52. International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia - TAIPEI FINE ART MUSEUM OF TAIWAN "ATOPIA"

June 14, 2007 - PRLog -- TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM OF TAIWAN
 Atopia

PRESS CONFERENCE: FRIDAY 8th JUNE 2007 FROM 10.00 TO 10.30 AM, TEATRO PICCOLO – ARSENALE, Calle della Tana 2168/B
INAUGURATION: FRIDAY 8th JUNE 2007 AT 6.00 PM
PRESS PREVIEW: 6-7-8-9 June, 2007 Hours open: 10.00 am – 8.00 pm  
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: 10 June - 21 November, 2007 Hours open: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm (closed on Mondays except Monday 11th June)
VENUE: Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello 4209, San Marco (Boat station: S. Zaccaria, next to the Palazzo Ducale) – 30124 Venice
CURATOR: Hongjohn LIN
ARTISTS: Ming-liang TSAI (b. 1957), Huang-chen TANG (b. 1958), Kuo Min LEE (b. 1969),
Shih-chieh HUANG (b. 1975), VIVA (b. 1975)
ORGANISED BY: Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan
COMMISSIONER: Wen-ling CHEN
DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: Paolo De Grandis
CHIEF CURATOR: Fang-wei Chang
COORDINATOR IN VENICE: Arte Communications

Atopia is a “non-place,” unconstrained by borders, due to the politico-economic dynamism of globalization. The disappearance of boundaries - the mixing and merging of cultures, virtual space shaped by technology, and transnational consumption and production - means no single identity can account for contemporary spatial configurations. Yet an atopia does not necessarily assure individual freedom. No longer the expressions of pure will and desire, our bodies are marked by the regulation of individual life by the combined powers of the new empire. The omnipresence of this condition makes true individualism possible, through the self-empowering recreation and rewriting of identities. Atopia also means that a place cannot be placed, or simply be not-a-place. The impossibility of legitimate representations makes atopia a state of de facto without de jure - a place without its name can only be attended as an exception. Anachronistic histories and dislocated sites all assume the status of atopias. One can envisage that Taiwan is a non-national nation, or a nation without nationality, yet neither post-nation nor pre-nation: in short, an atopian state par excellence. Its name as listed in international settings is confusingly inconsistent and endlessly reinvented: Taiwan (ROC), China (Taiwan), China (Taipei), Taipei/China, Taipei, Chinese Taipei, and so on. Within these brackets, slashes, and aliases, an atopia performs “in-the-name-of-other-names,” i.e., to claim its identity through différance, not difference. Its true identity has always-already been inscribed through reiterations of supplements, arresting the open secret of atopia. The uncertain status of naming generates a new position between the subject and the big Other, responding to the network of intersubjectivity codified by political realities in order to open up to the impossibility. With reiterations creating the identity in-the-name-of-others, atopia retroactively alludes to its own inexpressible phantom status, a symbolically perverse situation.
What the exhibition Atopia brings to light is that the transference of this unrepresentability belongs to Taiwan’s cultural and political discourse. Through a creative inscription on exile from within, a gesturing to para-sites of the local, the exhibition reflects the acting-out of Taiwan within its own glocalized map. This is a mirrored community reflexive to Taiwanese-ness as a cultural, social, and political terrain that excises a magical reverse of psychogeographical play.

Tsai Ming-Liang is one of Taiwan’s most important contemporary filmmakers.  The Exhibition of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan for the 52nd Venice Biennale features Tsai’s film installation “Is It a Dream?”. The setting is in a derelict movie theater in Malaysia, alluding both to its Golden Age of the film industry–the 1970s–and to its present day decline. The work also articulates a nostalgic return to the homeland where Tsai grew up. Tsai’s work is like a sculpture in time, slowly unfolding its narrative. The metaphors of the absence of a father figure in his work point out a disjunctive state of national and familial orders, an echo of the contradictory temporal and spatial state in What Time Is It There?: the protagonist ’s obsessive, imaginary love, which gradually shows a psychotic condition in the deterritorialized concurrence between Taipei and Paris. In Tsai’s works, his personal attitude–a distant nostalgia–in reflecting local culture is oddly uncanny and that, in turn, serves as an allegory for a non-place.

Kuo Min Lee’s documentary photography incisively portrays the relationship among community residents, their environment, and history. In addition to documentation, Lee also involved himself in social activism against the government’s removal of certain neighborhoods. Lee’s works are documentary photography but also reflect his active participation in the communal life and its social movements. These communities–Treasure Hill, the No. 1 Air Force Community in Sanchong, the Wenho New Village in Banciao, and recently Losheng Leprosarium–have all disappeared or are on the verge of being demolished. Lee’s photographs tell the story of the residents amid their belongings and spaces, while also serving as evidence that testifies to a disturbing and changing urban environment.

Huang-Chen Tang’s work embarks from a description of a well-known Taiwanese scenic postcard. She begins her video with a nearly obsessive undertaking–making a lost image to reappear in real places as France, Korea, and Taiwan. Her video–much like any tourist photo–signifies the re-presenting of a personal memory from visual culture. By employing an impossible means to achieve its impossible ends–rendering a still image into moving images; singular actions transformed into a group effort; and taking the local to the other places–the work is self-contradictory. Tang is a modern Kua Fu, constructing the task of untranslatability that involves culture/material/action. Precisely because of the unfeasible of her means, she is able to instill in her works a boundlessly fascinating space that borders on the ambiguous zone between individual action and collective memory.

Shih Chieh Huang is a bricoleur who transforms domestic appliances into a symbiotic organic installation. He employs low-tech, mass-produced goods in order to explore consumer culture and the human condition. Through his spontaneous, chaotic assemblages that are non-utilitarian inventions composed of recycled objects, Huang unveils the cultural habitus of the local as well as his own personal psychological state through his spontaneous, chaotic assemblages. Huang’s works point to the atopian state of technology and humanity: a hysterical condition of how the technology of the future is imagined, and perfectly explicating a sense of anxiety toward the future.

The artwork of VIVA might be described as a product of reinterpreting the Japanese subculture doujinshi (manga or anime drawn and distributed by its fans); yet, through mimicking another culture, he has created an in-between space for the local:  the past is preserved and translated to a new, contemporary culture, and vice-versa.  Different from that of most contemporary artists who use the motifs and subjects from subcultures as a source of inspiration,VIVA makes subculture as a living situation of culture and society.VIVA’s work in Atopia,Overclocker’s Hell, describes as its main theme the local geek culture, a reality that is manifested in everyday life in Taiwan.

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, R.O.C.(Taiwan);the Council for Cultural Affairs,Taiwan;the Taipei City Government;the Department of Cultural Affairs,Taipei City Government.

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