The tenth Taipei Biennial (September 10, 2016, to February 5, 2017) is under way. Organized around the theme “Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future,” this time the biennial features over eighty artists and teams of artists. In addition to the main exhibit at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the organizers have prepared an exhibit of archival materials looking at the twenty-year history of the Taipei Biennial, inviting examination of the present as well as speculation on the future. Guest curator Corinne Diserens planned the exhibit around the keyword “performing” in an effort to look ahead to the future through gestures of “performing” in the present.

Gestures of the Present to Open 'Genealogies' of the Future

More and more people seem to be expressing fatigue over biennales. People can hardly bring themselves to see a biennale—and when they do, they are left with mere fragmentary impressions and physical weariness, they say. There are some one hundred international modern arts biennales around the world. That means a biennale is held every week somewhere. The number of biennales per se is not important. If every exhibit justifies itself, it doesn’t matter how many there are. People had high expectations for biennales from the early 1990s, when their numbers began exploding, through the 2000s. They anticipated the emergence of a new discourse in contemporary arts as the world went through a series of momentous changes such as the end of the Cold War, the decline of modernism, the advances of the Third World, and postcolonialism. During this period, many Third World countries including Korea were given the opportunity to host biennales. But they fell short of producing any creative discourse, and many biennales ended up just repeating themselves every two years. It seems that an ingemination of incoherence led to the general sense of fatigue that escalated in the 2010s.

The three major biennales held in Korea this year appeared to have given up on presenting any specific discourse. The Gwangju Biennale presented an obscure, imaginary world called “The Eighth Climate,” and asked the question “What does art do?” The exhibited artworks showed that art was actually doing a lot of things. Many of the works at Mediacity Seoul were of high quality, but their voices ended up converging into some alien language: “Neriri Kiruru Harara.” The Busan Biennale was themed “Hybridizing Earth, discussing multitude.” As there is no such thing as purebred or standalone contemporary art, the Busan Biennale after all had a generous denotation that accepts all kinds of artistic possibilities. When a biennale fails to lay out a specific thesis, it generally leaves only spectacle and an oversupply of information. In this respect, we need to think about the word “archive,” which is commonly used in the art world these days. An exhibit in the form of an archive can stimulate the memory and imagination of the audience, as it is much more open compared with traditional forms of exhibits. But if it stems from a complacent attitude, it becomes nothing but a bunch of unorganized documents. It becomes nothing more than an oversupply of information. And the oversupply gushes out a paradoxical spectacle that overwhelms the audience. To remove a dominant and unilateral narrative is to give some breathing space for heterogeneous and multi-layered narratives, not to show off the absence of a narrative.

Left) James T. Hong, ‘Nietzsche Reincarnated as a Chinese Woman and their Shared Lives’, 2016, Performance, Video.
Right) Yeh Wei-Li&Yeh Shih-Chiang, ‘Hammer, YSC Shuinandong Residence’, 2016, Lightjet print, Acrylic face mount, Reclaimed wood frame, 124×154×5 cm.

Archives and exhibits, the biennale’s dual function

The Taipei Biennial, which began in 1996, has entered its tenth year. To commemorate the meaningful number, the biennale organizers decided to try something new. Previous biennales had taken up the entire Taipei Fine Arts Museum, but this year, only the first and second floors of the museum were used for exhibits. On the third floor is “Declaration/Documentation: Taipei Biennial, 1996-2014,” an archive exhibit that documents the past nine biennales. So while this year’s Taipei Biennial is an exhibition curated by guest curator Corinne Diserens, it also serves as an opportunity to look back on the twenty-year history of the event and decide its future direction. The biennale’s theme, “Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future,” seems to capture the dual function of this year’s event. It professes to be a biennale where people can comprehensively contemplate the past, present, and future.

