Luchia Meihua Lee
Outside In-New Realm for Taiwan Art, 2008
“…I thought of that danger, and I was afraid my soul would be blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with any of my senses. so, I thought I must have recourse to logoi and examine in them the truth of beings” --- Socrates in Phaedra1.
Art communities, In Taiwan and across the globe, are highly sensitive to conditions in the broader society. Indeed, what many consider to be the unfettered impulse of artistic creation is constantly pulled and pushed by the demands of the business of art and an array of cultural trends. Members of the art community often worry about being blinded by external circumstances in a way that complicates the essence of artistic expression and evaluation. The artist in Outside In have been selected for their unique ability to address their own positions in contemporary society while simultaneously locating themes that transcend any particular temporal or cultural context.
One recurrent solution to the challenge of understanding how art becomes eternal is to ignore the fashions of the mainstream. As Lao Tzu states in Tao Te Ching, “Everywhere it is obvious, if beauty makes a display of beauty, it is sheer ugliness”2. Following this adage, to evaluate contemporary art, it is necessary to reflect on what a piece can reveal, not just about its context, but also about the eternal human condition.
This objective is easier said than accomplished. Every
period in art history has created a new language or new form, and even those
who choose to rebel against the mainstream -which inexorably tied to social
context – often use the same language as their contemporaries and predecessors.
For example, in the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) sent a urinal,
a piece he titled Fountain to represent him at Society of Independent
Artists, as an ultimate gesture of defiance3. Yet in some quarters, he is
thought of as the representative of the then-mainstream insofar as his works were
logical extensions of the movements of Impressionism and post-Impressionism. If
people in the art world wish to discover art that is eternal, I urge them instead
ask “How can art reveal the secrets of an era?”
Perhaps a response to this question is that artists are most original and most useful to society when they stand outside of it. One recurring theme in the art of Outside In is in this exhibit is alienation and alliance, in its various guises. Another is the relationship between humans and the environment. As such , this exhibit explores the freedoms and constraints of being an outsider. In an even broader sense, these artists reveal how art can inspire the subconscious to discover the depths of the human mind and condition to bring the viewer closer to an original and therefore eternal truth.
Contemporary artist from Taiwan have displayed a unique
ability to establish themselves as explorers and recorders of the human
condition. In many ways, this comes as a result of their positioning within an
international context. In recent years, East Asia has experienced an economic
boom as well as an upsurge in international public interest. In particular, for
reasons including the excitement surrounding the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing,
artists from mainland China have achieved a high profile in museums and auction
houses, as well as in corporate collections. Accordingly, prices for Chinese
art have reached new heights.
The excitement caused by this widespread attention paid to Asian contemporary art—from a variety of sources including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and announcements from auction houses—is an entirely novel situation. Names of new Chinese artist have entered the mainstream public consciousness, thus creating additional dimensions through which the international community locates and defines contemporary art.
However, the global art world rarely hears of artist from Taiwan. This applies equally to artists in Taiwan and to Taiwanese artists living in Mainland China, then U.S. or Europe. Indeed, Taiwanese art works have commanded far lower prices and less attention than art by artists from mainland China– regardless of where it was actually produced.
While this situation can be understandably frustrating for Taiwanese artists, it has also granted them a unique ability to focus, perhaps more than ever, on the human condition. To quote again from Phaedo, Socrates says: “How can we turn away from direct intuition or even turn the gaze to the invisible?”4. These artists know how. Functioning outside the mainstream, outside the fervor surrounding mainland Chinese art, and often away from their home island, they must constantly create new realms in which to capture, explore and redefine how the subconscious functions in society.
Merleau-Ponty worried famously about who we are, how we can
be sure of what we see, what seeing actually is, and what illusions we
inevitably harbor. Of dreaming, he writes, “If we can withdraw from the
world of perception without knowing it, nothing proves to us that we are ever
in it nor that the observable is ever entirely observable, nor that it is made
of another fabric than the dream. Then the difference between perception and
dream [is not absolute]”5. To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, only the
sleeping can lose every reference mark, every model, every canon of the
articulate. If this is so, the artists in “Outside In” can all be viewed as
dream capturers.
1 Phaedo, 99d-e, trans. Harold North
Fowler (Loeb Classical Library, 1982) as quoted in Jacques Derrida, Memoirs
of the Blind: the self-portrait and Other Ruin, Translated by Pascale, Anne
Brault and Naas, Michael Naas (The University of Chicago press: Chicago and London.
1993), pg. 15.
2 Paul Carus, The teachings of Lao-Tzu, The
Tao Te Ching (St. Martin Press: New York. 2000.), pg31.
David H. Li, Dao De Jing, New Millennium
Translation. Premier Publishing Company, ML 2001.
3 William Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon, or Anti-Art? In Thierry De Duve ed. The
Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp.(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA 1993),
pg.133.
4 Socrates, Phaedo, 99d-e, trans. Harold
Northe Fowler (Loeb Classical Library, 1982) as quoted in Jacques Derrida,
Memoirs of the Blind: the self-portrait and Other Ruin, Translated by Pascale,
Anne Brault and Naas, Michael Naas (The University of Chicago press: Chicago and
London. 1993), pg. 15.
5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and
the Invisible, Claude Lefort, ed.
Translated by Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press, 1968), pg. 6.
Curatorial Essay for the exhibition
Outside In-New Realm for Taiwan Art, 2008
Weatherhead, East Asian Institute, Columbia University, New York City
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