Supported by the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, the Taiwan Contemporary Art Award’s “Taishin Arts Award” recently celebrated its eleventh year. The review committee selected fifteen finalists, including ten performing art works and five works by visual artists.
Projects based on social practices of exhibition planners or artists are particularly prominent among the visual arts finalists. This reflects a considerable movement in local art. In recent years, Taiwan’s environmental art has become highly concerned with curatorial issues through a diverse range of experimental spirit. The five finalists’ focus covers varied angles of curatorial practice, including the humanities, society, history, and geography. The development of socio-environmental art also seems to echo the convergence into a new selection process that emphasizes artistic creation, exploration, response, and concern about the core values of social reality.
“Plum Tree Creek Environmental Art Action” is a project presented by artist Wu Mali and Bamboo Curtain Studio. Local residents, businesses, schools, literary scholars, historians, urban planning professionals and ecological resource specialists are invited to explore local environmental issues and partake in the community action. Other works include “Searching for Wu Yaozhong’s Paintings: Stories of a Realist Artist” by Wu Yaozhong (1937-1987), one of the most prominent realists artists in Post-War Taiwan. The literary project brings together and expanded from nearly 130 artworks that were once scattered around the world, some previously unseen and kept by Wu's relatives. The exhibition combines a series of interviews and a collection of publications, exhibitions, and articles, among various forms of cultural action.
“Chin-pao Chen’s ‘Circumgyration’ Solo Photography Exhibition” focuses on daily life and reality. The project is inspired by fragments of both borrowed and personal memories. The artist then re-stages the scene through various locations, characters, gestures and other necessary properties. Curated by Zheng Huihua, the “Re-envisioning Society” series is a sequence of solo artist exhibitions. The project reflects the characteristics of contemporary life, individual and collective life experience and its transformation. “Re-envisioning Society” reconstructs the “vision” of the contemporary society we live in. The “Tunghai University Center for the Arts Hospital Exhibition,” organized by the campus Art History Center, demonstrates functionality, spatial identity, and environmental context. Through dissociation and reconstruction, the curatorial team crucially transcended the traditional art space of the “wall.”
In the beginning of May, a jury composed of both national and international art experts will select the recipients of the Taishin Arts Awards (the Performing Arts Award and the Visual Arts Award) and The Jury’s Special Award from the fifteen finalists. The “Eleventh Taishin Arts Award Exhibition” will be held at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art from April 27th, 2013-June 23rd, 2013. A series of educational seminars and workshops will also be presented in conjunction with the exhibition. Related activities will be announced on the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture website. Everyone is encouraged to take part in the exhibition and share the finalists’ artistic achievements.