The playful and interactive Taipei Biennial 2000 challenges the function of a museum, the traditional idea of art, and is an entertaining and provocative way to spend an afternoon. Here is a short description of each of the art works.
Before entering the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, you will see huge black bands painted on the museum's overhang. Silent Foundation by Sidney Stucki appears like techno codes or abstract art, while his work as both gallery artist and techno DJ blurs the line between art and music.
Inside the museum, the foyer's soft rosy glow is emitted by the traditional Chinese floral and phoenix pattern floor painting by Michael Ming-Hong Lin.
Visitors are invited to walk on the enormous painting and can sit on one of the floral pillows.
Lin's painting transforms the sterile museum space into a domestic and cozy place of hospitality.
Look up and you will see Jun'ya Yamaide's big blue balloons that float like clouds. Yamaide asked local people to write one of the Chinese characters from their names, which he then attached to the balloons and released to the sky.
Surasi Kusolwong's Everything NT$20 contained 1,000 items from Thailand, such as pillows, T-shirts, toys and plastic goods that were offered for sale on the opening night. The sale became a feeding frenzy with people hauling several bags of goods out of the museum within minutes. The items will continue to circulate outside of the museum, bringing art into daily life.
Wang Youshen provides the tools for you to be an artist. He invites direct action by allowing visitors to print photos in his darkroom. While Kendell Geers' Shooting Gallery shows us the entertainment value of extreme violence.
Follow the smell of Chinese cooking and you will enter Pascale Marthine Tayou's walk-in egg-shaped structure that connects his native Cameroon culture with Taiwanese culture through the shared experience of eating.
Take a few moments to contemplate the sacred with Lee Mingwei's shrines that display participants' personal objects. Next are Uri Tzaig and Kim Sooja's video installations. Tzaig alters the rules of the game, while Kim uses the Korean bundle of clothing as her metaphor for life.
You will then be bedazzled by Liza Lou's glittering and beaded Back Yard. A suburban barbecue is transformed into a meticulous shimmery meditation on the passage of time and labor.
Gimhongsok's vibrating LOVE project allows you to ponder the absurdity of love, while Meshac Gaba's interactive puzzles let you think about the Game of Democracy. Wang Du's cluttered installation of toy missiles and newspapers will help you contemplate the strategy of war games.
Artists Claude Closky and Daniel Pflumm show how consumerism affects our lives and how brand names are closely related to art. Closky's video projection of advertising superlatives will jump out at you and Pflumm's corporate logos seem like abstract art.
At the opening, former Geisha girl and musician Hanayo performed her eclectic blend of avant-garde music. On a calmer note, she displays her touching photos of intimate moments with her young daughter.
Combining art, design and psychology, Tobias Rehberger and Wang Junjieh both design total environments for better living. Rehberger's home furnishings are designed according to his friend's suggestions while Wang's Microbiology Association is a fictitious R&D institute to improve life in the future.
Navin Rawanchaikul invites you to sit on a rattan mat, watch his video and eat some watermelon seeds. If you are lucky, your package of seeds may contain a winning ticket for a free mat. Winners are encouraged to document how they use the mat and send photos and letters to Navin.
Stick a banana between your legs or use your head to hold a bucket and a ball against the wall. Hold this position for one minute and you have just become a one-minute sculpture by Erwin Wurm.
Kyupi Kyupi's video projection transports you into a strange world that combines cabaret and burlesque theater, sci-fi pizza delivery girls, and fish-head singers.
Henrik Plenge Jakobsen's Peephole challenges our sense of perception. Peep into the CD player for a new look on reality. Also challenging our sense of perception are Hung Tunglu's large lenticular panels of Japanese cartoon figures juxtaposed on historical Chinese sites.
Jonathan Monk's slide projection In search of Gregory Peck captures the era of the 1950s. Monk reshot photos that his musician father had taken when he was on the road in America.
Mark Lewis' single reel film will mesmerize you by the different senses of time he gives you in four minutes. Michel Majerus focuses on making connections between the architectural space, painting and sculpture and combines visual signs from mass media and fine arts.
Loris Cecchini's large light boxes and soft rubber bicycle and bench will alter your sense of reality.
For the voyeuristic viewer, Shulea Cheang's casting for her upcoming porno flick and Hsia-fei Chang's video of scantily clad babes will satisfy your desires.
Candice Breitz's video loops of duets sung by Whitney Houston and Karen Carpenter to themselves hint at narcissism, while confusing the pronouns "I," "me" and "you" imply psychological disorder and problems with identity.
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
Not long into Mistress Dispeller, a quietly jaw-dropping new documentary from director Elizabeth Lo, the film’s eponymous character lays out her thesis for ridding marriages of troublesome extra lovers. “When someone becomes a mistress,” she says, “it’s because they feel they don’t deserve complete love. She’s the one who needs our help the most.” Wang Zhenxi, a mistress dispeller based in north-central China’s Henan province, is one of a growing number of self-styled professionals who earn a living by intervening in people’s marriages — to “dispel” them of intruders. “I was looking for a love story set in China,” says Lo,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
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