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If You Got IT, Flaunt IT: An Art Space Celebrates 25 Years
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text by Eric Chi-Puo LIN
The art and photography exhibition space IT Park, renowned as the “midwife to contemporary art in Taiwan,” is celebrating its 25th anniversary this autumn of 2013.
For the past quarter of a century, IT Park has provided an experimental stage where local artists have been able to freely express themselves. For many an up-and-coming young artist, simply being invited to have a solo exhibition here has been an instant entrée into the bright lights of public attention. Artists now internationally famous who got launched here have included Michael Lin, Yuan Goang-ming, and Wu Chi-tsung.
To celebrate its anniversary, IT Park is holding a series of shows under the rubric “Tuanyuan.” Tuanyuan is a word that has great importance for Chinese. It means “reunion” or “homecoming,” and it is heard most often around Chinese New Year, when everyone is supposed to make their best effort to return home.
IT Park has invited more than 100 artists back for this “homecoming” series of exhibits. At the same time, the organizers have gone online to ask people to lend them any photographic or text memorabilia. Building on the past, and casting a wide net for input, IT Park is setting the direction for the next 25 years.
It is the evening of October 25, 2013, and sounds of laughter and celebration are flowing out of a quiet side street in the Zhongshan District of Taipei City. IT Park is having a cocktail party to mark the opening of a series of events to commemorate its 25th anniversary.
Over 100 works of art are hung or placed in every nook and cranny, the balcony and the rooftop are opened wide, and a cool breeze wafts through. Waves of visitors arrive one after the other—it seems like anybody who is anybody in the art world is here.
Three-month reunion
IT Park began planning this anniversary gala half a year ago. But as the organizers got more and more engrossed in the details of past glories and memories, their creativity became mired down. It felt like they were getting farther and farther away from the original intention of putting artists front and center. Finally, director Liu Ching-tang decided—just one month before the opening—that the theme would be “homecoming,” because this reflected the fact that IT Park’s most important role has been to create a space where Taiwanese artists could feel “at home.” The exhibition period was expanded to a full three months, and divided into three phases.
The theme for the first phase is “Reunion.” IT Park invited 108 artists who had at one time or another held solo shows at the venue to each contribute one of their most characteristic recent works for a collective show. Just like the 108 members of the Robin-Hood-like robber band in the classic Chinese novel The Water Margin, these artists are of many different personalities, styles, and ages (with birthdays stretching from the 1940s to the 1980s). An exhibition of this scale and diversity is a rare event indeed.
Countless art-world notables—including Minimalist maestro Tsong Pu, video pioneer Yuan Goang-ming, feminist discourse symbol Chen Hui-chiao, visual illusionist Wu Tien-chang, and new wave color-block experimentalist Wu Tung-lung—are represented in this first phase. Though there are vast stylistic gulfs between the various works, the deft skill with which they are set out creates an unexpected sense of harmony and visual comfort. There is no stealing of the limelight, but rather mutual blending.
The theme of the second phase will be “Presents.” It will revisualize the past 25 years of IT Park as one giant installation art piece. Representative works from 25 artists who have exhibited here have been selected, and limited-edition prints have been produced. The result will be a single installation comprised of 25 slices of the past, transcending space and time. Phase three, which aims to look toward the future, is entitled “The 25+1 IT Park New Year’s Exhibition.” IT Park and other Art Space will collaboratively exhibit works from 26 artists with whom they have never cooperated before.
Towering figures
The origins of IT Park can be traced back to 1982. That’s the year that Richard Lin, a Taiwanese Minimalist master who had long lived overseas, returned to Taiwan and declared, “Painting is dead!” He introduced new concepts like Raumkunst (spatial art) and installation art to Taiwan, and attracted many acolytes, including Tsong Pu, Jun T. Lai, Hu Kun-jung, and Chang Yung-tsun. It was the first stone cast in a cataclysmic restructuring of Taiwan’s arts topography.
