
1East
42nd St, NYC, 10017
www.tpecc.org
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March
21 - April 4, 2008
Opening
Reception：
March
19 6:00pm~8:00pm
Open
hours：Monday - Friday 9:00am~5:00pm,
3/22-23
Close
3/29-30 Open 9:00am~11:00am
Gabarron
Foundation
Tel:(212)573-6968
149
East 38th St, NYC, 10016
www.gabarronfoundation.org
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Asian
Contemporary Art Week
SNAKE
ALLEy
Curated
by Eric C. Shiner
Deep in the midst of
Taiwan’s capital Taipei lies the Wanhua District, the
city’s most historic area and home to Longshan Temple, the
city’s oldest religious structure. The area was also home to
Taipei’s red light district and a tourist attraction called
Snake Alley where live animals including snakes and turtles
were displayed in small cages—and often publicly killed for
the extraction of their blood which could be consumed on site
for good health and sexual prowess— until animal rights
activists successfully brought the practice to a stop in the
1990s, or, more likely, pushed these activities behind closed
doors, and thus ending this spectacle that was interweaved
with tradition and hucksterism writ large. Today, it is a
place filled with restaurants, night markets and shops,
reflective of the bustling hub of the gleaming modern city
that surrounds it. Yet, at the heart of Wanhua lie the secrets
of Taipei’s past, a conceptual and shared history that
artists from Taiwan have looked to again and again for subject
matter that so often plays out in their work. In SNAKE ALLEY,
the work of many of Taiwan’s most prominent contemporary
artists shows how they are negotiating the epic changes that
have occurred over the last two decades in Taiwan as the
nation has exploded economically, and how they rectify those
changes with an at times troubling past.
All of the artists in the
exhibition examine the secrets, shadows and growing pains of
contemporary Taiwanese culture. By no means pessimistic, their
works smartly analyze the underground aspects of a specific
site bound in the throes of unprecedented growth and informed
by the binary of stability versus uncertainty that comes along
with it. These artists look at the themes of identity,
sexuality, politics and the environment (both built and
natural) frequently, making critically-aware art that engages
rather than condemns the ever-changing face of Taiwan.
Photojournalist and artist
Chang Chien-Chi, for example, often turns his camera’s lens
on the unspoken. His
best known project comprised portraits of psychiatric patients
whose families deeded them over to a temple complex known for
taking in the unwanted. In SNAKE ALLEY, Chang again focuses on
a topic of current debate in Taiwan: the growing number of older Taiwanese men who are traveling
to Vietnam to use a service that matches them with a wife.
Chang documents the process from start to finish in his
“Double Happiness” series, showing the young women being
interviewed, documented and eventually married (in a group
ceremony) to their new mates from the other side of Asia. The
portraits show resignation and excitement in not only the
brides, but the nervous grooms as well, and document the
simple fact that due to demographics, there simply aren’t
enough women of marriageable age available for every potential
husband back in Taiwan.
Twin brothers Chang Keng-Hua
and Chang Geng-Hwa collaborate on projects revolving around
technology and violence, and the fine line between the two.
Here, the brothers display works from their “Shotgun Blue”
series, sumptuous imagery of machine guns wrapped in black
nylons and set against a rich blue ground. By encasing these
lethal weapons in a product used in the construction of
beauty—and the occasional bank heist—the Changs attempt to
put a soft edge on the hard core realities of a world marred
by war and violence, while at the same time critically
addressing the media’s fixation on packaging war as a
consumer product in and of itself. Young artist Chang Ling
also looks at the meeting point of media and culture in his
eerie paintings that combine traditional Chinese motifs, such
as imagery of animals and nature, with such contemporary
subject matter as war planes and mutated bodies. His fleshy
and mysterious beasts populate a world riddled with violence,
suggesting that Armageddon is upon us, or that it has already
come to pass. Painter Wu Tien-Chang also depicts alternate
bodies in his work, most often in the form of a strange
clown-like character who appears again and again in the
artist’s oeuvre. Whether riding a bicycle built for two or
rowing in a boat, Wu’s strange and slightly menacing clowns,
like Chang Ling’s animals, allow us to imagine a world
populated by the completely bizarre.
Contemporary dance
wunderkind Chou Shuyi not only pushes into uncharted territory
in his choreography and dance performances, but also goes so
far as to create installation art within which he stages dance
happenings. Seemingly impromptu in nature, his jolting
recitals are in actuality very much planned and rehearsed;
their manic movements and seizure-like vibrations standing in
for the real bodies which navigate the space of a
radically-shifting Taiwanese landscape, both actual and
psychological. Photographer
and performance artist Hou I-Ting also looks at the topic of
changing bodies in space by using herself as the primary
subject of her work. Hou uses costuming and make-up to create
alternate personalities, for example a sexy—yet
faceless—figure in Day-Glo fishnets and a neon yellow wig in
an early video work, while using a projector in other
photo-based work to literally screen other possible selves
onto her actual face and body. In so doing, Hou melds fantasy
and reality, making us question the limits of both.
Painter Hua Chien-Chiang
also creates fantasy environments, often using mythic animals
and technologically-enhanced bodies as the main characters in
his vivid canvases. In Hua’s world, birds sprouting
earphones or USB cables as plumage are the norm, as are human
beings with recharger attachment portals and futuristic
jetpacks. Here, the past and the future become one, exactly
mimicking the actual conditions of society in flux that so
defines contemporary Taiwan. Sculptor and installation artist
Huang Shih-Chieh
also works within this vocabulary, but in radically
different—and often large-scale—ways. A representative of
Taiwan at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Huang is known for using
junk technology as the primary material in his work.
