Ni Tsai-chin, who has hosted the International Conference of Curators for the past two years, says that in recent years the major international exhibitions have tended to place overall control in the hands of a chief curator, with a number of other curators from different countries and cultural backgrounds working together on the specifics. The exhibition becomes a web of different events, with the curators at its nodes. There is no doubt that being in touch with international exhibition curators can help artists to improve their international exposure. Expensive dreams
Funding is the question that causes exhibition curators the most headaches, and one which tests their ability to find sponsors. As Beatrice Gysen-Hsieh puts it: "Of course money is important. With money you don't have to compromise your ideas-dreams don't come cheap!" Many artists also admit that once there is a problem with funding, curators have to limit what the artists can do, and it ends up creating difficulties for everyone.
Another factor is that art comes in all forms these days, and the technical problems that a work may entail are unlike those encountered in the past. There are a handful of curators overseas who have huge technical teams at their disposal, including electricians, carpenters, metalworkers and lighting people, and can obtain all manner of material required by the artist. Sometimes, the artist simply needs to hand over a precise design diagram, and the curator will arrange all the rest. Taiwan's small-scale, newly formed curating firms are far below this level, whereas experienced international curators are often familiar with every detail of the trade, from the dimensions of goods doors on cargo planes in Europe to the temperature and humidity controls used in specific art museums.
In the "Power of the Word" at the Museum of Art, there was one work which involved a number of thread-bound volumes laid out on the ground. The curator was initially unaware that public museums switched their air-conditioning off in the evenings, which presented a threat for this exhibit as moisture from the stone floor could have affected the special paper in the volumes and blurred the writing. Luckily the exhibitors were alerted to the problem by museum staff, and a wooden floor-surface was specially installed to prevent possible damage. The artist's helpmate
A good film director gives actors the opportunity to perform and to display their abilities, and can develop new aspects of their art, while a poor director can ruin a top star by forcing an unsuitable role on him or her. Something similar applies in the relationship between curator and artist, as artist Hou Chun-ming illustrates with the example of his involvement in the "Post 89" exhibition in Hong Kong. Hou's project for the exhibition involved creating huge posters based on the depressed and troubled mood of the people of Hong Kong, and pasting these up in the streets and lanes of the city. After holding discussions with exhibition curator Li Xianting, Hou dropped his original plan of interviewing passers-by on the street, and instead decided to set up a "misery hotline" for people to call in on. Also, since it wasn't going to be possible to stick posters up everywhere as imagined, Hou was able, at Li's suggestion, to get the posters pasted to the steel shutters of banks. As Hou puts it: "A good curator can help an artist to extend the reach of his arms and legs, whereas a bad one may have to chop them off just to fit him into the exhibition." The skill of exhibition lay-out alone is enough to make or break a show, in that a poor arrangement interferes with the audience's appreciation of the exhibits, and can result in different works counteracting one another, to the detriment of all. The interaction between curator and artist is particularly important when the theme of the exhibition has been selected and is fully controlled by the curator. At this point, the question arises as to whether the nature of the artist's contribution is actually governed by the curator.
Yao Jui-chung, an artist who is frequently invited to take part in exhibitions by curators in Taiwan and overseas, thinks not-"unless the artist himself is not too clear about what to do, or is willing to be led for the sake of getting exhibited." Yao says that he simply doesn't accept invitations to exhibit on themes that he finds unsuitable. "The artist can accept the challenge of working to a curator's theme, but must also have the courage to refuse," says Yao.
The arena for art exhibitions is far wider now than it used to be, in addition to which Taiwan has experienced an upsurge in local arts events during recent years. Curators can on the one hand send artists off to distant lands, and on the other hand lead them out of art museums and into the city boulevards and the country lanes. But when art comes to a small town, and takes place in the audience's own back yard, the local people's interaction with and reaction to the work is something that a curator has to deal with delicately.
Two exhibitions of small-town installation art have generated discussion and controversy in recent months: "The Heart of History" in Lukang, at the beginning of this year, and "Art in March: Legend 99" in Nantou during the spring.
