The Botanic Image of “Air Plant” and its Strong∕Weak Curating

Text by Sheng-Hung Wang

Grapevines and Air Plants

Chun-Yi Chang, curator of the Air Plant: Performance Ability within Contemporary Arts exhibition (hereafter referred to as the Air Plant exhibition) introduces a distinctive, plant-based image/concept that is closely related to curatorial practice and highlights the notion of “free, active subject of art creation.” Among articles written on the Air Plant exhibition, some have already explained the artworks in detail. By contrast, in this article, the focus is on the curatorial idea of “the coming subject image,” which merits additional discussions.

On an individual level, the use of plants to describe people is not unprecedented. An image of vines depicted in a poem written by ancient Greek poet Pindar (ca. 522-443 　BC) provides a great reference for comparison. In the poem, the following sentence can be found: “But human excellence grows like a vine tree, fed by the green dew, raised up, among wise men and just, to the liquid sky.” This signifies that people, similar to vines, must rely on “nourishing” external environmental conditions to grow and achieve excellence. Similarly, “nourishments” are needed to foster human goodness. However, this leads to the following question: If human goodness is cultivated by the external world, how can we prove that human nature is an inherent, ideal quality of ours rather than a characteristic forced upon us by the society? In The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, U.S. philosopher Martha Nussbaum uses the image of grapevines to initiate a series of debates on the excellence and fragility of human nature. Contrary to the general argument that humans are autonomous and self-sufficient, Nussbaum contended that humans are imperfect and even easy to “contaminate.”

In ancient Greek poetry, human excellence was portrayed as something that could be achieved only through luck and constant external trials and challenges. However, Pindar’s verse suggested that the beauty of human nature comes from human fragility, a kind of beauty based on uncertainty. Nussbaum stated that “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control... That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.” In short, the image of grapesvines depicted in Nussbaum’s theory emphasizes the beauty of plant-like growth rather than the dazzling, self-sustaining beauty of a jewel.

Strong Curating: From Fragility to Toughness

The Air Plant exhibition conveys the idea that similar to ethical life, creative life relies on multiple conditions being met for it to grow. Concerning the shaping of artists, the process is complicated. Although the Air Plant exhibition introduces a plant image that is rich in meanings, it differs from Nussbaum’s theory in a number ways. For example, despite Chun-Yi Chang also using “cultural fertility” (provided by external environments) to discuss the interrelationships between artists and their background (where Chang’s idea of “cultural fertility” was based on the concepts of cultural gap and cultural variability proposed by French philosopher François Jullien), the depiction of artists in the Air Plant exhibition is not based on the idea of “beauty of fragility.” Nevertheless, the thin foliage of air plants does feature an appearance comparable to “beauty of fragility.”

Air plants are plants that can grow in soil and without soil. They can grow on other plants and survive on their own. They possess a vitality that is in stark contrast to their fragile appearance. Therefore, the Air Plant exhibition puts forward an ideal pattern of survival for artists, emphasizing that they should not be restricted or confined by their background or the idea of “cultural identity” that traditionalism and multiculturalism adhere to. Similar to air plants growing in soil and without soil, artists should be able to adapt comfortably to the environment, where they absorb nutrients from their own culture as well as those from other culture. Thus, contrary to the image of grapevines presented by Nussbaum, the image of air plants stresses cultural depth and flexibility, and that being “root-free” does not signify “losing roots” (i.e., breaking from one’s background culture) or subjecting one to abstract space without historical reference; instead, being root-free suggests keeping a distance from one’s familiar background to examine all things that one takes for granted, from which one develops a sense of self-reflection. In other words, despite both Nussbaum and the Air Plant exhibition employing the image of plants, the latter outlines an artistic approach that facilitates the evolution from fragility to toughness and from attachment to freedom.

Although Chun-Yi Chang’s curatorial idea is based on that proposed by Gilles Deleuze (i.e., rhizome) and Nicolas Bourriaud (i.e., radicant), it also demonstrates the potential of local cultural discourse (despite air plants themselves being an outside species). The tendencies of artists highlighted in the Air Plant exhibition are connected to the complicated history of Taiwan: For a long time, Taiwan has been colonized and influenced by various foreign culture. Even today, Taiwan remains affected by a variety of regional politics and geographical relationships, where it must exercise caution to survive. Pessimistically speaking, Taiwan’s culture is heavily influenced by external environmental conditions and changes; to other empires, Taiwan is like a fragile, anonymous plant and artists who grow up in such an environment inevitably share the same fragility. Optimistically speaking, as underlined by the Air Plant exhibition, Taiwan has the ability to adapt and engage in critical self-examination. Accordingly, Taiwan must learn to not blindly accept all external cultures, particularly those that are inactive or without character. In addition, Taiwan must eliminate the illusion of “cultural identity” to resist the “narrow-mindedness” of cultural protectionism. Concerning how to create a cultural entity with such a strong vitality, the answer remains to be found. However, the Air Plant exhibition offers potential answers to such a question.

