The Wild Eighties

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is delighted to present The Wild Eighties: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan, curated by the TFAM director Jun-Jieh Wang and scholar Chien-Hung Huang. Focusing on the 1980s in Taiwan, the dawn of the transdisciplinary and self-enlightenment, the exhibition takes the audience into an exploration of the vibrant cultural scenes, in which visual arts, theater, new cinema, music, and literature interwove and collided in the socio-political milieu at the time, and further opens up multiple perspectives for possible historical narratives. Featuring more than seven hundred works, archives, audio and video documentaries recordings, and interviews, the exhibition comprises five sub-topics, namely, “Avant-Garde and Experimental,” “Politics and Taboo,” “Translation and Hybridity,” “Local, Global, and Identity,” and “Convergence and Onward.”

Avant-Garde and Experimental
In 1983, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan’s first modern and contemporary art museum, was inaugurated. Through looking back on the documents and literature of the TFAM exhibitions presented in the early period, the audience can see artists’ responses to the public art institution, as well as the museum’s developmental trajectory. On the other hand, some artists tried to expand the space outside the institution. The exhibition Xirang (1986), organized by Chen Chieh-jen, was presented in an empty, unfurnished apartment space, and featured works of mixed media, ranging from installation, painting, to performance, some of which are represented in this exhibition along with archival documents of the event. Back then, performance art and action art formed a vital aspect of avant-garde experimentation in Taiwan. Lee Ming-Shen’s Lee Ming-Sheng=Art (1988) comprised seven parts, one of which involved defecating in the TFAM exhibition—The World According to DADA. Influenced by the Western avant-garde theater, theater groups such as the Lanlin Theatre Troupe and the Rive-Gauche Theatre Group experimented with performing space, methods, and text, attempting to shatter the limit of traditional theater performances.

Politics and Taboo
Around the lifting of martial law in 1987, in the midst of the socio-political milieu informed by the coexistence of suppression and openness, pioneering cultural and art practitioners engaged in challenging taboos with new media and interfaces, gradually moving towards the liberation of mind, body and artistic creation and leaving behind the singular authoritarian narrative of Taiwanese history in the increasingly free society. Musician LO Ta Yu voiced his critique about social events and institution through his music. While the flourishing street movements slowly opened up public sites, photographers and media practitioners, such as Hsieh San Tai, Tsai Ming-Te, Chen-Hsiang Liu, and Green Team, utilized new media technologies to document the scenes, offering people different perspectives outside the state-controlled media. Many artists paying attention to political and social issues also carried their artistic agency into social movements, producing more ways to speak up about the pursuit of democracy. One example was Rip the Evil out of Orchid Island (1982) collaborated by art practitioners, who utilized action theater and reportage theater to conduct a march around Lanyu to protest against the inauguration of the nuclear waste storage site on the island.

Translation and Hybridity
Taiwan’s economic boom in the 1980s, the atmosphere of pursuing political freedom, and the formation of the bourgeois taste subjected cultural expression to various forms of “translation.” This section of the exhibition starts with the documentation of the performances by Japan’s experimental Butoh dance troupe Byakko Sha and the Hong Kong-based international experimental theater company Zuni Icosahedron in Taiwan, which engendered great stimulations to the Taiwanese experimental theatrical movement and related practice. In terms of the visual arts, the TFAM had consistently curated and presented international exhibitions, including Exposition d’Art Vidéo Français (1984) and Bauhaus 1919–1933 (1989). These exhibitions showcased the diversity of contemporary art and influenced the subsequent Taiwanese environment of artistic creation. Furthermore, artists in the 1980s directly learned from important Western dancers and performers, including Martha Graham, Jerzy Grotowski, Bread & Puppet Theater, and so on, introducing their teaching approaches and aesthetic forms into Taiwan.

Local, Global, and Identity
The new international and domestic political situations resulted from the termination of the diplomatic relations between the United States and the Republic of China forced Taiwan to re-comprehend the so-called “Chinese culture” while seeking a different cultural identity to re-initiate dialogues with the globe. Many works from the period consequently reflected the oscillation between the Chinese imagination and grasping an understanding of Taiwan. For example, while Taiwanese photographers were applying extensively the “documentary” approach to shaping the local scenes, LONG Chinsan’s photographic montage visualized richly the aesthetics of Chinese literati painting. The wave of the Taiwan New Cinema offered an alternative take on “reality” different from what the mainstream commercial films had shown. This section features many archival materials related to the important works of the time, along with other literature of the movement. In addition, cultural and art workers during this period also turned their eyes to re-discovering local knowledge, for example, Taiwanese Nativist art movement, which promoted the artistic expression of folk art.

Convergence and Onward
Looking back on the 1980s in Taiwan, everything was interconnected, and kept congregating, circulating, and changing in different physical spaces, media, and on divergent platforms. In the era without computers and the internet, newspaper supplements had the vital functions of introducing translations of intellectual thoughts and promoting artistic waves. As the entry barrier of printing technology lowered, the national average income increased, and the reading population grew, the publication of magazines and journals entered an era of competition. At the same time, facing the “ban on political parties,” publishing magazines became an alternative option for assembly and association. On the other hand, gathering places in myriad forms, such as exhibition venues at formal institutions and alternative spaces, multi-functional tea houses, chic restaurants, etc., provided opportunities for creative workers from all fields to meet, brainstorm, and initiate new projects.

For more information, please visit the website.