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

Article source: 17th Taishin Art Awards website (http://17award.taishinart.org.tw/2/copy4_of_5c0f59d0514d9a5a)

On the north side of the Taizhou University of Arts campus, there are bungalow-style buildings built in the 1960s. The staggered low-rise gray houses and the banyan trees next to the brick walls form a contrast with the surrounding campuses and streets. There are the "North District Art Settlement", which was rebuilt from the old residence of overseas Chinese and the "Jiudan Art Practice Space" organized by the university dormitory. It is closely connected with the adjacent Taiyi Dayouzhang Art Museum, and the texture of the space is different.

Since the 1st Greater Taipei Contemporary Art Biennale in 2016, "Decongruence - Where Do Art and Lives Come From?", Taiwan University of Arts has started to renovate the old family homes around the campus into exhibition venues. Exhibited works enter these spaces; by the end of the next year's exhibition "Air Grass - Performance in Contemporary Art", nearly 50 contemporary art works have appeared in these houses. The curator Zhang Junyi joined Taiwan Arts University for three years. With the development of the above-mentioned art projects, he also found that the spatial texture of the area was constantly changing, and he was facing reconstruction or demolition at any time. People and works of art come and go, and the red wooden doors and the forest of sheep's hoofs are no longer there. Conceiving the second Greater Taipei Biennale of Contemporary Art, she wonders, how can contemporary art create what kind of interface? In addition to the interviews and video recordings of residents, should the image, history, and the fact that the residents once lived here be preserved?

The branch relay creation initiated by the novel
The literary world constructed by fiction and reality first emerges in the mind of the curator. She found the novelist Luo Yijun and took him through the exhibition, introducing the history of the space and describing the various artistic appearances that took place there. Luo Yijun quickly developed his first work involved in the exhibition, the novel "The Wall Climber", which depicts the maze of ruins on the edge of the city, the people who lived here and disappeared in time, and the land rights are transferred. The complex land relationship with the residents' struggle, and the many differences in the space such as the contemporary art works that have been involved in the space are skillfully blended with the overlapping layers of images. As soon as the completion of "The Wall Climber", the curatorial team translated it into English, and sent the novel together with the exhibition floor plan and space photos to the participating artists at home and abroad, which became an imaginary reference for space imagery. In the process of artist creation and development, Zhang Junyi Then, according to the respective properties of the exhibition venues, they are divided into batches, and they are invited to submit their work plans. “I try to make the artist’s process of proposing a work plan as transparent as possible. The form is a bit like a poker game, and the participants also know what other people are doing and how they intervene; More or less, I have a glimpse of what the exhibition will look like in the future, and I consciously intervene in this exhibition.”

The exhibition title "Extraordinary" emerged after that. Zhang Junyi thought about the relationship between art and life, and a piece of "white paper with a fold drawn on it" appeared in his mind - "When this fold appears, it is a dimensional transformation, a transformation from one dimension to another, and it is also possible It is the moment when sexuality emerges. So the super-ordinary is not produced by breaking with the ordinary, and it is not only a transcendence of the ordinary, but a kind of inquiry: Can we return to the ordinary through art, and in the process of returning, we realize that we have never noticed or thought so. things, or discover the original uniqueness of everyday life?”

Return to everyday life from art
This kind of dimensional transformation, folding and returning, appears repeatedly in the exhibition works and the layout of the exhibition venue. Some works appear at the turning points of space, or between works and works, transforming body perception and spatial dimensions: Charles Carcopino's "Personal Music Computer" waveforms musical sounds into a spatial immersion experience; Jeff Desom's "Rear Window" "Reconstruction of Hitchcock's classic movie footage, echoing the relationship between space and settlement; Hirakawa Yuki "The Lost Woods" creates invisible sculptures with video installations at the upper and lower ends. Some works develop their own narrative dimension by changing the tone: Liu Herang's "Grand View Villa - Very Short Story" starts from his own history of living in a small room in the exhibition hall, and creates time and space through installation and text letters delivered to the neighbors on site. Lai Zhisheng's "Floating Island" extends the pipelines buried deep in the floor of the old house to construct a suspended platform. Some works are closely related to the text of the novel and the exhibition space: Dorian Gaudin's "Lucy's Dream" uses moving beds to metaphorize the displacement and identity of characters; Pierre-Laurent Cassière's "Moment" uses dynamic sound installations to create sensory misunderstandings , showing the feeling of time stagnation; Stéphane Thidet's "The Realm of No Darkness" uses a half-soaked light bulb rotating in a duckweed pool to refer to the time loop. In addition, Zhang Junyi presented Luo Yijun's "Wall Over the Wall" in three forms of reading and exhibition, creating a "reading capsule" in the art museum, transforming the novel's description of space image sentences, and distributing it in the alleys of the exhibition area in the form of text tablets. The mini-booth of books and audiobooks, "Super Daily Satellite Booth", tours the art and literature sites in the Greater Taipei area during the exhibition, allowing the novel text to be extended and returned to the exhibition venue. Novels, works, and places are intertwined in the process of becoming texts with each other, laying out a network of meanings that refer to each other, "like layers of carbon traces that accumulate into cryptic texts like parchment."

"The exhibition starts when the idea of the work begins to brew, so compared to the organic generation process of the work, perhaps the opening is just a note to mark the time." During the exhibition period, the artist still has the possibility to propose new works. The 20 forums under the theme of "Daily Life" coexisted with the exhibition; after the opening, the poet Huang Tonghong entered the exhibition venue as a resident writer and wrote during the exhibition. "Neither the forum nor the workshop is outside the surrounding activities of the exhibition, but interweaves with the works to form the overall picture of the exhibition."

Curatorial journey like a watercolor painting
The closely linked curatorial mechanism, the repeated sand table deduction of the exhibition space and the arrangement of works, the exhibiting lineup of many foreign artists and 70% of the new works make the exhibition preparations full of challenges. Zhang Junyi described this process as "painting watercolor", "The brewing of creative ideas, the flow of energy, and the dialogue between works all take time. Sometimes it takes time to wait for the water and paint to settle, soak into the paper and slowly superimpose, sometimes You have to make clear judgments, just like at the critical moment when the water is half wet and half dry, you must grasp the time to make accurate operations, such as adding, removing or fine-tuning.” The works, spaces and even the curatorial process all seem to travel back and forth in the folds of time and space, both capturing and patching. In the fold of art and life, some fragments are picked up again, so that everyone can see the uniqueness in daily life.