Weak Curating: The Timing Logic of Plants

The Air Plant exhibition does not feature theoretical over-idealization and puts theories into practice. Although contemporary art platforms have been repeatedly proven to be the optimal platforms to propose and publish theories, the Air Plant exhibition successfully avoids being theoretical and not practical. The exhibition ingeniously utilizes the within-campus and outside-of-campus platforms provided by the National Taiwan University of Arts Yo-Chang Art Museum and The Northern Campus District, inviting participating artists to explore, communicate, and interact with each other as they create the exhibition. The demonstration of local cultural discourse by the Air Plant exhibition entails strong curating, whereas the process where artists put related concepts into practice involves weak curating.

Chun-Yi Chang adopts a symbiotic, interdependent curatorial mechanism to facilitate applying theories in practice: She provided the participating artists with great time flexibility, did not specify the artworks to be created or the location in which they were to be created, and encouraged the participating artists (including herself) to think freely and inspire each other. This was the perfect example of practicing “trust uncertain things beyond your own control” (an idea described earlier) prior to curating an exhibition. The greatest feature of this curatorial mechanism was that it allowed the artworks to have “the timing logic of plants”; that is, the artworks are not confined by specific purposes and directions, are allowed to rest and form slowly, and are given an extended period of time to grow and connect with other artworks. In the exhibition, many artworks evolved based on this logic. For example, Kuei-Chih Lee created Recycling Scenery (Picture 1) using collected local materials, where he gathered, stacked, and entwined tree branches together to form a giant vine that runs through the inside and outside of the exhibition space, echoing the aforementioned concept “growing on other plants”; Yen-Hong Liu used objects, paintings, furniture, and sculpture to transform the exhibition gallery into a house for meeting guests, drinking tea, and talking about dreams (Picture 2); Joyce Ho and Snow Huang investigated the life story of an unknown visitor using personal belongings that he has left behind (Picture 3); and Yannick Dauby, Wei-Chia Su, and Chun-Yi Chang used visual and auditory perceptions to create two artworks (i.e., Trajectories & Impacts (Picture 4) and FreeSteps – Sense of Place (Picture 5)) in the same space, where the latter artwork illustrates the static and dynamic movements of dancers. All of these works are artistic creation gradually formed using the interdependent relationships between people and people, people and space, and artworks and artworks in an open, trusting environment. The exhibition curator and participating artists did not project the exhibition results; instead, they waited patiently for them. In Joyce Ho’s These Things that Drift Away (Picture 6), the pure white waiting rooms symbolize this concept of waiting. In other words, the so-called “performance ability within contemporary arts” requires “the timing logic of plants” and a curatorial practice that is not aggressive. In addition, because of the emphasis on creative inspiration, the participating artists were able to engage in organic dialogues and work closely together.

“Nomadicity,” Isonomia, and Free Belonging

Through the abovementioned “horizontal,” symbiotic co-creation mechanism, the Air Plant exhibition avoids the defects of the commonly-used “vertical” mechanism of “theory–practice” and allows us to see an instance of idea-generation and putting-idea-into-practice happening simultaneously (i.e., “equal governance”) rather than the former happening before the latter. By pairing the spirit of equal governance with the concept of isonomia proposed by Kojin Karatani in his book The Origin of Philosophy (where he studied Ionian political philosophies), an interesting result can be obtained. Isonomia refers to a political ideology that completely removes the “distinctions” in a society including clans, tribes, cities–states, and men–women. In addition, isonomia attaches importance to free flow and joint participation. In his book, Karatani explains that the reason why Ionian cities in the past could achieve such equality was because the nomadic society was able to abandon all traditional tribal privileges, enabling it to create new political relations and a joint community structure without a dominant political power. In the contemporary era, the art creation community that most closely practices this ideology may be playwright and director Daizo Sakurai’s “tent theater.” In dramas created by this theater, Sakurai tries to eliminate all professional and class distinctions and encourages everyone to work together in all activities (e.g., cooking rice) to form a “community-level self-reflection field.”

The reason why isonomia is introduced at the end of this article is to point out the room for improvement, if any, for the Air Plant exhibition: Although the exhibition offers a clear and inspirational theoretical concept and the implementation of such concept is impeccable, the exhibition does not go beyond the boundary of “exhibition is a temporary community platform where participants gather” to enable equal dialogues and for the community created by the artists to spread. In other words, although the Air Plant exhibition outlines the possible existence of a nurturing field of art creations, questions such as how to allow this concept to not exist only temporarily (i.e., how to go beyond the Air Plant exhibition), how to not rely too much on the local strength of art institutions (i.e., how to avoid “institutionalized identity”), how to let curatorial practice facilitate the spread and continuation of speech, thoughts, actions, and exhibitions, and how to realize “free-belonging,” which is indispensable to the imagination of a community, without diminishing the potential and nomadicity of artists?

Although the answers to these questions remain to be answered, I hope to leave them to the Air Plant exhibition to be answered in the near future. I hope that the exhibition can facilitate more curatorial research and practice, promote “connected” art creation dialogues, and use its strength as both visual arts and performing arts to put all related theories into practice.

About Sheng-Hung Wang:

Sheng-Hung Wang is an art critic and an adjunct lecturer of the School of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. For many years, he has written reviews for various domestic and foreign contemporary art exhibitions and observed Taiwan’s creative trends, current school situations, and contemporary art environment. In addition, he participates in and pays attention to contemporary art review-related writing and discussions in Taiwan.