Unlike the three biennales in Korea this year, the 2016 Taipei Biennial attempts to put forward a concrete thesis. It focuses on an artistic practice that follows and reinterprets memory by letting the present confront history and imagines the genealogies of the future. Such a theme is not entirely new. It is not very different in philosophical genealogy from the ideas expressed in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” or the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. As these philosophers’ theories still influence the zeitgeist of our times, the Taipei Biennial’s thesis has a contemporary nature. The point is how the biennale played out this theme in its own way. Corinne Diserens emphasizes the performativity of this year’s biennale. She has set “performing the archives, performing the architecture, performing the retrospective” as her curatorial methodology. History and memory do not exist in fixed conditions; they have the mobility to be unearthed and reconstituted from today’s point of view. Therefore, the performative gestures of the present become very important, and forecasts for the future take place simultaneously as memory is dug up.

Left)　Chia-Wei HSU, ‘Spirit-Writing’, 2016, 2 Channel Video, 9min 45sec.
Right) Ham Kyungah, ‘Needling Whisper, Needle Country/SMS Series in Camouflage/ Imagine C02-001-01’, 2014~5, North Korean hand embroidery, Silk threads on cotton, 200×198cm.

Stressing performativity also becomes a major principle in organizing the elements of the biennale. This year, in addition to the exhibits, screenings, performances, symposiums, lectures, and publications constitute the biennale with equal weight. Films will be shown based on weekly screening programs in the “Little Cinema” located on the first floor of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Nine performances will be held in and out of the exhibit space throughout the biennale. The Taipei Biennial Symposium, divided into three parts, brings together a large public with artists, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, and musicians to engage in various discussions. A series of monthly conferences from September through December, organized by art historian Gong Jow-Jiun, focuses on exploring the images of religious folk festivals in the history of Taiwanese photography. There is also a program of talks and workshops on publishing called “The Editorial” on December 10 and 11 where various discussions on independent art publishing in Asia will take place. With such diverse programs, this year’s Taipei Biennial maintains its “performative” nature throughout its duration, instead of simply presenting finished outcomes to the audience.

The museum will also host “Retrospective,” an exhibition within the biennial’s exhibition led by French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, for four weeks starting from December 9. It will be a choreography of actions by fifteen Taiwanese performers in situations that investigate various experiences of the present as a composition of several times coexisting in the same time and space. Based on excerpts from Le Roy’s solo works from 1994 through 2014, “Retrospective” includes biographical elements from each performer, showing that the exhibition is not simply a playback of the past, but an act of arranging an unexpected encounter between the past and the present.

Performing the archives, or understanding them as a sort of gesture, is more than just putting a multitude of documents in one place. It is about affirming the possibilities of different narratives produced through diverse combinations of documents. Furthermore, it encompasses the efforts to restore the diversity of individual and collective memories by visualizing the narratives. When archives are always associated with the issue of narrative in thinking and practice, the past can avoid being stuffed into lifeless forms; the present is no longer trapped in isolation; and the future can earn its status as a new exit.

Im Heung-soon, ‘Bukhansan/Bukhangang’, 2015/2016, 2 Channel video, Color, Sound, 26min 5sec, Exhibition view at Taipei Biennial 2016.

Looking at the present through the lens of history and memory

With the exception of its inaugural year, 1996, every year the Taipei Biennial has highlighted its international aspect by inviting curators from overseas. Fumio Nanjo, Jerome Sans, Dan Cameron, Anselm Franke, Nicolas Bourriaud are among those who have served as guest curators. This year’s guest curator, Corinne Diserens, has worked as a curator in art museums in Italy, France, and Spain. She currently serves as director of the Ecole de Recherche Graphique, a higher art and research academy in Brussels. Of the eighty participating artists she chose for this year’s biennale, more than thirty are from Taiwan. It is quite unusual for a foreign curator to select a large of number of artists from the biennale’s host country. Whereas Haegue Yang was the only Korean artist to take part in the ninth Taipei Biennial in 2014, six Koreans—Kyungah Ham, Im Heung-soon, Park Chan-kyong, Minouk Lim, siren eun young jung, and Varlen Pen—appeared on the list of artists participating this year. Asian artists, including those from Vietnam and Cambodia, account for about half of the participating artists. There are also artists from the West, the Middle East, and South America. The curator allotted considerable space to Taiwanese artists, and evenly distributed the rest across different regions.

