Daily+, the 2nd Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art | Curatorial Discourse

Art is what makes life more interesting than art. -- Robert Filliou

Text by Chun-Yi CHANG
As an old labourer full of wrinkles on his front, Doubting Thomas recklessly probes the index finger into the ribs of Jesus. Following the “daily” gesture represented by Michelangelo Caravaggio, we are bound to see Johannes Vermeer’s woman pouring milk under the sunlight, Gustave Courbet’s stone stackers, Jean-Francois Millet’s cleaners, and even Edouard Manet’s bunch of asparagus. We might even recall in early 15th century Jan van Eyck, who insists on portraying in the real world everyday life on the corner. Artistic practices have evolved under various trends, such as naturalism, realism, Dada, Neo-Dada, pop art, assemblage art, new realism, Fluxus, happening art, arte povera and so on. If the course of evolution has step by step turned from the sacred temple of perfectness into “the daily”, then where would contemporary art in “the daily” go ? Does “the daily” still belong to one of the creative resources stimulating artistic practices? If in “the daily” we are familiar with exists always some aporia which keeps us from gazing upon life itself, could a shuttle between art and daily life render us more insightful of life?  

Baptised as Daily+, the 2nd Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art unites 35 artists from France, USA, Austria, Luxembourg, Japan and Taiwan. Engaged firstly in the biennial, the Taiwanese novelist Yi-Chin LO writes along the exhibition venues, in particular Northern Campus and Nine Single Rooms Art Space, and transforms the spaces full of winding alleys as interwoven reminiscences into Wall Climber, which mixes residual images of daily life with segmented work on what had happened here. The novel is the first invited work that lifts the curtain of the biennial. Taking the novel and exhibition spaces as reference of inspiration, the invited artists develop as a card game their projects in multiple direction,  and the developing projects later become as well a reference to each other, through which the invisible relationship of linkage is thus gradually drawn out. Therefore, the novel based on the exhibition sites and the artworks referring to the novel--both create intertextually between artwork, text and site a sort of multi-level dialogue from which is generated a significance network of inter-reference, similar to a parchment-like invisible text, full of layers of overlapping and accumulated traces.

Derived from the daily life, the daily+ is neither translation nor representation of the daily; it is not a clean break from the daily routine either. Rather, it signifies that in the different slices of reality stands a subject of art creation who, by means of various art practices, deconstructs and reconstructs the daily in order to return to it anew. Out of the very returning can a subject reveal the originality of the daily. In other words, keeping a distance from the daily life, a subject is thus able to discover in the relationship of dependency some points of reference, of substantiality and of transcendence, and to further transform the daily into infinitive resources for creation. As a folding mark cut slightly on the inner of the daily, the daily+ diverges the dimension of the daily to the unknown, to a place seemingly close yet out of reach, and endows the daily with a future never expected. Thus, we hope to unfold a multi-dialogue between art and daily life, and at the meantime, through a series of forums and workshops, to reveal progressively the “daily of artist”, and finally to invite spectators to stroll in a wrinkled space of imagination and thought so as to observe each layer of daily life, diverted, metamorphosed, or transformed. The more the daily becomes the daily+, the more the daily+ becomes the daily.  

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