Not long thereafter, in 1983, Taiwan’s first museum of modern art—the Taipei Fine Arts Museum—was founded. It was also around that time that a group of artists with a strong politically dissident orientation (led by Wu Tien-chang and Yang Mao-lin) formed the 101 Modern Art Group. In 1987, the government lifted martial law, and progressive social and artistic movements (including the Little Theater Movement and New Wave films) flourished and fed off of one another.
There was a titanic collision between tradition and innovation, each defending its values, bringing epic figures to the fore. In 1988, Tsong Pu, Liu Ching-tang, Chen Hui-chiao, and Huang Wen-hao joined forces to found IT Park, located in an old apartment block adjacent to Yitong Park in Taipei City.
Liu remembers that they chose the appellation “Park” because they wanted to create a space that differed from typical museums or galleries. They wanted the relationship between visitors and artworks to be more than just “passing through.” They wanted their venue to have an open feel, welcoming to people from all walks of life, with visitors coming and going without tickets or salespeople to hassle them, a place where you could sit for a while and sip on a drink, like a relaxing park….
In an unplanned, organic way, this space increasingly gave scattered artists a sense of “belonging.” Each day at dusk, culturati would gather here and often chat deep into the night. Gradually it became more and more like “home.” Going with the flow, two years later IT Park invited more than 6 active artists to hold a formal opening exhibition. As word of the show got around, people started showing up in a steady stream.
“The artists sat next to their works,” recalls Liu, “and anyone who came, maybe just a high-school student wandering in without any idea what was inside, maybe a grandma just taking her grandson on an aimless stroll, could discuss the work with the artist, and even critique or debate it.” IT Park was not a non-profit museum, it was not a market-oriented commercial gallery, it was not a dues-paying arts society—it was simply a space where non-mainstream artists could, free from any market pressures whatsoever, let their creativity run free.
You can imagine that artworks like these were not exactly easy to sell, and IT Park found it impossible to rely on sales commissions. The next idea was to set up a bar inside the gallery as a way to keep their bankbook in balance, but after a while, as everyone got to know everyone else, they more or less stopped taking money for the drinks. In fact, financial pressure has been the norm at IT Park, with the whole operation depending upon revenues from the commercial photography studio set up next to IT Park by founder Liu Ching-tang.
Giving creativity free rein
The last quarter-century has passed in a flash, and IT Park has changed little. The entrance is the same ordinary, unobtrusive doorway on the ground floor of the apartment building, marked only by a very small placard. Upon entering, there is the same narrow and unadorned concrete staircase heading upward, at the top of which, without any signage or foyer-type space, you step right into the first exhibition room. The two floors are divided into three display rooms and one living room, and there is also a balcony in a Mediterranean style. About the only change has been that the bar idea was abandoned back in 2000, with the shelves that originally held bottles of alcohol now filled with books, the interior workspace of the bar converted to an office desk, and the barstools left scattered here and there for visitors to sit or lean on as they like.
The division of labor among the three amigos at the heart of IT Park is that Tsong Pu is the “spiritual leader,” Chen Hui-chiao is the curator and administrator, and Liu handles the financial side.
With the amount that he has spent on rent alone over the last 25 years, Liu Ching-tang could have bought a nice apartment in downtown Taipei. Hoping to shore up the financial situation, in 2010 he transformed his photography studio into a commercially oriented arts salon. He holds occasional exhibitions there and brings together artists and collectors, hoping to increase commissions from the art trade. However, in order to ensure that the independent character of IT Park remains unsullied, the operations of the two venues are kept completely separate.
Back at the inaugural cocktail party, while everyone is chattering happily and enjoying themselves, I track down the three principals—Tsong, Liu, and Chen—each at the center of groups of people holding different conversations, and ask them the same question: “You’ve invested 25 years, all the years of your youth, in IT Park, yet you’ve never been able to escape financial pressures. Do you feel any regrets?” All of them give essentially the same response, turning and pointing at the crowd of people around them, and answering: “IT Park has been my artistic life, and now look at how vibrant and rich our little household has become!”
Indeed, in any history of art in Taiwan, IT Park would deserve a chapter of its own, if not an entire volume. This is even more the case when you consider Chen Hui-chiao’s incredible acuity at selecting innovative but unknown artists for individual shows who, within a few years, virtually always find themselves in the center spotlight of the arts stage.