Left) WANG Mo-Lin&Blacklist Studio&AU Sow-Yee, ‘Hermeneutics of Hamlet Machine’, 2015, Performance, 70min.
Right) Dareen ABBAS, ‘The Sand Clock’, 2016, Wood, Resin-casting, Sand, Dimensions variable. Exhibition view at Taipei Biennial 2016.

Like the theme, many of the works in the exhibition directly or indirectly refer to history and memory, compare them with the present, and make them resonate. What kinds of history and memory are reflected in each work? Firstly, some have been nourished by the memory of prominent artists from the past century. Manon De Boer showcased a film that reinterpreted John Cage’s 4’33’’. Saadane Afif unveiled his project—a collection of publications containing reproductions of Marcel Duchamp’s famous, readymade Fountain (1917)—a year ahead of the 100th anniversary of its creation. Pierre Leguillon shows hundreds of slides that were used by abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, best known to us for his black monochromes, drawing attention to the unknown side of his life as a collector. Other works by contemporary artists touch on Le Corbusier and Yvonne Rainer. The objects of history and memory that these works refer to are of art historical and aesthetic value.

But the fact that these legacies of the past mostly belong to Western art history leaves much to be desired. Park Chan-kyong’s film ‘Citizen’s Forest’ drew on ‘The Lemures,’ a painting by Oh Yoon, and ‘Colossal Roots,’ a poem by Kim Soo-young. Su Yu Hsien summoned up ‘Prophet,’ a play written by Taiwanese avant-garde artist Huang Hua-Chen, from the last century to the present. But such examples are few. What memories of the past did these artists bring up from the non-Western world? Most of them were memories of political and ideological conflicts from the past century or myths or folktales from the distant past. Chen Chieh-jen’s work, which explores a site that housed victims of Hansen’s disease in the past, raises issues of colonial modernity. Tiffany Chung visualized conflicts arising from urban planning and migration in the course of industrialization in the form of maps. Works of Kyungah Ham and Im Heung-soon reveal how ideological conflicts from the past century still exist in Korea today. Taiwanese artist Shake dealt with issues of geopolitical history entangling politics, economy, culture, and ideology. Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe from South Africa captured the history and memories of racism in photographs. Vietnamese artists Truong Cong Tung and Taiwanese artist Hsu Chia-Wei found clues from folk religion or folktales to understand today’s political situations.

Left) Shake, ‘The Subduction Zone-Our Suite de Danes’, 2016, HD Video, Color, Sound, 7min 31sec.
Right) Park Chan-Kyong, ‘Citizen’s Forest’, 2016, 3 Channel video, b+w, directional sound, 27 min. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center and the Taipei Biennial 2016.

Similarities that create the genealogies of the future?

We can’t say which is more important: aesthetic legacy or political legacy. Both are important objects of reference, discovery, and interpretation for contemporary artists. And in many cases, they are closely intertwined. In the current Taipei Biennial, however, the distinction between aesthetics and politics may appear to be overlapping with the distinction between regions. As if there were aesthetic traditions of the West on one side, and political traditions of the non-Western world on the other. While many of the non-Western countries have a history of colonization and ideological conflicts, they also have plenty of aesthetic legacies to unearth. Western countries have inarguably attained dazzling aesthetic achievements in the past century, but they have also gone through as many political upheavals. Genealogies of the future cannot be set up if the contemporary reality where aesthetics and politics are jumbled together is unnaturally reorganized by grouping what looks similar on the outside. A similar past and a similar present only lead to a similar future. Strictly speaking, it is not a future, but merely a tiresome extension of the present. The future is not met through logical deduction; it is invented. New possibilities of time start to open up when dissimilar times and spaces meet and create unexpected similarities. We call those possibilities the future.

※ This article was first published in Art in Culture, November 2016. Translated by KAMS, the English text will be co-published by art in ASIA.

Kim Hongki / Art Critic

Kim Hongki is a art critic, curator and translator. He received his bachelor’s degree and MA degree in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul University. He is currently a Ph.D student in Aesthetics at University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle. As an Independent curator he has produced ‘Hyemin Son&John Reardon: Minor Adjustments’(Incheon Art Platform, 2011). He has translated Georges Didi-Huberman’s Survivance des lucioles into korean in 2012.