2015 Asian Art Biennial: Artist Making Movement

The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts is now showing the 2015 Asian Art Biennial, featuring 28 artists from Asia. Aiming to overturn institutions through self-actualizations driven by perceptual creativities, artists are using their individual values to respond actively to the new era. New turning points are embarked upon, signifying an ongoing process with reevaluation and innovation for Asia’s new cultural system. At the same time, the community in Asia is also projecting a sense of active anticipation and activism targeted at a collectively envisioned future.   

This biennial includes 28 sets of contributing artists from 17 different Asian regions/countries, with artworks dealing with Asia’s current institutional, human rights, and other problems amidst its moving boarders. With increasingly frequent and intense socioeconomic developments and cross-border relations within Asian countries and transnationally, these shifting exchanges are drastically challenging preceding viewpoints and order, and a mobile state with aligning thoughts and actions has become an assertive approach for dealing with the current reality. Problems and the creative environment in Asia faced by artists are cross-cultural and exist in a cultural domain composed of a plethora of divergences. As seen in Singaporean artist Lee Wen’s Ping-Pong Go Round, the method of including multiple participants in the competition/dialogue is a metaphor for Asia’s complex multilateral political wrangling. Indian artist Rina Banerjee’s work deals with cultural symbols and objects that have been relocated and rearranged within the global cultural landscape through the complex routes of colonialism, tourism, travel, and mass media. Banerjee’s sculptures are quite peculiar, and have come to form a spectacular way of presenting the cultural production process in today’s Asia with globalized features. Studio Revolt was co-founded in Cambodia by Japanese filmmaker Masahiro Sugano and Cambodian artist Anida Yoeu Ali, using poetry to examine issues of identity and borders. The art created expands beyond traditional narratives, and included in this exhibition are collaborative works created with Pakistani and Cambodian poets on exile, publically voicing out issues that some are currently facing.

Indonesian artist collective Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina has custom-created a new project, Salting the Sea, to echo with the theme of this biennial, "Artist Making Movement," focusing on the relationship and the existing conundrums in Taiwan between Southeast Asian migrant workers and the local society. As youth movements rise to the fore and labor- and wage-related issues take up news headlines, Filipino artist Stephanie Syjuco’s MONEY FACTORY: Economic Reality Game is an onsite project that focuses on this social phenomenon. The exhibition space will be transformed into a factory of labor production, using a playful yet critical approach to explore the economic predicament faced by the younger generation in Taiwan. Visitors are invited to join in at this factory to produce the Taiwanese currency, with their working time equated to monetary income. At the end of the game, participants can freely choose and consider: What kind of realistic goals can be achieved by the youths today with their annual income? Can today’s economic policies, industrial developments, and social conditions satisfy people’s hopes and dreams for attaining a good life? The artist has made available a practical space for public involvement, sparking reflections through the participatory process.

Mirage: Disused Public Property in Taiwan is a social investigation consisting of real images and solid documents, executed for over five years by Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-Chung and a group of art students. It is a critical micro-action group that uses art and group action to tangibly engage in society. The images and documents created by the group have exposed a course of public development lacking in core content and value and, at the same time, is also devoted to proposing reforms for the absurd polices.

Media liaison
Emily Wang: T +886 4 2372 3552 #133 / emily.w@art.ntmofa.gov.tw