"The Heart of History" was designed to encourage people's interest in cultural preservation, using the space around a historical site in Lukang. The artist, Lien Pao-tsai, plastered a figure of Matsu in banknotes to satirize the materialist nature of religion today, but the people of Lukang, pious devotees of the goddess, viewed this as an act of blasphemy. In the case of "Art in March," the artist Hou Chun-ming set out a number of human figures wearing women's panties on their heads, to reflect the ubiquitous siren-call of pornography, but this incurred the wrath of a local schoolteacher who felt that the piece corrupted the minds of children.
Art often has the courage to do what people don't dare do, and say what they dare not say, and the notion of artistic freedom is therefore like an amulet for artists. But when art is introduced to a relatively conservative community and comes into conflict with traditional ideas, it is all the more important for the curator to sincerely address the concerns of the local people. J.J. Shih, who curated the show in Nantou, says: "When an artist oversteps the mark, the curator must of course take responsibility for keeping him within bounds. And when there is a misunderstanding about the work among the audience, or doubts arise, the curator should also take the initiative to communicate with them about the problem." Curators have it all stitched up
With curators now running the show, many exhibition contractors have now begun calling themselves curators too, regardless of whether or not much they put much research into planning the show, and even when all they have done is arrange for a group of artists to mount a joint show. But many people are also concerned that with so much depending on the curator, who has the funds at his disposal to recruit personnel and implement the kind of huge projects that an artist could not otherwise handle, and who also coordinates the media to generate fashions in art, then the curator not only decides who gets the exposure but also determines the tastes of the public.
Curators on today's exhibition circuit in Taiwan seem to best like artists working in a post-colonial, consumerist, folksy-but- contemporary vein, aged from around 35 to 45, and it is these artists who attract the most discussion and media interest-which will undoubtedly lure more emerging artists to do work along the same lines.
J.J. Shih, who is curating the Taiwan pavilion at this year's Venice Biennial, has grouped the three participating artists-Huang Pu-ching, Chen Chieh-jen and Hung Tung-lu, three generations of artists chosen to represent the blossoming diversity of art in Taiwan-under the title "Close to Open: Taiwanese Artists Exposed." On entering the Palazzo delle Prigioni, where the Taiwanese exhibits are to be housed, the first sight to greet visitors will be "Banquet," a richly Taiwanese work of installation art, followed by Chen Chieh-jen's "Revolt in Body and Soul," in which the artist has reworked archive photographs of scenes of beheading and dismemberment. Last comes the offering of the young artist Hung Tung-lu, who presents images of popular toy idols, like the Barbie doll, and the video-game character Chun-li, on the sides of a traditional colored lantern. It seems that contemporary works such as these, Western in form but Taiwanese in content, are the ones for which the most opportunities exist overseas, and which therefore come to represent Taiwanese art in general. Quiet appreciation
Wu Ma-li believes the situation is not actually as limiting as that, and cites a recent exhibition at the Museum of Art of work by the father of contemporary painting in Taiwan Li Chung-sheng and his students, for which the curator researched, over the course of several years, the entire genealogy of Li's antecedents, colleagues, followers and pupils in Japan and Taiwan. The show amounted to a rediscovery of the old artist. Similarly, the 100th anniversary retrospective of Yu Cheng-yao, which featured a comprehensive selection of his work, and included for the first time in exhibition Yu's ci poetry and calligraphic works, captured the spirit of Yu's approach to art: "Nankuan music first, ci poetry second, calligraphy third, and painting fourth." In fact overseas too, many curators are interested in rediscovering old artists and re-interpreting classical art.
Artist Hou Chun-ming describes an exhibition he once saw in the US that made a deep and long-lasting impression on him. It was not a large exhibition, and the featured artist was not part of the new avant-garde. In fact it was van Gogh, an artist with whom we are all fully familiar. Listening to the audio guide as he moved through the exhibition, Hou found that instead of some distracting discussion of trends and themes, there was simply a reading of letters between van Gogh and his brother Theo to accompany the paintings. "I think that what an exhibition like this tries to show is not art, but life itself!"
The emergence of curators is like an announcement that art exhibitions have entered a more professional era. From a top international director, you are likely to get a big movie featuring lots of stars, whereas from a more sensitive kind of director you are likely to get a carefully crafted art film. So long as we have a Hollywood, there will always be plenty of exciting new movies in the cinemas. As to what kind of a repertoire in art we can expect from the exhibition curators, that is something that we, as the audience, have the right to choose.