A Dynamic Relational Model of Quasi-daily Spatial Clusters: Curating Conception and Practice of Daily+
Text by Hai-Ming HUANG (Art Critic, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Arts and Design, National Taipei University of Education)
In addition to the on-campus Yo-Chang Art Museum, National Taiwan University of Arts boasts two other art exhibition and performance venues: the Nine Single Rooms Art Space and the Northern Campus, converted from an old military family housing project and a faculty dormitory, respectively. The three distinct spaces, as a whole, constitute a fantastic locale for the practice of artistic experimentation.
This essay aims to discuss how Chun-Yi CHANG, curator of the NTUA’s Yo-Chang Art Museum, makes use of this combo space—spacious, in working condition, near the campus, retaining its residential dimension and living memories, as well as flexible substitute art space—to change a major art production ecology.
Contemporary art, an export in nature, intervenes in and therefore influences the society. At the same time, it changes the path of local contemporary art and swings to and fro between the changing art and society, making the whole process necessary and yet difficult.Daily+, the 2nd Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art organized by NTUA, places itself at this strategic position of practice and experimentation.
Process of Implementation / Dual Starting Engines:
The head curator Chun-Yi CHANG took the novelist Yi-Chin LO on a tour around the planned exhibition venue and then invited him to create the very first work for the present biennial. The aim can be seen as an attempt to introduce into the cleared-up space past memories of living in the community and displaying artworks in the last couple of years. The resulting novel was immediately translated into English to lend in-depth and detailed insight, especially for the overseas artists, into the space they were about to occupy. At the same time, it was envisioned to inspire more connected, diverse, and heartfelt creative dialogue therein.
Named Wall Climber, the novel comprise 11,262 words in eight layered sections. The following is a summarized structure of the story:
In a super gigantic world are small living worlds of different sizes joined and existing together. This is a world of living that has been cleaned out, fixed up, painted over, plastered white, covered up, stacked atop one another like prison cells. It is impossible to tell the inside from the outside here, and there is no hurt, anger, ugliness, desire, greed, or privacy. It is like a wormhole but is defenseless against the onslaught on disasters and gradually falling apart. How do we make sense of all this?“This,” repeatedly layered and unspeakable, can only reside in the physical memory of those who once were trapped here, came and went, were left to their own devices, and had nothing to lose; they were the dredges of society, families fallen from grace, and poor unmarried teachers. Any temporary residents, who wish to rebuild “this” and succeed or fail, can only exist as lingering specters returning from many deaths. In this mildewed dreamscape rife with mystery and piled up with a network of frames, they keep climbing over and crossing the walls. How do they extract themselves and look down from above at “this,” the rich yet unbearable miniature of an old era?
In addition to a pre-existing text for the overseas artists to understand the exhibition space with, the writing was developed by the curator Chun-Yi CHANG into: A1-1, reading capsules resembling those in space shuttles;A1-2, a Daily+ Satellite Station that travels among different organizations; and A1-3, the “Wall Climber Guide,” consisting of 12 short quotes and spread out all over the exterior alleyways, which is rather symbolic of the space it inhabits. Meanwhile, the printed edition of the novel is not for circulation or sale.
Artists are creatures impossible to bring under control. For them, the novel was but a common material to stimulate art-making. Nevertheless, judging from the finished works, it can be seen that the novel had indeed played a crucial role in shaping them. For those viewers who have read the novel, it helps them better understand certain exhibits and even renders the locus of living more interesting than art itself. We will deal with the latter point in detail in conclusion, but let’s first try to put in order the deployment strategies of and dialogue among the three exhibition venues.
Our Museum
A2 Julien PRÉVIEUX
1. For Lana: This piece deals with how the language trainer (the scientist) conditions and controls the trained (the ape). When manipulating the language, the artist came up with a series of surrealist visual poems as an anti-language conditioning art game.
