Mar 09 2021

Taoyuan International Art Award Exhibition opening Mid-March; Grand Prize Winner to Be Announced at the Opening Ceremony

by ArtAsiaPacific

*This is a sponsored post.

The Taoyuan International Art Award exhibition will open on March 13, 2021, at the Taoyuan Arts Center, Taiwan. The open call for Taoyuan’s first international art prize, organized by the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA), attracted more than 600 artists from 46 countries to take part, and the grand prize winners will be revealed at the opening ceremony.

The long-anticipated TMoFA is the foremost art institution in the growing city of Taoyuan. With the city being part of the six special municipalities in Taiwan, the importance of the award is undeniable, and it will only be the first step among the museum’s future programs to connect with the international art scene. The Taoyuan International Art Award exhibition is scheduled to run to April 18, 2021, at the Taoyuan Arts Center.

“Taoyuan International Art Award is in the foreground of the development of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, and even more so, that of the vision of Taoyuan city toward the international art scene. We look forward to building a new dynamic art hub to nurture contemporary art creations. At the same time, we also aim at providing artists with another professional exhibiting platform, in the hope of opening up the possibility for dialogues and cooperation through the holding of the award,” says the Director of TMoFA, LIU Chun Lan.

The first international award from the city to promote the power of contemporary art creations

The Taoyuan International Art Award aims at encouraging a diversified development of art practices and cultivating talents in contemporary art. With an expectation to strengthen international exchanges and to provide full freedom of expression, the award accepts applications worldwide. The entry to the competition is not limited to material, category, or size as long as the submission would be a new work that has not been exhibited or recognized by other awards.

The organizer will cover the finalists’ expenses for the basic exhibit build-up and transportation. Their selected entries will be exhibited in the Taoyuan Arts Center for one month, during which an onsite review will take place to decide one Grand Prize winner, three Honorable Mentions, and one Sojourn Award recipient. The Grand Prize winner will receive NTD 500,000; Honorable Mention artists will receive NTD 120,000 each; and the Sojourn Award artist will receive NTD 150,000.

A creative dialogue: 17 artists to showcase together in Taoyuan and reflect on the issues of our time

The 17 selected artists have diverse practices spanning painting, installation, and new media. They invite audiences to rediscover and reflect on various issues, from cultural identity, community, and global politics to history and the notion of time.

The finalists of the Taoyuan International Art Award are: LEE Tek Khean (Malaysia), WANG Yi Wei (Taiwan), KOO Bon A (Korea), Ray KIANG (USA), CHUANG Li Hao (Taiwan), Ana MENDES (Portugal), LIN Yan Xiang (Taiwan), CHANG Chih Chung (Taiwan), Lewis COLBURN (USA), Takahiko SUZUKI (Japan), Liva DUDAREVA (Latvia), Sara WU (Taiwan), Maria VARELA (Greece), CHIANG Chun Yi (Taiwan), TING Chaong Wen (Taiwan), Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh), CHIEN Yu Jen (Taiwan).

The award ceremony will take place following the opening of the exhibition on March 13, 2021. The event will be livestreamed via TMoFA’s Facebook and YouTube at 14:30 (GMT+8). During the exhibition period, the museums will also be launching a series of onsite events to invite the audience to have further engagement with the artists and artworks.

ANA MENDES (Portugal)’s The People’s Collection is a project, initiated in 2014, in which people originating from colonized countries are invited to visit ethnographic museums worldwide and rethink their identity in a post-colonial context. At the end of the visit, they may choose an object that they think should be returned to the country of origin. Afterwards, Mendes visits the museum, photographs the objects and creates a collection of postcards that are named after each participant. It has been developed in over 20 museums worldwide, involving more than 100 participants.

Soil degradation has created problems that affect the entire biosphere cycle, such as climate change, food production decline, and decreasing biodiversity. CHIANG CHUN YI (Taiwan)’s Holobiont Project: Ji-mi is an attempt to understand the subtle relationship between soil, microorganisms, crops and people through observing the symbiotic changes between crops and soil bacteria and by using the senses of smell and vision. Through the guidance of smell, we will further consider the layers in the interrelationship and reflect on the ecological connections and impacts.

CHIEN YU JEN (Taiwan)’s Workers Holding Placards – a Portrait Project takes the workers holding placards as the subject, and uses the artist’s physical action to record the workers’ labouring state. The project attempts to create a reversal of the imagination of portrait painting. Through the artist’s action and creative process, it responds to a social practice highly common to this generation. It is used to explore how body image is currently presented, as well as the complex relationship resulting from the dynamic tension between creative labor, individual, collective, and social mechanisms.

In MARIA VARELA (Greece)’s Rugs of Life, traditional Moroccan Amazigh weaving motifs are reframed into a new typology. Basic traditional symbols as found in folklore are initially deconstructed according to CONWAY’s Game of Life algorithm. The traditional motifs are transcribed onto organic computational entities which evolve in a cellular automaton environment wherein simple rules introduce ever increasing complexity over the specific time frames of algorithmic generations. Local artisans are subsequently invited to use the deconstructed motif patterns to incorporate these patterns and create new compositions on the rugs instinctively, driven from their long experience. The traditional rug weaving is in this way reconfigured into a contemporary design which combines an algorithmically generative pattern evolution, a storehouse of cultural knowledge and human craftsmanship of the highest level. These new patterns thus come to become a prime example of machine intelligence, human storytelling and physical labor collaborating in the creation of a new way of not only understanding but also being in the world.

The concept of land is traditionally conceived by mapping or creating border restrictions. Living in the post-colonial era, the war, border restrictions, and privatisations of land have created massive migration of human population. The indigenous people and the inhabitant are then marginalized, while the natural catastrophe can change immediately the maps of this present world. MIZANUR RAHMAN CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh)’s video LAND investigates the land that exist in-between real and alter space and recalls the abstraction of human existence.

The title of CHANG CHIH CHUNG (Taiwan)’s Fabricating Mandarin Duck is a term originated from Wangan Island and Jiangjun Islet in Penghu, Taiwan, which means "the construction of the 24th Base of Shinyo Tokubetsu Kogekitai (naval suicide squad).”

This artwork continues with the artist’s recent series of OHP installations and interweaves two narratives of the gloomy war history during the end of Japanese Colonial Period in Taiwan and the history of misusing and misappropriating the name of a famous waterfowl “Mandarin Duck (Yuan Yang)” in Chinese literature, which vaguely correspond to each other. Through various approaches of geopolitics, biology and deconstruction of literary texts, the name of the Japanese naval base “Mandarin Duck Cave” seems to validate the inevitable and absurd fate of the species. This is Taiwan’s “allegory of the cave” that reflects our truth, distortion as well as the eternal blind spot in the gloomy darkness.

Comprising both Into the Light… and Blue Book, RAY KIANG (USA)’s The Invisible initiates a dialogue leading the viewer to reflect upon the complexities of global politics and the social constructs within which all societies reside. This presentation is a conceptual dissection of the tension among language, law, social constructs and individual beliefs. The two pieces presented together create a conceptual poem that initiates awareness and reflection.

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