Written by Gabriela-Alexandra Banica.
Image credit: Pompiduo by Lunna Campos/ Wikimedia commons, license: CC BY 2.0.
In the third decade of the 21st century, Taiwanese artists and exhibitions have appeared at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Metz, and this could serve as a compelling case study of Taiwan’s pursuit of international recognition through arts.
Through this exploration, this article aims to address the gaps in the current scholarship related to curatorial practices concerning art from contested territories while enriching the field of France-Taiwan curatorial practices. By analysing the current subject of interest, it is hoped that art from more disputed territories can be made accessible to audiences in France, Europe, and around the globe.
Positioned at the intersection between cultural diplomacy, museum and curatorial studies, this article explores the fascinating domain of interacting with a contested state. Four exhibitions from the Centre Pompidou that took place starting in 2020: Yuan Jai 05.02-27.04.2020, Lee Mingwei Sonic Blossom 23.09-18.10.2020, River Lin: An Art History on Escalators 26-27.06.2021, The 12th Taipei Biennial – You and I Don’t Live on the same Planet, (initially organised by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 21.11.2020-14.03.2021, later it was re-staged at the Centre Pompidou-Metz) 6.11.2021-04.04.2022, will be the focus of the analysis.
The formalist approach in museum studies will be used alongside with the critical museum visitor categorisation, including Eugene Dillenburg’s “What, if Anything, is a Museum?” and Margaret Lindauer’s “The Critical Museum Visitor”.
Exhibitions and Their Embedded Knowledge
According to Eugene Dilenburg, exhibitions are the defining feature of the museum. They are what make museums different from every other type of public service organisation. Moreover, exhibitions are the way museums educate the public. According to the author, a museum is “an institution whose core function includes the presentation of public exhibits for the public good”.
Exhibitions are a medium of communication and the physical environment of the show itself, but it is also an experience. Inside exhibitions, “information is not just presented but embedded”, and “every facet of the environment contains meaning, which visitors access through their experience”. Of course, this does not happen “by accident, but by design”. Some professionals consider the exhibition “the medium of media”—as it utilises the written word, image, sound, moving image, performance, installation, and, recently, even digital electronics.
The research done around the four mentioned exhibitions is based on this working definition: “an exhibit is a physical environment designed for the experience of embedded knowledge”. What is the embedded knowledge about Taiwan/the Taiwanese artists that the audiences will access via visiting those exhibitions is one of the questions that the article will try to answer. In order to find an answer to such a question, the matter of the visitor to an exhibition has to be discussed.
Margaret Lindauer puts forward the notion of the visitor is also a critical consumer of the museum and the exhibition visited, not just a passerby. Influenced by semiotic theory, Lindauer sees the museum, and implicitly the exhibitions, as a text or script that has to be decoded. She considers now the time for “a new museum model that declares institutional purpose, acknowledges a point of view, provides cultural context, reveals contradiction, and inspires debate”.
Lindauer fosters in her research the concept of the critical museum visitor. The one who studies “how an exhibition’s visual, written, and spatial features collectively implicate an ideal visitor”. The critical museum visitor is the one that “notes what objects are presented, in what ways, and for what purposes (…) explores what is left unspoken or kept off the display (…) asks who has the most to gain or the most to lose from having this information, collection, or interpretation publicly presented”. Moreover, by characterising the relationship of critical museum visitors to new museum theory and exhibition practice, Lindauer creates a framework for exhibition critique, a needed tool for conducting the research related to Staging and Restaging Taiwan at the Centre Pompidou Taiwanese Art on Display 2020 to Present.
Taiwanese Identity and the New Cultural Imaginary
Notions about Taiwan’s international status must be discussed to present a proper framework for analysing Taiwan’s cultural diplomacy practices related to the contemporary art world. For this, Deon Geldenhuys’s notion of contested state, put forward in his book Contested States in World Politics, 2009, will be used when addressing Taiwan’s relationship with the international community. Special attention will be paid to the chapter dedicated to Taiwan, but the matter of other contested states will be looked into as the research addresses the gaps in the current scholarship related to curatorial practices displayed when dealing with art from territories whose status is contested.
Geldenhuys enlists Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transdniestria, Nagorno-Karabagh, Kosovo, Somaliland, Palestine, Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara and Taiwan as contested states. Taiwan is the oldest of all; its contested statehood dates from the 1940s. He considers that Taiwan provides “a rich illustration of the diversity among contested states” and serves as “an outstanding example of how much an entity can skillfully exploit its limited international space” and that it is a “pioneer in the development of semi-official foreign representation as a substitute for normal diplomatic ties”.
Taiwan’s quest for international recognition is often discussed alongside its identity quest. The two are the most important and, nonetheless, fiercely contested issues both in Taiwan and abroad. Sophie McIntyre’s book: Imagining Taiwan: the role of art in Taiwan’s quest for identity (1987-2010) deals with these topics in a specific time frame. Her research is an in-depth and comprehensive study focusing on visual arts and their role in Taiwan’s identity discourse. The author analyses “the ways in which identity narratives have been imagined, interpreted and transmitted, locally and globally, through the production, selection, display and reception of Taiwan art”. Focusing on the post-martial law era, it deals with a transformative period in Taiwan’s history when “democratisation gave rise to a heightened sense of Taiwanese consciousness and a growing awareness of Taiwan’s place in the world.”
The contested state realised the “limitations of the ‘nation’ as a subject of artistic and curatorial investigation” by the end of the 1990s, and the beginning of the 21st century marked their “seeking to create a niche in the global cultural sphere, artists, curators and museum in Taiwan proactively pursued opportunities for global dialogue and exchange, which introduced new levels of cultural diversity into Taiwan’s art field”. This led to “a new cultural imaginary that embraced the local and the global, and was recognisably transnational”.
This vision was particularly articulated in the Taipei and Venice biennials. An analysis of a selection of the mentioned biennials that took place during the first decade of the 21st century and of the participating artists’ works revealed: “how the world, rather than the ‘nation’, became the prime referent in visual art discourse”. As “the visual art discourse in Taiwan gradually shifted from a national one to a global and transnational outlook”, themes related to “fluidity, variability and multidimensionality of identities” could be seen in artists’ work and curatorial practices.
Furthermore, modernism in Taiwan impacted “the museum space; the specific status of the object of art (and the artist) within the museum space; and lastly, the image of the nation and its transformations as it is projected through” exhibitions. When modernism was enacted in ” the first museum of modern and contemporary art in Taiwan (and one of the first in Asia)”, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum that opened in 1983, “a Chinese modernism was anointed through the exhibitionary system”. But this trend did not last long as it “was challenged and finally abolished in favour of a new exhibitionary system, the Taipei Biennial”, which “inaugurated a new and different status of the work of art, not merely an aesthetic object, but an element of a cultural narrative and discourse”. In the new exhibitionary system, “the work of art was re-framed through the discourse of Taiwanese identity”.
Future Perspectives
The research done around the presence of Taiwanese artists and art at the two Pompidou centres in France, Paris and Metz, is meant to show how any moment the international scene speaks of a new global order, Taiwan is not late in offering a replay to it, reasserting and establishing its new position in the designed setting, and such was the case of the period in question for the current research, 2020 to present. Also, the French institutions proved to be solid partners of Taiwan in the island’s quest for international representation.
Through accessing the exhibitions, the visitors were immerged into knowledge about Taiwan. Even if the island is denied access to almost all the international country represented organisations that foster and nurture world cultures, such as UN or UNESCO, Taiwanese art and culture is present and celebrated in one of the world’s most influential museums.
This article was published as part of a special issue on European Association of Taiwan Studies.