The 2023 Taoyuan International Art Award (TIAA), organised by Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA), Taiwan, selected 15 finalists in last June to participate in the exhibition and compete the awards. After a thorough secondary review, an award ceremony was held on March 21 to reveal the final winners on the spot. The Grand Award goes to Pull Up by Delphine Pouillé (France), while Migran-t, First skin: Nostalgia by Belén Santamarina (Argentina), I CAN NOT BE WITH YOU by Jiao Yan (China), The Shadow Lands Yonder by Lee Kai-chung (Hong Kong) are the three Honorable Mention winners, and Wang Yen-ran (Taiwan) is awarded Sojourn Award.
French artist, Delphine Pouillé, has long developed a practice centered on the body, combining sculpture and drawing. The award-winning work Pull Up is a hybrid piece in which two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality coexist. The notion of exhaustion is at the heart of the project. If the voided figure of the suspended body is shown at full physical exertion, its “positive”, puny counterpart lies wrecked on the ground, conveying a sense of derailment or crash. Belén Santamarina of Argentina in the Honorable Mention for Migran-t, First skin: Nostalgia, in which the artist embroidered on drawings, poems and words written in a private diary, or words from books or songs using hair picked up after grooming, embroidering on sheets, and implanting the experience of migration and being in a different place; Chinese artist Jiao Yan’s video work I CAN NOT BE WITH YOU started with word searches on China’s website for missing persons. The artist contemplates ways to document these individuals and adopts anthropological imaging methods to commence this photography project, including herself in the works, expressing shattered stories and nuanced emotions, re-presenting the images of missing per sons. This work explores the power structures behind the seemingly normal social phenomenon. Hong Kong artist Lee Kai-chung positions the perspective in early-20th-century Manchuria, and explores the complex process of identity “transition” under sudden political changes through video and creative writing based on a documentary review. The “Sojourn Award” aims to reward Taiwanese artists to travel abroad to observe and expand their international horizons, and this year’s winner Wang Yen-ran’s work Productivity Project 2023 uses a “copying” action with a reference model to produce a large number of IKEA mugs by hand, in an attempt to explore how ceramics creators should deal with themselves in the era of globalized industrial mass production.
TIAA is one of the major contemporary art competitions in Taiwan. This edition, it received overwhelming response from 62 countries, with more than 687 artists submitting their works for the preliminary review, a 25% increase in the total number of submissions compared to the previous edition. This indicates that TIAA has received widespread attention from international art professionals and creators since it placed an international call for entries in 2021 for the first time. The 15 selected art works are from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Syria, France, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Peru with a wide coverage of various fields and forms. The next call for entries will be announced at the end of this year (2023).
The international jury has been a unique feature of TIAA. The jury of the preliminary review was composed of Christine MACEL, Chief Curator of the 57th Venice Biennale; Hanru Hou, former Director of MAXXI; Cosmin Costinas, Curator of the 2024 Sydney Biennial; independent curator Nobuo Takamori and Professor Chun Lan Liu of National Taiwan University of the Arts, who was also the former director of the TMoFA. While the preliminary review was implemented online, the secondary review was implemented on-site, and the finals jury consisted of Hanru Hou, Cosmin Costinas, Jin-suk Suh, Director of the Ulsan Museum of Arts, South Korea; Kuang-Yi Chen, Dean of College of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts; and independent curator Chia Chi Jason Wang.