2. Letters of Non-motivation: Following right after For Lana is a piece on the unequal relationship between the job seekers and the non-transparent hirers. Assuming the identity of different characters, the artist answers all kinds of want ads, and reveals through writing these “letters of non-motivation” for “not seeking a job the absurdity of the corporate hiring system.
3. What Shall We Do Next?: The bizarre form of contemporary dance projected on a giant screen is actually a patented unlock feature utilizing AI technology. The message transmission channel locked up level after level like a wormhole, or luxury residential and office buildings locked up like a wormhole, requires this kind of proprietary physical unlock system to access. How can people of this present era find an escape from such a physical behavior control mechanism?
A3. Félicie d'ESTIENNE d'ORVES
Light Standard: The interstellar light transmissions, undetectable to the naked eye, is rendered visible and imaginable here through conversion on a super large scale. Measured with a light standard, the distance between stars becomes an abstract absolute value, which in turn brings the certainty of the standard in doubt. It is as if we could travel among the stars riding on a dot of light.
A4. Bernd OPPL
Mise-en-scène: Cold miniature models of houses installed in a gigantic featureless space with no geography or history can be taken in with just one look from above. Can they be used to represent a type of uniformly designed and strictly monitored collective housing policy?There is no necessary connection between the houses, but they are directly linked to all sorts of web service providers. The title Mise-en-scène says it all!
A5. Dorian GAUDIN
1. Lucie’s Dream: Adding a sophisticated mechanism on an old single bed cut in half and fixed with wheels, the artist made the contraption gape and move like a worm, circling endlessly like it’s sleepwalking in the crisscrossing dark alleys of the exhibition space.
2. Saâdane and Sarah: A small monitor displays the private, absurd daily life happening in a tilted room. At close range and through a tiny hole, this piece turns the viewer’s looking a voyeuristic act.
A6. Charles CARCOPINO
Personal Computer Music: Set to the computer music by François-Eudes CHANFRAULT, this piece seeks to interpret the final moments in the composer’s life. Simplified and twisted by means of a digital tuning program, the music is modulated and projected as images in the physical space. The viewer is like being caught in a dark wormhole, making his way blindly amidst indecipherable sounds and disturbances.
--The immediate and derivative relationship among the Hall A pieces:
In the Hall A of Our Museum, the collective state of no exit, an uncertain future under surveillance and monitoring, and escape for various kinds of soft control are conveyed by means of different art forms. This kind of relationship, nevertheless, is represented with a seemingly heavy yet light touch and through the form of very subtle concrete spatial poetry; it is also closely related to the unspoken grey past and uncertain future fate of the space in reality.
Nine Single Rooms Art Space
B1. Jeff DESOM
Rear Window Loop: This project reconstructs the Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window shot by shot and then piece them up into a 20-minute panoramic picture. By rule of similarity, this piece provides a frame for reenacting what happened in the military housing project and the teachers’ dormitory, which are each informed by national history and personal upheavals. This is also an opportunity to stage a holistic vision of that history by employing a larger-than-life, seemingly haunted moving panorama.
B2. Olivier PASQUET
Proxima B: As a constantly self-generating audiovisual piece, this predominantly visual text is made of a massive volume of contrasts interacting with one another. There is not a so-called subject but an endless algorithmic self-generation of sights and sounds. Seemingly out of place, this piece seems to serve as a sort of buffer situated between Rear Window Loop and Ready to Try the Artists' Habits? It also foreshadows some important pieces that follow, such as the markedly nonhuman, automated Notification.
B3. Emmanuelle LAINÉ & Benjamin VALENZA
Ready to Try the Artists' Habits?: A conglomerate integrating multiple interview clips to form a heroine’s multiple personality narrative. The woman dominating the film is a fable for art institutions: she is at the same time an ever-changing, indefinable fictional female body and a fable with an unfixed moral. This piece, by contrast, highlights the humane management and attitude of the present curating team.
