Running into its 7th edition in 2019, last year’s Asian Art Biennial was hosted at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, Taiwan, and co-curated by Ho Tzu-Nyen1 from Singapore and Hsu Chia-Wei2 from Taiwan.
When I was a kid, two of the many things about Taiwan that we were taught in school were Alishan and Sun Moon Lake. The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea / 來自山與海的異人, the title and location of the Biennial, seemed more like an intentional choice than a coincidence. The concept of the Biennial was deciphered with the help of an illustrative diagram by the curators, which was set out as the blueprint for the entire Biennial and, in itself, felt refreshingly new.
In between the highs and the lows, the rocks and the clouds, the sea and the mountain, the water and the plate, enters the “void”. According to one of the curators, the “void” acts as an empty space, a mandala, as well as a centre point for humans, or “Strangers”, to creatively rethink the position they occupy within a greater system in a newer version of our world populated by many other objects, things, and beings, while addressing urgent political and ecological crises that the world, and especially Asia, is currently dealing with. We are presenting a two-part visual documentation of the Biennial, for the second chapter of the series, please follow the link.
Footnotes
1. Ho Tzu-Nyen (何子彥, b. 1976) is a Singaporean artist and filmmaker known for research-driven multimedia works exploring history, mythology, and identity.
2. Hsu Chia-Wei (許家維, b. 1983) is a Taiwanese artist who works between moving image, installation, and archival research, often tracing obscured histories and regional memory.