In the past two decades, the Taiwan society and environment have undergone drastic changes: Including the rapid evolution of information transmission; the appearance of self-made media; the popularization of AI technology; and the near replacement of the written word by audiovisual streaming. Each one of these developments has had an impact on our ways of understanding the everyday life. The network of transnational labor exchange systems has brought an atmosphere of southern exoticism to Taiwan, which in turn has impacted the formerly homogenous local culture. Furthermore, as the political geography of Taiwan has observably tilted towards localization, contradictions and conflicts between Taiwan and China have grown all the more intense. When such a crisis becomes part of people’s life, it further spurs thinking about Taiwan in terms of its subjectivity. Against such a background, attention to various local issues has increased as well. Amidst the collision of multiple domains, art has come into contact and integrated with
traditionally disparate fields, such as archaeology/modernology (the study of modern social phenomena), genealogy, topology, anthropology, geomancy, and many more. Today, “being interdisciplinary” has become an unavoidable trend. In addition, the idea of “the environment” has evolved conceptually from being directly associated with “environmental protection” into a wider consciousness encompassing ecology, non-human life forms, indigenous peoples, and all existences on earth. This not only enriches the implication of “environment,” but also unveils an unprecedented alternative worldview. On the other hand, the institutionalization of art has produced a beneficial effect shared by all, as effective capital investment has created a wider platform for artists of younger generations to demonstrate their works. Nevertheless, the
widespread “capitalization” of artistic thoughts has also resulted in the gradual erosion of creative energies previously accumulated in the margins. Also, the increasingly maturing academic scene has engendered both positive and negative outcomes: On the one hand, it has constructed an epistemological structure for art; on the other hand, however, guiding qualities of discipline and systemization central to “epistemology” have diluted the physicality of art that once thrived and prevailed in the 80s and 90s. Instead, art as a “project-based” and “knowledge-oriented” form of presentation has surfaced as the present mainstream.

Throughout all the editions of the Taishin Arts Award, the winners and their award-winning works have, to a certain degree, reflected and responded to these developments of Taiwanese contemporary art over the past twenty years. To curatorially consider and respond to these changes has proven to be an enormous and a herculean task. Therefore, in dealing with this fundamental motif—the changes and developments of Taiwanese contemporary art over the past two decades—which is almost impossible to represent comprehensively, the curating of this exhibition renounces the usual chronological approach that represents history with a fragmented timeline, and also avoids the common routes of “thematic exhibition,” “exhibition of classics,” and “exhibition of masters.” Instead, the curating concentrates on the present of the award winners and how they envision the future, with a special emphasis on a seemingly age-old but continually relevant matter of “the future.”

Twenty years ago, the world had just ushered in the millennium, before which waves of apocalyptic theories and notions swept the globe, with many believing that the world would be soon destroyed and reborn from its ashes. Twenty years later, to once again put forward the term “future” seems to be an ingenious response. In other words, the curating does not aim to add to the popular contemporary discourses of futurology, but to firstly respond to our current situation, particularly when the military pressure from China has grown imminent during the curating and preparation of this exhibition, and our envisioning of the future has been informed by a sense of complicatedness (if not a sense of destruction). This “future” is not utopian in nature, and surely cannot be explained away by the generalizing term of “imagination.” It is rather a future that is inscribed into the characteristic instinct of life. The future must be created in an active way; and it
is particularly so when the present reality has become growingly suffocating. As for the approach to create said future, one must rely on “dialogue.” Furthermore, dialogue is also a question posed to the art field today, which has been moving towards individualization and separation. Consequently, establishing a site of dialogue, temporary though it may be, is one of the curatorial axes of this exhibition; others include different tasks: continuing the artists’ self-dialogues; creating thematic dialogues between the previous award-winners and the curator; facilitating broader connection between visual and performing artists to engender new collaborations; and bringing in the creative thoughts and perspectives of new-generation artists. All of these have constituted the curatorial framework of this exhibition.

