text by Sing Song-Yong
Video art is a paradigm flourishing in the registers of contemporary art in Taiwan. However, the public has only a limited understanding of Taiwan's video art and its evolution. The genealogy of related artworks also needs to be reconstructed in a precise manner. In view of these insufficiencies, this exhibition features the development of Taiwan's video art between the 1980s and the 1990s It also reconstructs the genealogy of related artworks by collating the files of the two-decade development of this paradigm, and thereby charts the courses of its orientation and evolution in aspects of history, aesthetics, technology, and so forth.
1983 is the inaugural year of Taiwan's video art. In October on the occasion of the entrance examination of technical subjects administered by University of Tsukuba in Japan, Kuo I-Fen presented three video installations, namely In the Corner The Last Party, and The Quiet Sound. In December, Kao Chung-Li presented his work Grooming the AIT American Cultural Center. 1984 is a year of fruitful results. Chen Chieh-Jen created a single-channel video showing a man who was in a black hood and executed by shooting. This video was screened in his solo exhibition "Goodbye 25". Hung Su-Chen also finished her single-channel video East/West, featuring the left and right parts of her lips respectively speaking in Chinese and English. During the summer vacation in the same year Wang Jun-Jieh filmed his maiden video artwork The Variable Form at the summer school organized by Cloud Gate Dance Theater. These fruitful results were followed by a number of budding video artists' effort. Yuan Goang-Ming, as an art student at that time, embarked on creating About Millet's The Angelus. Lu Ming-Te and Kuo I-Fen presented their collaborative work Silent Body in Experimental Art-Action Space", a grand exhibition hosted by Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In the course of time, the works by these early pioneers in Taiwan's video art have almost passed into legends that were handed down to later generations through texts, images, and dictation.
Throughout the 1990s, Taiwan's video art became an art field of remarkable diversity in terms of artist, practice, and theme. For example, Chen Cheng-Tsai Wu Mali, Lin Chun-Chi. Lee Kuang-Wei. Yang Chuan-Hsin, Lin Chi-Wei Lee Ji-Hong, Huang Wen-Hao, Peng Hung-Chih, and Tsui Kuang-Yu, have developed their own unique styles from their disparate backgrounds They not only perpetuate, reconstruct, and transform video art according to their personal studies of this field, but also define and extend the boundaries of Taiwan’s video art by bringing in it new themes such as political critique personal reflection, virtually- reality relation, and new horizons.
To reconstruct the genealogy of Taiwan's video art, this exhibition invites 17 Taiwanese artists of different generations to display their early works It also encourages the participating artists to produce full-scale replicas if their original works have been lost or unable to be restored. The 57 pieces of exhibited works encompass a profusion of genres ranging from video installations and video sculptures to single-channel videos and performance videos. They not only constitute the underlying structure of this exhibition, but also outline the developmental trajectory of Taiwan's video art. The works by Hung Su-Chen, Kao Chung-Li, and Lu Ming-Te in the fourth floor preface this exhibition. The works by Chen Chieh-Jen, Wu Mali, Wang Jun-Jieh, and Chen Cheng-Tsai occupy the third and the second floors. The first floor is used for the sequential display of the works by Yuan Goang-Ming, Kuo I-Fen, Lin Chun-Chi, Lee Kuang-Wei, Tsui Kuang-Yu, Peng Hung-Chih, Lee Ji-Hong, Yang Chuan-Hsin, Huarig Wen-Hao, and Lin Chi-Wei.
In addition to giving their original works new appearances Kuo I-Fen, Lu Ming-Te, and Lin Chun-Chih are invited to stage the revivals of their performance artworks during the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by the display of related manuscripts, photos, pamphlets, posters, monographs, and video cameras on the first floor. Such a curatorial approach not only explicates the context and orientation of Taiwan's video art between the 1980s and the 1990s, but also creates congenial (non-) material conditions and strands of thought that offer us great visceral thrills.
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REWIND
Video Art in Taiwan 1983-1999
10. 02 - 12. 06, 2015
Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan |
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