Inaugural works of Small Worldthe latest biennial in Taipei, which closed on Sunday, the provocative exhibits are as remarkable as they ever get: first, a section featuring pioneering Palestinian digital artist Samia Halaby, then a wall of Hsu Tsun-Hsu’s photographs documenting Taiwan’s passage through the military dictatorship. To the prosperous democracy in the 1990s.
Palestinian curator Reem Shadid from Beirut, Taiwanese curator Freya Chou from Hong Kong and Taiwanese American writer Brian Kuan Wood from New York. Small World It applies insights from very small but conflicted places, like Taiwan and Palestine, to big questions about humanity, security, and community.
“After that there was no structural change [Hamas’s attack on Israel on] On October 7, some passionate statements during the opening days, and heated debate,” says Kuan Wood. “The original show stands; we’re the same curators as before. We were worried, because Reem is Palestinian, about the kind of attention it might generate,” but the subsequent local reaction was “wonderful it’s been”.
“When we started planning, the world changed,” says Jun-Jieh Wang, director of the government-backed Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). It has hosted the Taipei Biennial since 1992, and is the oldest in East Asia and one of the first in the entire Asian region. TFAM celebrated its 40th year last year, and the new wing being expanded in its original premises is nearing completion.
The biennial, Wang says, “is apolitical on the surface, about how the pandemic has changed life on a global scale. There are different kinds of politics: some are contemplative, not critical.”
Hsu Tsun-Hsu, The More We Join: The Annual Fall Labor Fight (1996) Courtesy of the artist
Hsu’s historic photos cover a deep green wall, a veiled reference to Taiwanese politics — the shortened green of the blue of the re-elected opposition Progressive Party of Taiwan — which organizers will neither confirm nor deny.
“People would like to forget [the pandemic], it was very painful, but we are seriously overdue for a self-examination. With the understandable desire for ‘normal’, we still have something to learn,” suggests Kuan Wood.
Time for transparency
Without a clear contemplation of sickness, blockages and loss, Small World It raises the need for openness, transparency and honesty in order to move forward. In an era of “extreme confrontation,” the show “deflects the geopolitical in a sense, making it mundane, private, and painful,” says Kuan Wood. “Amid this divisive political climate, we find a place of complexity.” Covid “tore apart the social fabric, but brought the world together in a strange lockdown, in a fight to stay alive”. Just as Covid particles can greatly deplete a host’s body after an acute infection, the whole world seems to have a long political Covid. The pre-pandemic rifts have only widened since then. However, our shared trauma could provide a starting point for empathy.
Atomization among the closeness took shape in the popular favorite The Wall: Asian (Un)Real Estate Project (2023) By Aditya Novali, miniaturizing the giant apartment towers of Asia and depicting the madness of being locked inside them, although he planned the piece before the pandemic. The Indonesian artist’s background in architecture and shadow puppetry showcases the theatricality of unique tableaus in each small room, from the silly to the sweet to the kinky.
Nadeem Abbas Pilgrim in the microworld (2023) Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Next, in the last room on the first floor, the installation of Nadim Abbas from Hong Kong Pilgrim in the microworld (2023) inverts the diorama with a room-sized sandbox microchip, Taiwan’s symbol and supposed security shield. Rendered in steel and sand and reconfigured every day, they turn this sense of permanence, security and even the conditions we know upside down.
The surrounding walls reinforce – or reinforce – Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology (1958-65). The ghostly images of destroyed Nazi bunkers along the coast of his native France, some embedded in sand dunes, highlight the durability of regimes and the futility of European defensive identities. Only the breathtaking ocean endures.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology (1958-1965) Courtesy of Sophie Virilio and Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Jen Liu dives beneath the waves in fantastical allegory The land at the bottom of the sea (2023), is the final installment of his long-running film series Pink Slime Caesar Shift. The disappearance of South China’s female migrant labor entrepreneurs literally becomes a liquidation, becoming underwater creatures and finding some beauty and hope against a world where their political or financial survival was always so difficult.
Philosophical dilemmas
Kuan Wood suggests that the dominant “American influence in the world is in the water, in the air. You see the peculiarity of this distribution in many parts of the world, the earth’s doom scrollers. It is becoming more and more common, embedded in technology. There are so many divisive conditions around the world that share political failure. Attention, not agency or belief, is needed in this shortcoming of traditional politics: the toxicity of Covid.”
the video What is your favorite primitive? takes fantasy in a convincingly cynical direction, as Taipei-based Taiwanese artist Li Yi-Fan puts his absurd digitally rendered characters through violent confrontations and philosophical dilemmas. Just as screens can reveal human cruelty through anonymity, a God-like Li turns his cursor into a kind of vengeful empowerment.
A whole hall fills Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork Not exactly B flat (2017), with columns and walls swelling and collapsing like the lungs of a giant or the reversal of time. The semi-dark and cold space is eerie as it whistles, both comforting and unsettling. Sound and music receive special attention Small World, with inclusions like DJ Sniff and some local indie labels, in part in recognition that musicians and other performers were the creators who struggled most during the pandemic, Kuan says. With more mainstream artists, “Musicians are out of place, and they are not respected in the institutions”.
Migrant musicians are doubly marginalized, and January’s interaction led by Julian Abraham “Togar” and Wok the Rock showcased Indonesian musicians in Taiwan. “There’s a vibrant migrant music community here, like an underground volcano about to explode,” says Kuan Wood, blending Indonesia’s rich musical history with Taiwan’s.
Hong Kong pop star Karen Mok, also of Persian heritage, provides audio for the sound installation Watershed (2023) by Berlin-based Iranian artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian. In TFAM’s garden atrium, effervescent balls on walkers rock out to Mok’s 1999 ballad. Suddenly, he wants to pay tribute to the fact that carers often lose their sense of self, in the role of the unknown. The song mingles with the low-buzz plane flying over or near Songshan Airport, allowing a wider world, even to those isolated by the caretakers or the pandemic, who are currently trapped in smaller confines. Or that better times may follow today’s upheavals.