The most famous example is the artist Michael Lin, who came up at the same time as Chen Hui-chiao. After graduating from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California back in 1993, he returned to Taiwan and took a job at IT Park mixing the duties of administrative assistant and bartender. After several periods of inner turmoil and reassessment over his art, with his third personal show at IT Park he became an overnight sensation with a series of works based on colorful Hakka printed textiles, and was soon internationally famous.
Among the new generation, the most representative figure is Wu Chi-tsung, born in 1981. Within two years of his first personal show at IT Park, his work Rain was nominated for the Artes Mundi Prize of Wales. His installation Crystal City, originally created in 2009, was awarded the grand prize in 2013’s WRO Media Art Biennale in Poland.
A work of art in itself
How is that many of the artists invited to have personal shows at IT Park have turned out to be pathbreaking figures who make a huge splash in the art world?
Chen Hui-chiao offers the following analysis. IT Park doesn’t take commercial factors into consideration, and doesn’t screen or vet works or performances. Instead, it has incessantly searched out artists who can bring new content and new elements that IT Park itself lacks. IT creates a context of mutual trust in which artists can bring their creativity fully into play and come up with pathbreaking works of art that reflect their own generational experience. It is only natural that they give off sparks and light fires.
Interestingly, as a result of this curatorial spirit, IT Park itself can be seen as a gigantic work of behavioral installation art, blending time, space, creativity, interpersonal networks, sentimental attachments, and imagination. Every participant is an element in this piece, and shapes what it will look like in the future.
In 2002, curator Hou Hanrou, drawing on the idea of “spatial reproduction,” created a duplicate of IT Park at the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, treating the spatial essence of IT Park as art in itself.
In 2010, architect Chi Ti-nan made another reproduction of IT Park in the main lobby of the Taipei City Hall. He dissected the original vertical three-story layout of the Yitong Street building and then re-aligned the upper stories side by side at floor level, creating a “horizontal IT Park.”
A group exhibition, christened Every Chalice Is a Dwelling Space, was held in the faux IT space, to which ten artists including Tsong Pu, Ku Shih-yung, Chu Chia-hua, and Wang Jun-jieh were invited to exhibit works. Citizens who came to City Hall to take care of business passed through the space, constituting, in combination with IT Park, something like a single living organism.
Another remarkable aspect of the legend of IT Park is that it has become a central window for linking Taiwan’s arts community with the rest of the world. Over a long period of time, Chen Hui-chiao has steadily been gathering together biographical data and visual materials about artists, curators, and critics who have a connection with IT Park, and compiling these into a database on modern art in Taiwan. It is in this very database that the Glenfiddich artist-in-residence program, known as the wealthiest in the world, searches every year for suitable candidates from Taiwan to invite to Scotland for an extended stay.
Personal IT Parks
Back at the cocktail party, everyone has a story about “their” IT Park. For some, it is where they started, for others where the future will happen.
Cutting-edge artist Wu Tung-lung says that IT Park was the catalyst for his “metamorphosis.” After becoming a Glenfiddich artist-in-residence in 2012 via the IT Park connection, his painting style changed, and he began to evoke in his art the mild intoxication of fine whisky, a style to which he has gotten a very positive response.
GaiART gallery director Lee Hui-an describes IT Park as her “inspiration.” She entered these portals for the first time when she was 16, and it was like opening a window to a new way of seeing the world, where everything is imbued with an aesthetic texture. It’s what prompted her to pursue a career in art management.
Liu Ching-tang, on the other hand, describes IT Park as his “passion.” The space represents his indestructible passion for art, a passion that he wants to share with others and that he wants to have with him all his life.
And Chen Hui-chiao? She sits at the bar, chin in hand, not saying a word, looking super cool. A guest off to the side offers this interpretation: “Guarded behind this face that has not changed in 25 years, there is a complete sense of satisfaction, because modern art in Taiwan has a tapestry made up of dreams that will continue to be woven on and on into the future, in a place where anything is possible.”
(December 2013 Taiwan Panorama p.90-97/ tr. by Phil Newell)
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