B4. Claude CLOSKY
Notification:The exhibition space is made up of intertwining power cords and seven offline tablet PCs. Some of the cords are hanging from above for the viewers to charge their devices. All the tablets are preinstalled with the newly designed app. The mobile devices need recharging from time to time, but the users can’t help but receive inescapable ads in the process while operating the system. So what is the purpose for these people to stay in this place together? Are they connected to the outside world? Or are they just killing time in an internal environment with automated, unmanned ad loops?
--The immediate and derivative relationship among the Hall B pieces:
In Hall B, namely the Nine Single Rooms Art Space, Rear Window Loop shortens the relationship between art and the historical locale, turning the space into a black-and-white mystery film by elevating the temporal distance of the spatial cluster. Ready to Try the Artists' Habits?, meanwhile, highlights what’s special about the curating practice of Our Museum through its Western counterpart. Continuing with the asymmetrical propagation featured in Hall A, Proxima B takes it up a notch and presents fully automatic communication without human involvement. Finally, Notification takes this issue to a new high, venturing into nonhuman notification and automated conversation.
C.D.E.F.G.H. Isolated Living Quarters
C. Ho-Jang LIU
DaGuan Villa - Flash Fiction: Based on the artist’s own sculptures from 1993-1994, this project seeks to respond to the massive public world on site. Through the memory of objects is manifested the spiritual and physical intersection of the world from the past in the present time.Meanwhile, handwritten letters containing a minimalist essay have been sent and delivered to the neighbors living on the site. This is supposed to aim at creating a real linkage with the present time and space by assembling the artists’ older pieces anew and enlivening the environment of the military housing project.
D1. Pierre-Laurent CASSIÈRE
Dislocation and Moment: This piece invites the viewer to experience the slightly twisted time and space in an empty house. The first part consists of an immaterial sound sculpture which one can feel is present like a phantom. The second part consists of an old industry-grade electric fan, which generates wind and has sounds but is motionless even though the fan blade is turning. It is like the unstable images from an old black-and-white movie, building a connection to the piece developed from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as well as the lo-fi monotone old movie vividly described in Yi-Chin LO’s novel. The artists himself attributed the inspiration for his art to Lo’s novel as well.
D2. Nicolas TOURTE
I Don’t Know: Combining physical objects with projections, which includes a slowly moving ghost-like figure (projected onto the surface of a translucent plastic sheet) lounging on a red sofa, this piece reminds the viewer of the death of the fallen protagonist in the documentary film from Yi-Chin LO’s novel.
Song and Detachment: Via the projection of floating light dots on the walls, this piece disintegrates the concrete building and turn it into a liquid existence.
Tidal Wave: The wooden floors, which used to be square and flat, are all curled up like ocean waves with sounds of water oozing from every opening. In a rather poetic way, this piece manifests the signs of collapse when all the material objects inside an old military housing project start to crumble.
E. Chih-Sheng LAI
Drifting Sandbar and A Tree Planted on the Wall: Digging open the old walls that have been put on layer after layer of paint for several times and exposing the invisible yet essential pipelines, the artist turned all this into a slightly raised platform that resemble a floor. Moreover, he planted a tree on a wall—in fact a pipeline opening as well—reflecting the afternoon sun. This piece brings out strong melancholy over the completely drained livelihood of the community.
F. Wan-Shuen TSAI
Plant and Waste: In this old dormitory area marked by accumulation and dispersion, abandonment and management, inside a renovated empty house is a wall embedded with small type metal blocks on one side. Through the window opened on the wall can be seen short haiku-like lines about tributaries, sand beaches, ferry wharves, and vegetable gardens. A few simple lines reveal the light, poetic lives led by those people living on the edge of geography and society.
G. Stéphane THIDET
There Is No Darkness: Duckweeds floating on a black pool in a darkened room and a dim light bulb with the wire visible circling half-submerged in the black water, isn’t this precisely the total state of existence for lonely souls living in a dark, damp, corrupted, and exitless environment which is also prone to unforeseen misfortunes? This piece closely reflects the miserable state of living in the military dependent community from Yi-Chin LO’s Wall Climber.
