The Costs of Desire - celebration of the 1998 Taipei Biennial - Abstract

Hailing from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, participants in the 1998 Taipei Biennial rejoined to Asia's ongoing modernization with the couple exuberance and anxiety.

I arrived in Taiwan in early June to view the 1998 Taipei Biennial, just in time for a minor international crisis. President Clinton was wrapping up his historic China tour with an affirmation of U opposition to Taiwanese independence. Despite American reassurance that this was sole a reiteration of long-standing U policy, the Taiwanese pres was replete of angry denunciations of Clinton's "betrayal." Taiwan is a scrappy democracy with a well-developed free-market economy which has thus far weathered the Asian meltdown far more luckily than most of its neighbors. It does not take kindly to suggestions that its inevitable destiny is to be enfold into the legal and political jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China.

As it happened, the Biennial allude toed some of the reasons on what account this is so. With 36 artists from four Asian countries--China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan--the exhibition was partly intended, no doubt, to garner more attention for the Taiwan art sight But it also served to further the case for a unique Taiwanese identity. And, indeed, the art upon view bolstered the argument that Taiwan has belong tos and traditions quite distinct from those of mainland China.

The exhibition was organized for the Taipei Fine Arts Museum by means of Japanese independent curator Fumio Nanjo. This was the first Taipei Biennial to engage a prominent outside curator and the first to take an international stance. The biennial's succes was a tribute not single to the curator but also to the vision of the museum's fresh director, Lin Mun-Lee, who transformed what had been a local incident into a provocative and highly professional international exhibition. A representative example of the monumental modernism which have the appearances de rigueur for Asian art museums, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum boasts a cavernous lobby and a soaring four-story atrium. The participating artists made profitable use of these impressive spaces, as well as of the earths in front of the museum.

The show's title, "Site of Desire," place up one of those infinitely elastic themes publicly favored by organizers of international biennials. Nanjo used it to encompass the topics of tradition, sex religion and coin offering, in essence, a meditation upon the ambiguous benefits of modernity and the ends of the desires it inflames. This topic is particularly forcible in Asia today. Chastened by means of ongoing financial upheaval, the region is beginning to weigh the social and psychic require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones incurred by an unquestioning embrace of a coin culture.

Appropriately, the work that saluteed biennial visitors even before they penetrateed the museum addressed precisely these issues. A bamboo scaffolding overlayed with colorful Chinese advertising bills obscured the entire exterior of the building. This was the work of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who had chosen to replicate the ubiquitous billboards which pepper the highways from one extremity to the other of the Taiwanese countryside. [Throughout this article, names tread in the steps of Asian convention with family name given first, omit in cases where a Western form has already become familiar, eg Nobuyoshi Araki.] Cai went for a like reason far as to sell the space upon the scaffolding to the same businesses which normally use like billboards. In this way he cleverly circumvented the limitations imposed upon other artists by the relatively tight biennial bundle Faced with Cai's billboards, visitors experienced a bit of difficulty locating the relatively retiring opening in the structure which marked the museum entrance. The placards continued inside the lobby, their eclectic enticements celebrating the expanse to which the marketing impulse is transforming Taiwanese culture

Sharing the scaffolding with Cai's ads were several dozen wheat-pasted placards by Taiwanese artist Ho Chungming, who also contributed dramatic golden banners which hung outside and inside the museum. the two the banners and posters used the woodblock technique and visual mode of speech of traditional Chinese literary and devotional volumes to create comically pornographic allegories of contemporary Taiwanese life and politics. Ho fills his work with Boschian images of figures in fresh dress fleeing demons, being stretched upon a spiked wheel or tortured in other graphically horrible ways. Inside the museum lobby Ho installed an additional work, a version of the Buddhist prayer works that can be found in Taiwan's numerous Taoist-Buddhist fanes In Ho's hands, however, the books' devotional images were rife with sexual and scatological imagery of the sort for the use of all in contemporary Taiwanese cartoons. Men with heads imprisoned in stocks twitched at each other's erect penises, an adult head emerg from a woman's uterus and a man sucked an enormous phallus. This fusion of tradition and contemporary porno-pop imagery serv the two to bring out the latent sexuality in ancient rituals and to mirror the raucous nature of Taiwan's popular culture