This year could prove to be a watershed for Taiwan’s art scene, with established artists using exhibitions as platforms to publicly criticize the art industry’s practices.
Installation artist and painter Tsong Pu (莊普) fired the first salvo in May with Art From Underground (地下藝術), an exhibit that drew attention to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s (TFAM) practice of relegating contemporary Taiwanese artists to its basement space. A few weeks ago, Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁), a video artist who is currently showing a retrospective, On the Empire’s Borders (在帝國的邊界上), in the same space, said that he would never again exhibit at TFAM for similar reasons.
Now, Shi Jin-hua (石晉華) is taking aim at the commercialism of the art industry with A Trilogy of Contemporary Art Alchemy (當代藝術煉金術三部曲), an astonishingly risky exhibit at Nou Gallery (新畫廊) presented in three parts: Episode One: Cost of Concept (首部曲:觀念的代價), Episode Two: Art Earning (二部曲 藝術所得) and Episode Three: Cover Project (三部曲 封面計畫).
The three sections are being sold together as one work of art, and Shi produced five editions of A Trilogy of Contemporary Art Alchemy.
Each segment of A Trilogy serves as a kind of unfolding conceptual drama with the artist playing David to the art industry’s Goliath. The exhibit calls into question the professionalism of art magazines, the gallery system and by extension the art industry itself.
Shi made a deal with collector and ArtCo (今藝術) publisher Chien Hsiu-chih (簡秀枝) to trade the first edition of A Trilogy for a cover story, which appeared in July. It is the kind of exchange that might raise eyebrows in London or
New York, but seems par for the course in Taipei.
“It’s sort of an open secret, an unofficial rule in the arts industry, that all the covers, all the articles you read — everything in the magazines — can be bought. This includes Artists Magazine (藝術家雜誌), Cans [Arts Magazine] and Contemporary Art News Magazine (當代藝術新聞),” said Nou Gallery’s (新畫廊) Sophie Huang (黃鉉心).
“Many of these magazines don’t have any editors on their staff, they only have sales people,” Huang added.
Those who read the ArtCo story, however, would have learned that Shi collaborated with Chien to draw attention to such ethically questionable practices. The 14-page spread — including a cover story, feature and editorial — sits behind framed glass and forms part of Episode Three: Cover Project.
Huang said that although ArtCo’s “covers could be bought” in the past, Shi’s cover story was published to draw attention to the practice, and to “cleanse the magazine” — a kind of baptism absolving it of its former publishing sins.
At the exhibition, I wandered over to Episode One. The photograph on display shows a painting sold at a group exhibition in Kaohsiung in December 2008, held in response to the global financial meltdown. The gallery invited 116 artists to exhibit work with a price tag of under NT$30,000. As Shi didn’t have anything in that price range, he submitted a one-quarter section of Walking Pencil#24 (走筆#24), a painting originally valued at NT$120,000.
The photograph’s context illustrates the effect market forces have on the value of art and the role perception plays in that process. It also shows that high prices can become a Faustian pact for artists, who are inevitably pressured by galleries and collectors who have already bought their work into producing works of ever-higher value.
It’s easy, then, to imagine the annoyance that collectors of Shi’s art must have felt when they found out that he sold another work, 50 Cents (伍毛 — a NT$1 coin cut in half and mounted on a board), for NT$0.50. This topic is examined in Episode Two.
As there are no NT$0.50 coins in circulation in Taiwan, Shi and InArt Gallery (加力畫廊), the gallery that sold the work, had to find an alternative method of payment.
They settled on bread. A video shows a hilarious verbal exchange (Huang said it was scripted) between the artist and the owner of InArt — the complicated and absurd set of calculations becomes an emblem of the hidden costs of dealing with galleries. In the end, the video suggests, artists are left with only a few crumbs, as is shown in Breadcrumbs (麵包屑), a photo of the tiny morsels of bread that Shi received for his efforts.
There is much else in this exhibit worth pondering and Nou Gallery deserves credit for its willingness to display works that so obviously criticize the system it is apart of. Of course, the gallery might benefit from the exhibit’s sale because curator Paul Chen (陳宏星) doubled A Trilogy’s original asking price — an intentional jab at the speculative nature of the art market.
“Collectors aren’t that comfortable [with the exhibit] ... They think the market will not accept it and it might collapse the value of his [other] work,” Chen said.
I asked Chen if he thought that the gathering storm of public criticism exemplified by Shi, Tsong Pu and Chen Chieh-ren would spur changes in Taiwan’s art scene.
“No way. Artists exert very little influence over the art market — especially compared to galleries, or auction houses, or collectors,” he said.
Shi will deliver a lecture entitled Missing Masters (消失的大師) as part
of Taipei Biennial on Sept. 18 from
2pm to 4pm. For more details visit
www.taipeibiennial.org.
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