Looking closer, Jao Chia-En continues his previous attention to Southeast Asian migrant workers, and constructs an installation that transforms the exhibition space into a site for learning Indonesian. Chen I-Hsuen also continues the creative thread in Commissioned, and further collaborates with Horse Dance Theatre and its general director, Su Wei-Chia, to once again interpret how instructions and the body become interrelated, while discussing the dominance/subordinance dynamic between arts creators and freelancers, along with the blurred boundary therein.

Tang Huang-Chen carries on with the core of her artistic practice—“drift and search,” which underlines the Ulyssean journey starting with I Go Traveling V—A Postcard with Scenery, and the dialogues in Completed-in-Forgetting Old Lady in recent years, to arrive at the artist’s projection and quest of the self. Her latest work, adopting the form of live performance, seeks to initiate a dialogue about life between herself and the audience. In addition, TheCube Project Space starts with their award-winning project, Altering Nativism—Sound Culture in Post-war Taiwan, and combines it with the art space’s subsequent projects, including Talking Drums Radio and Sound Meridians, to showcase more comprehensively their strong interest in the sound culture. Chou Yu-Cheng exhibits new two-dimensional works, but these images are still informed by
his individualistic inclination towards crisp refinement and reserved critiques observable in his previous works.

Additionally, in cases of dialogues between artists, Wu Mali has demonstrated persistent concern with issues related to environmental politics starting from Art as Environment: A Cultural Action in Tropic of Cancer to Art as Environment—A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Stream. Gong Jow- Jiun’s curating of the Mattauw Earth 2022 —One Thousand Names of Zeng-wen River features the river basin of Zeng-wen River as its primary creative site, and incorporates art initiatives to engage in deep cultivation of the land and explore policies of river governance, further developing the research-based curatorial practice and the approach of “puânn-nuá” (literally meaning “socializing”) realized through being stationed at and studying specific places for a long period of time, a practice which Gong has developed and accumulated since Kau-Puê, Mutual Companionship in Near Future. Therefore, Plum Creek and Zeng-wen River form an
alternative dialogue of “two river basins” in this exhibition. Aside from archives and documents, the exhibition also features Chen Po-I’s Monument series, which shows astonishing images that expose multiple problems in relation to the policy of modern concrete river improvement. Moreover, one of the key focuses of the exhibition is “off-site dialogue”: In Chiayi’s Tapu, where the “two river basins” intersect, the program of “The Parliament of Things” and the system of guides have relaunched discussions about the diversification of rivers and the environment, species, and ecology, as well as opening up more policy-oriented discussions through artistic initiatives. Tu Wei-Cheng continues The Urban Image Treasure Chest Display and other series, through which he conducts dialogues with other finalists and winners of the Taishin Arts Award. Meanwhile, Peng Hung-Chih’s award winning work, Beware of GOD, discusses issues of
contemporary people’s religious belief by looking at more than six hundred abandoned religious statues. In this exhibition, he still implicitly follows a similarly supernatural route involving the subject of deities and religious belief, and collaborates with Gang-a Tsui Theater to integrate visual art with theatrical elements to portray stories of the mountain city—Keelung, where the artist currently resides. This collaboration also demonstrates a remarkable cross-field dialogue for this curatorial endeavor. Tsui Kuang-Yu combines the current system of accounting and financial statements to alternatively appraise the social functions and core values of art venues in Taiwan. In terms of inter-generational dialogue, a satellite exhibition has been organized and presented at Nanhai Gallery, which was once a landmark of Taiwan’s alternative spaces and has been closed for a long time. The satellite exhibition is themed around urban development, market memory, archaeology, and modernology. Through mirroring the main exhibition and establishing a forum
for disucssion, the satellite exhibition weaves a dialogue between the award winners and artists of a younger generation.

“After twenty years, will you still be here?” is a question I posed to myself, who is also an artist and a former Taishin Arts Award winner, about whether that pure artistic fervor from the past would continue, or dwindle due to work overload. Bypassing the loneliness and oblivion of the artistic process, how can we re-launch dialogues? Is the future a realm of the unknown that is filled with more energy? Perhaps we would gain some insights into these questions when visiting the 20th anniversary exhibition of the Taishin Arts Award.