In Terms of Sport

This summer, the New Taipei City Art Museum (NTCAM) is hosting a different kind of physical education class at the museum.

In Terms of Sport, on view at the NTCAM adjacent to the Yingge Civil Sports Center, is an exhibition that integrates indoor (playgrounds, stadiums) and outdoor (cities, streets) sports. This thematic exhibition aims to dismantle and challenge contemporary society’s mainstream perceptions of “sports.”

This physical education class at the museum unfolds through a look at art, architecture, and sports. An artwork about a ping-pong table without actual ping-ponging through the lens of Hayahisa Tomiyasu; a community sports center designed by Lina Bo Bardi that cannot host formal sports games, but only leisure activities; a professional athlete and the epitome of “sports is life” named Chang Hsing-hsien, who represented Japan, Manchuria, and Taiwan in international sports contests. Together these three examples from different time periods, geographical contexts, ethnic groups, and social structures encapsulate what remains the mundane nature of sports: it never is just sports.

This exhibition features eight groups of artists from Taiwan, Japan, Germany, Brazil, India, the United States, and South Africa, showcasing unconventional sports scenes relayed through photography, videos, kinetic, spatial, and sound installations, and the distinctive spaces of the NTCAM's "Creative Cluster." Here, the audience will encounter street dancing from the periphery of Recife (Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca), urban skating amidst the activist song (Amol K. Patil), impeccable and invisible national teams (Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi), free-rolling body parts (Luo Jr-shin), climbing site covered by white sand (Yang Chi-chuan), and dynamic soundscape of mountains and forests in eastern Taiwan (Sayun Chang).

Concurrently on view is various sports equipment, such as the world-leading Taiwan Tchoukball team's net, the paddle that inherits Austronesian maritime culture, and the Olympic trophy earned not through competition by Taiwan's first female baseball umpire, revealing a series of familiar yet unfamiliar sports stories related to Taiwan.

When we talk about sports, what do we talk about? What do we truly observe when we watch sports? These exhibition narratives weave together identity, colonial history, political dynamics, and social issues, offering an alternative routine of sports as well as a different kind of physical education class at the museum.

For more information, please visit the website.

Exhibition date: July 5–November 17, 2024
Exhibition venue: Creative Cluster, New Taipei City Art Museum
Curator: Tsou Ting
Artists: Amol K. Patil, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Gabriella Angotti-Jones, Hayahisa Tomiyasu, Luo Jr-Shin, Sayun Chang, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Yang Chi-Chuan