The relationship between history and fiction will be the subject of this year’s Taipei Biennial, one of the largest exhibitions of contemporary art in Taiwan, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum announced July 17.
Scheduled to open Sept. 29, “Modern Monster/Death and Life of Fiction” is designed to make “viewers reflect on how fiction has made history that confines our thinking about the past,” according to Anselm Franke, Berlin-based curator invited by the TFAM to organize the biennial.
Franke noted that in the globalized modern world, what is considered rational has come to have irrational consequences for humans. “A salient example is the way in which market mechanisms recently ended up causing financial meltdowns.”
According to the museum, the blueprint for this year’s biennial was inspired by “The Monster That is History,” a 2004 book by literary scholar David Der-wei Wang that examines the representation of the 20th century Chinese-speaking world’s violent history. The book and exhibition refer to works by pioneering modern Chinese novelist Lu Xun (1881-1936) and others that look at the roles of fear, violence and irrationality in the seemingly rational desire for progress.
In this respect, “the biennale takes a very ethnic Chinese approach in addressing the many current issues surrounding globalization,” TFAM Director Huang Hai-ming said.
“The audience will experience modern violence through art,” he added.
The show will also include a series of events titled “Mini-museums,” where museum-goers will be stimulated to reflect on how museums also write history.
A total of 40 artists and groups will participate in the biennale, with nine from Taiwan and one-third of all projects to be designed particularly for the Taipei show.
The eighth Taipei Biennale will run till Jan. 13, 2013, at TFAM and the Paper Mill in the capital city’s Shilin District. (THN)