H1. Man-Nung CHOU
Fever 103°: Based on an adapted screenplay, this piece employs nonlinear language and musical soliloquies to discuss the nature of art making, life, love, and death. This time, the subject is recreated and displayed using a visual installation. Inside a rather stylish room flooded with water running from a bathtub, there is an antique floor mirror in the background. A warm light is still on in the bedroom, evoking the lonely life of a woman pining for an unrequired love.
H2. Youki HIRAKAWA
Vanished Tree: On the altar-like pedestal can be seen the black-and-white image of tree rings on the surface of a trunk, from whence we look up and sees the distant sky through the skylight and the elegant, poetic silhouettes of leaves and branches swaying in the wind. Using technology, the artist recreates inside the altar-like housing unit real skies and trees that have been gone for long. This achingly beautiful piece is especially poignant as it reminds us that an entire living world is no more.
--The immediate and derivative relationship among the Hall C pieces:
Through various kinds of physical objects and a few words, the sense of loss, disappearance, and submergence in a certain past is conveyed rather poetic and subdued manner. The diverse expressions of melancholy are a key point here, bringing out the possibility of reconnecting with all that have disappeared. Among the venues, this one also features a stronger sense of daily living, featuring more local artists, too.
Art is that which makes life more interesting than art
In an era marked by populism, almost all kinds of art activities, when being designed or organized, are more or less hijacked by the populist value of quantity instead of quality.As a matter of fact, the incorporation and intervention of art has as its ultimate goal reaching out. Art always points toward the often overlooked difference in daily life and the possible future. Its binary role of approaching and staying away from the public poses as a major source of concern for young curators who have more Western than local experience.
Therefore, as CHANG pondered the relationship between art and life during the process of curating, she kept thinking back to what Robert FILLIOU said, “L'art est ce qui rend la vie plus intéressante que l'art.” If art is “that something” which discloses the invisible relationships in our daily life while deepening, externalizing, and synchronizing it, does it mean that art is able to make the seemingly mundane daily life more interesting than art itself?
I think a lot of the things she did in the process of making this exhibition happen has something to do with the idea. That includes having to raise the bar after commissioning Yi-Chin LO to create the very first piece. Moreover, when engaging in dialogue with the artists, she was cool with the changes and waiting, not to mention that she was willing to make major adjustments when conditions changed, so that the relations among the pieces could be more self-evident and freer to develop. Of course, we don’t have the luxury of discussing such details here, but the extravagant process behind what is presented here was absolutely necessary.
A dynamic relationship among spatial groups of daily life formed by curating the exhibition
Daily residential communities where no one inhabits anymore are still rife with all kinds of entangled memories even though they have been wiped clean. The artists intervened in this by deconstructing pieces or revealing the wrinkles in time through local excavations. They got to touch the very deep-seated multiple collective memories, while representing all those things—contemporary AI, internet connectivity, virtual image technology—that have been integrated into our life without us knowing it in an eerie poetic and dreamlike way. It is as if the exhibition has always been a strange dream that we’re familiar with in our daily life. Perhaps we can take Richard Hamilton’s pop art masterpiece, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, as inspiration and name the exhibition Just what is it that makes today's daily life so different, so marvelous? Perhaps, it is an awe at the dreamscape formed by the transformed elements that are decidedly future but at the same time appear familiar.
The entire exhibition assembles different works by different artists, each building its penetrating relationship with the space in its own way. The relations between the pieces seem distant yet so close, too, as if they were all inalienable parts of an urban fantasy novel written long ago. Via the clever flowing network among the pieces, the grid-like distribution of the space in the exhibition halls makes for a collective brain active in dream. The curator Chun-Yi CHANG demonstrated in this exhibition her mastery in communicating and curating combining theater, film, and literature, as well as the ability to create the daily of the future. (Translated by Yi-Hsuan CHEN)