2020 highlights

Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) officially announces its program of events for 2020. Solo exhibitions of both local Taiwanese and international artists from different eras, as well as live performance-themed exhibitions. The grand exhibition in summer, “The Secret from the South: Cold War and the Global South in the Museum’s Collection” and the 2020 Taipei Biennial in the latter half of the year will be the annual highlights of 2020. “The Secrete from the South” invites guest curator Nobuo Takamori to delve into the Museum’s permanent collection and contemplate the interconnections between Taiwan and other countries of the Global South, such as Southeast Asia and even Africa or Latin America to explore Taiwan’s pivotal role during Cold War.

Solo exhibitions showcase different generations
Beginning in March 2020, the museum will unveil a series of major solo exhibitions, pondering the historical context of art and the representation of contemporary society in the artistic practices of different generations: An Open Ending: Huang Hua-Cheng, Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948-49 | 1958, Paul Chiang: A Retrospective, and Erwin Wurm: Solo Exhibition. These solo exhibitions address a diversity of unique topics, expressed in an array of materials and forms.

The spring season will begin with Paul Chiang: A Retrospective. Art scholar Chia Chi Jason Wang will serve as guest curator, presenting the evolution of the artist’s abstract painting from the 1960s to today. Chiang’s itinerant life experience, living for 30 years in Europe and the United States before returning to Taiwan in 1999 and eventually settling in Taitung in 2008, led him to gradually invent a series of dramatically varying styles, shifting back and forth between concrete and abstract, all of which are presented in this retrospective exhibition.

The exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948-49 | 1958 is co-curated by French photographic historian and curator Michel Frizot and Taiwanese photographic historian Su Ying-Lung. It features a series of documentary photographs taken by renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) for Life magazine in 1948 and 1949, and again in 1958. This photographic evidence of modern Asian history capturing the transformations of China in the previous century is particularly significant for the light it sheds on Taiwan’s own cultural context. Also launching in springtime is An Open Ending: Huang Hua-Cheng. Presenting Huang’s (1935-1996) paintings, nearly a hundred book cover designs and manuscripts, and his films and stage installations, it reveals the multifaceted conceptual thinking this native Taiwanese avant-garde art pioneer introduced in the island’s formative era of cross-disciplinary art. The careers and creations of Cartier-Bresson and Huang are very disparate, but they intertwine in terms of the stories they tell about history, geopolitics and cultural change in Taiwan.

In addition to the solo exhibitions highlighted above, 2020 will see solo exhibitions of Wang Hsiang Lin, Chen Chien-Jung, Fu Ya-Wen, Liao Chi-Yu, and Cheng Hsien-Yu, placing the creative prowess of Taiwanese contemporary artists on the same platform with international artists, engaging in a dialogue of mutual illumination.

In Spring/Summer 2020, multiple dimensions of contemporary art
“Performance art,” “performing arts” and “live performance” are a focal point of TFAM’s late spring and high summer schedule. Since the late 1980s the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has presented his works with everyday objects in surprising and compelling ways, creating humorous, highly performative “one-minute sculptures.” In November 2019, the 8th Performa Biennial was held in New York City, inviting Taiwan to take part in its Pavilion Without Walls program. Taipei Fine Arts Museum took up this task with vigor, as TFAM curator Jo Hsiao collaborated with the Performa team to facilitate a highly original program by artists Yu Cheng-Ta and Huang Po-Chih that turned New York City itself into a gallery/stage. In the summer of 2020, TFAM will continue the cross-disciplinary, speculative spirit it has pursued in recent years, as curator Jo Hsiao follows this participation in an international event with a special program that continues to experiment with new forms of performative art within the spaces of a traditional art museum.

For this year’s Experimental Exhibition from the Museum Collection, TFAM director Ping Lin will serve as general curator, continuing the tradition in recent years of initiating reinterpretations of the TFAM collection in different themes and forms. In 2020 the curatorial approach will attempt to deliberately disturb works from the collection that rarely see the light of day, exploring the historical issues of the Cold War and the unfamiliar “South.” For this project, Nobuo Takamori, a Taiwanese curator of Japanese descent, will serve as guest curator of “The Secret from the South: Cold War and the Global South in the Museum’s Collection.” The exhibition shines a spotlight on selected works from the TFAM collection created around the time of World War II which reflect the process of cultural exchange among countries of the “Global South” in the context of the Cold War era.

2020 Taipei Biennial to deepen consciousness of contemporary environmental issues, develop a platform for dialogue
In October of 2020, the 12th Taipei Biennial will officially open, co-curated by philosopher Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard. The two curators have chosen the theme You and I don’t live on the same planet—New Diplomatic Encounters. Focusing on environmental issues, the Biennial will transform the art museum into a diplomatic arena for the confluence of different perspectives, in a process of discussion that attempts to turn biases and conflicts into constructive deliberation.

The two curators visited Taiwan last September on an intensive research tour, visiting various Taiwanese artists and scholars in different fields, such as geography, ecology and marine sciences. They initiated dialogues and concretely scrutinized the environmental issues of Taiwan first-hand. The curators state that the many issues confronting contemporary society which have converged intensively on this island, involving population, manufacturing, environmental resources, and geoecology, have given birth to a social environment that presents an optimum scenario for artists, social activists, engineers, scientists and citizens to engage in intellectual enquiry. In this biennial the guest curators will select local curators to assist them in develop the program. The first wave of participating artists will be announced in March 2020, more fully fleshing out the Biennial’s conceptual framework.

In the 2020, TFAM will present the native Taiwanese cross-disciplinary art pioneer’s works, live performance dealing with the relationship between in-the-moment viewing and performative action, discourse on environmental issue, and curation of the museum collection as reconstruction of history, all on the same stage, to wholly manifest the museum’s active role in developing an art ecosystem and a full-spectrum artistic vocabulary.