Highlighter fluid, cheap plastic shopping bags, remote control
toy motors and other odd elements all come together in
Huang’s flashing and whirring contraptions as if to bring a
sense of optimism to the patchwork nature of life in the
here-and-now. For SNAKE ALLEY, Huang installs his massive work
Organic Concept in
the carriage house of the Gabarron Foundation at 149 East 38th
Street. Consisting of just a few box fans and meter-upon-meter
of reconstituted plastic bags, the billowing snake form that
results inhabits the entire space and is both menacing and
tranquil in equal measure. Sculptor Wong
Yuh-Shioh also uses the detritus of life—polystyrene foam,
marbles, bricks—to piece together fantasy realms based in
the realm of nature. Her
Jellyfish Lamp sends
out a bright light that seems to expose the cheap materials
from which it is made, making us question the concept of truth
and beauty, and indeed of life itself.
Carrying on with this theme,
artist Ku Shih-Yung presents a video work, The Astonishment of What I Have Been Through Abolishes the Aureola of
Experience, that features an animated skeleton cavorting
on the screen. Part of a larger installation that was
presented at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, the work
looks at the underpinnings of life and how something as simple
as our own biological framework can be construed in a variety
of ways, while at the same time charting the course of time on
our physical containers. And it is those very containers that
photographer Kuo Hui-Chan takes as her subject matter, often
times using her own body as the canvas upon which she depicts
alternate beings or fantasy environments. Literally painting
aspects of architecture, nature and urban views over her skin
and clothes, Kuo becomes a chameleon that perfectly blends
into her surroundings, whether against a back alley wall in
downtown Taipei, or standing in a rice paddy in the
countryside. By becoming one with the diverse landscapes of
Taiwan, Kuo charts her lived environment by fusing herself to
its very make-up.
The youngest artist in the
show, Lan Yuan-Hung, also manipulates the body, however does
so not to blend in, but to stand out. His grotesque digital
manipulations feature men across a variety of age groups and
body types lying in their beds in contorted poses and
sprouting additional appendages such as an extra leg here or a
third arm there. Seemingly depicting the after effects of a
toxic spill or nuclear disaster, Lan’s mutants both repulse
and attract thanks to their focus on the flexibility of the
human form, whether through digital or actual means. Video
artist and photographer Lin Hsin-I also features mutants in
her animated films and enhanced photography. Here, the artist
plays the role of a futuristic nymph with cyber eyes and
sockets embedded into her flesh, no doubt a site for the
implantation of nourishment, energy or data. Lin’s work
often features this cyborg character in lush tropical
environments, an effect that makes her robot-like form appear
even further distanced from nature. She questions the role of
the human corpus as technology gradually overtakes it,
positing that at some point in the not-too-distant future we
may all begin to morph into hybrid bodies that straddle the
binary of nature versus technology. Video
pioneer Yuan Goang-Ming also explores this divide in his new
series of videos and C-prints composed of endless thickets of
lush green leaves, all without life-giving veins below their
glistening surfaces. Through
using technology to erase an important element of his natural
subject, Yuan takes on the role of creator, editor and
fabricator in one fell swoop, producing a faux nature that can
never exist in real life.
For sculptor Shyu
Ruey-Shiann, this same binary has always infused his work with a
hard-edged grit and witty sense of humor. Known for his
large-scale sculptural works made from old machine parts,
working motors, fan belts and gears, Hsu seems to utilize the
detritus of industry as the primary building blocks of his
elaborate works. Referencing Taiwan’s own loss of industrial
jobs due to rising production costs and the migration of
factories to mainland China in the 1990s, Hsu’s work gives
the past’s mechanical ghosts a new lease on life. Here, his
new sculpture Between
comprises two standard kitchen garbage cans in metal.
When guests use the foot pedal to open the can, they
are confronted with a most unexpected barrage:
lion roars exploding from the speakers set within. As
with his massive churning sculptures, Hsu here too seamlessly
blends the natural with the man-made, forcing us to question
where the line of distinction between the two truly lies.
Video artist Tseng Yu-Chin
also confronts the “man-made” in his work, but not via
industrial or technological means. Tseng is much more
concerned with the production of identity as it develops in
childhood and how the fears, dreams and secrets of our youth
remain with us for a lifetime. Perhaps Taiwan’s most
celebrated young artist, with a showing at Documenta in 2007
and the recent receipt of China’s most celebrated art prize,
the ACCC Award, Tseng has created an entire aesthetic
vocabulary based on diverted glances, childhood uncertainty
and a sense of longing for something just outside the
camera’s frame. Haunting in its loneliness, Tseng’s work
takes us back to the universal time of feeling out of place
and prompts us to think about the influence these memories
have on us today. Novelist and photographer Seven U also takes
us back in time, whether through a literary passage about the
glories of youth, or through his stark black and white
photography that documents the abandoned or hidden space of
cities around the world. In his “Low” series, U snaps
pictures in old factories and empty buildings throughout
Taipei, showing that even in the face of unprecedented
development and economic growth, unwanted and unkempt spaces
still exist. Indeed,
all of the artists in SNAKE ALLEY turn to the secrets and
fantasies of a society in flux for inspiration, and in so
doing, create works of art that capture the uncertainty,
aspirations and realities of life in Taiwan today.
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