Whose Exhibition is This?
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Koki Tanaka, Relocate The Public Library In Taipei By Borrowing One Love Story At A Time. Leave The Book In The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2009)
Taiwan’s contemporary art scene has been tied up in knots trying to reorient exhibition-goers out of passivity and into active engagement. It has proven a complicated transition, but 12 artist groups have come together to work their way back to the start of the puzzle, posing the fundamental question that lies behind any show: ‘Whose Exhibition is This?’
In fact, ‘Whose Exhibition…’ tries its hardest not to be an exhibition, but a form of institutional critique. As an established form of artistic inquiry into the nature and limitations of art institutions, the institiutional critique posited here tests the neutrality of art by calling into question the limitations of a broad range of institutions such as libraries, universities and the very museum it is held in. Overall Curator Chang Fang-Wei teases out the subjectivity of ‘This’ exhibition through a series of artistic protests, forums and installation works. ‘Whose Exhibition…’ refuses definition from the outset, reflecting the very question of its existence out to its audience, appearing as whatever they think they see.
Many works rely on mass participation, such as Koki Tanaka’s Relocate The Public Library In Taipei By Borrowing One Love Story At A Time. Leave The Book In The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2009), which comprises a room that looks suspiciously like a partially full library. As the title suggests, bookshelves invite people to contribute romance novels they borrowed from the city library. Tanaka explained: ‘I’m thinking of how to crush the normal system. There is the possibility in each system for its loopholes to reveal how it can malfunction. If millions of people are mobilized to borrow books from the library, then the library may have to close down.’ He expressed his disappointment, however, when the proposed library movement only saw contributions from less than 100 people.
Since first emerging five decades ago, institutional critique has come under increased scrutiny, often accused of becoming institutionalized itself. Indeed, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum has also attempted to contain and regulate some exhibitions, most notably Tanaka’s project. Another was critic and curator Manray Hsu’s project The Museum In My Camera (2009), which invited submissions of prohibited photographs people had taken of past or present museum exhibits, showing the controversial institutional regulations against photographing exhibits, and that these rules had been broken.
Raqs Media Collective, Please Do Not Touch This Work Of Art (2006)
Please Do Not Touch This Work Of Art (2006) by Raqs Media Collective explores the representation of the eponymous sentence by scrambling its word order in several different combinations, one of which instructs us ‘Do Not Please. Touch The Art Of Work.’ The exhibit also comes with takeaway postcards.
25 Seconds in Taipei (2008–9), comes from Angelika Middendorf and Andreas Schimanski’s 2008 residency in Taipei’s Artist Village, during which they interviewed 41 people from a broad range of artistic disciplines and backgrounds. Each interviewee was asked to take 25 seconds to describe aspirations and thoughts regarding their own work. The subjects explain their individual satisfactions and frustrations derived, yet, when placed in the context of the exhibition, their words take on new meaning, speaking not for themselves as individuals but the social consciousness toward the state of art in Taiwan as a whole.
Photographer Yeh Wei-Li attempts a similar goal with NCU Project (2005–9), a photoseries documenting her time as resident artist at a Taiwan university in 2005, where she collaborated with ten students to explore her psychological introversion, serving to indict the university as an ivory tower, disconnected from society. It is left unclear how the students contributed to the work. Yeh’s self portraits develop an introspective narrative of the friction between her sense of identity and an independently self-sufficient environment.
Taipei society itself has proven surprisingly enthusiastic when it comes to popular movements; democratization has spread rapidly since the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. For the younger generation, the city has begun to witness a trend where art is the new politics.
‘Whose Exhibition…’ has, however, proven more alluring for the art clique than for the general public. It may be argued that this lack of participation proves the exhibition’s point, highlighting the lack of popular awareness towards the twisted paradoxes that are presented. On the other hand, ‘Whose Exhibition…’ was formed on the premise of being a movement fueled by widespread enthusiasm and has thus hobbled itself, remaining inaccessible to those without a background in art. Such a disconnection has restricted the project to an ivory tower of its own, destined for a limited minority with a dedicated intellectual investment in the art world, as few others have found themselves excited to ask the question of ‘Whose Exhibition is This?’
James Donald
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