Contemporary Taiwan Art Forms

The value of art is in the soul of the beholder. To examine the changing face of art is one way of deeply exploring a national identity.

What is the face of art in ROC? What kind of a Taiwan is reflected in the art of this island? In the market, natural realism is the unchallenged leader, while the media says that new wave art is popular. Regardless, neither can fully encompass the face of art in Taiwan.

The decade since the founding in 1983 of the first institution here dedicated to modern art--the Taipei Fine Arts Museum--has been the most vital decade for the arts in Taiwan. With political liberalization, the boom in the stock market, and social pluralization, the arts have also"intensified."

The current generation of creative artists has, on the one hand, opened its heart and mind to absorb new international concepts, and on the other has actively searched for a "nativist" aspect to its work.

It is not only the artists who are exploring contemporary Taiwan art -- the critics are writing about it and even helping to arrange gallery showings. Last year the Fine Arts Museum held a show entitled, "Taiwan Art 1945-1993." The Hanart Gallery in Taipei held a show called "New Art New Tribes: Taiwan Art in the Nineties," while "Art Toward the Apex--An Exhibition of Taiwan's Modern Art" was shown in Kaohsiung's G-Zen Art Space gallery.

Living as we are in the middle of all this, it is not appropriate to make qualitative or historical judgements yet. It is hard to encapsulate the many diverse and contending schools of thought in a pithy phrase.

What is "performance art"? Why would a performer defecate in a museum? Will the land that emerges from the brushes of urban artists be as lively and as invigorating as in the past? If porcelain is not bowls and jars, then what is it? As the fever for "political painting" fades, what place will artists find for themselves in history?

New surroundings, new forms, and new concepts have arisen in a flood, completely changing the definition of fine arts. But the understanding of the general public seems to stop at "nice paintings that you can hang on the wall."

To look at these issues we have begun a special series on "Contemporary Taiwan Art Forms" We hope that as we accumulate reports we can objectively sketch a relatively complete picture of the face of fine arts in Taiwan.

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Yang Mao-lin's "Made inTaiwan: Limbs, Trunk, Sign Section I." Composite materials, 1990; 175x350 cm.