text by Kao Chien-Hui
Keep objects as a system. Keep production as a mirror. Keep death as an exchange. Keep the world as a simulacrum. Keep the evil transparent. Keep the majorities silent. Keep your seduction alive. Keep your memory cool. Keep yourself as an other. Keep perfection as a crime. Keep illusion for the end. Keep on line for the while. —Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III
Who am I? Who are we? How close or how far can the distance between our ideals and realities be?
Moving away from the contemporary thinking of pursuing the new, Once Upon A Time－Unfinished Progressive Past revisits a humanistic topic－what exactly are the life stories, daily events, social milieu and attitude towards the world that have shaped today’s contemporary art and its spirit?
From “cold societies” to “cold memories,” we have only been able to see the glistening event horizon of art without being able to penetrate the black holes of history. The development of Taiwan’s modern and contemporary art has been under the influences of various factors, such as the indigenous, immigration, colonialism and nationalism. Cultural perspectives have led us onto a process informed by definition, translation, mistranslation and transgression, trapping Taiwan’s contemporary art in an anchorless state of perpetual anxiety. Once Upon A Time－Unfinished Progressive Past employs the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei as a temporary site to re-examine the spiritual origin, historic scenes and conversion of artistic language that have contributed to the emergence of contemporary art at the early stage through the memories and imagination of contemporary artists. By doing so, the exhibition re-explores the unresolved issue loaded with the following questions: “Whose contemporary? Whose art? Whose history?”
“Once upon a time” refers to the crucial germinating stage and the influential ecology before contemporary art really took shape. If the mythology of contemporary art still possesses the power of discovering the spiritual potential of the human life, artists’ primary family culture, unrestrained youthful days, the visible and intangible social systems, the infiltration of daily and communication culture have all become sites where the mythology manifests, and at the same time, served as clues to examine the development of the contemporary art today. These spiritual legacies from the early period have grown in an atmosphere charged by dreams, taboos, repression, emptiness and reality, and are converted into blueprints, readymades, paintings, videos, music, objects, films, buildings, popular culture, newspaper messages, etc., to display visual landscapes oscillating between imagination and reality and transform artworks into a bridge connecting art and society.
Once Upon A Time encompasses the life and cultural memories of three post-war generations as well as the repressed and upheaval past they have shared, employing visual art to represent taming, confusion, imitation, resistance, self-adjustment that speak individual and collective search for an outlet. In addition to delineating the triangular zone with unclear boundaries, demarcated by the contemporary era, art and history, the exhibition also reveals the unfinished modern consciousness, colonial consciousness and the consciousness of mechanism in four decades. The sixteen artists and their collaborators featured in this exhibition respectively demonstrate the impact of collective memories and their aesthetic approaches. With connections formed through détourment (rerouting) and dérive (drifting), artists have shaped the relations between individuals and society while allowing the unfinished border of contemporary art and the unknown black holes of consciousness - those that are unescapable and outside of contemporary art - to resurface - the unfinished imagination of national territory, social constraints, influences of the West and all the wild dreams.
According to the choreographic route, artists and their works on view in the exhibition include Leo LIU’s Resistance is Beautiful Series, Ruey-Shiann SHYU’s Nine Dreams －Hopscotch, a new version of The War That Never Was by Chien-Chi CHANG, Dean-E MEI’s Youthful Taiwan, Yu-Ping KUO’s The House She Wants to Build, I-Fan WANG’s 02-06, Kacey WONG’s Absolute Loneliness Installation, Chun-Yi CHANG’s This Is Very Simple So I Can Do It, Juin SHIEH’s Chora－Endless Interpretation, Jun-Honn KAO’s Smoke, Hung-Yi CHEN’s Rewriting Les règles de l'art, Ideal House created by Beautiful Construction (Yu-Ting LIN, Chien-Chih LIN, Jin-Ann LIN, Tzung-Kuei LIN, Chia-Hsuan YANG, Wen-Long XIAO). Jun-Yuan HONG’s Where Do You Come From?－1981, Che-Yu HSU’s Single Copy, Shake’s 1989, and Li-Ren CHANG’s Battle City－SNG Specials. The museum’s research team also produces a chronological timeline with rich literature about the debates and popular culture in Taiwan’s modern and contemporary art scenes.
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