Yukie was rescued off the streets of Bali in Taipei County by artist Peng Hung-chih around 10 years ago, and its message, while not quite a prophecy, represents the conceptualization of Peng's imagination. This installation titled "Beware of GOD," part of a larger series titled "Canine Monk," won this year's Taishin Arts Award for visual arts and an accompanying check for around US$30,000.
"I guess I should first give thanks to God," Peng joked while accepting the honors at the awards ceremony held April 15 in Taipei's Zhongshan Hall. The award for performing arts, worth the same amount, was given to the Gang-a-tsui Theater for their production of "Jhu Wen Elopes with the Ghost," a Ming-dynasty comedy about a young scholar who fell in love with the deceased daughter of an innkeeper.
The financial element made these Taiwan's best-paying awards, claimed Hong Konger Becky Cho, executive director of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, which has organized and underwritten the event since its inception in 2002. "It is quite a big sum in the art field," she said, adding that, since many artists operated on the breadline, the award helped them continue doing what they loved to do.
There is also a Jury's Special Award worth around US$10,000. This, explained Minder Chung, was given to a work "not quite deserving of first prize, but, at the same time, was something the judges just couldn't bear not to recognize." Chung, who is dean of the College of Theater Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts, was a member of the performing arts jury. This year, the special award went to visual artist Kao Jun-honn for "The Home Project," which examined the idea, construction and meaning of "home" from the viewpoints of three families.
The works of all 15 finalists, five in visual arts and 10 in performing arts, were displayed on the second floor of the Taishin Bank Tower in Taipei April 8 through May 4.
The Taishin foundation initiated the awards as a way of promoting contemporary arts in Taiwan. As a bank, it was natural for Taishin to provide financial support, Cho said.
Nominations for the awards are collected throughout the year from critics, professors, curators, writers and performers in Taiwan, she explained. The accumulated list of exhibitions and performances is reviewed by a committee, which then selects finalists for each of the two categories. Lastly, a panel comprising 10 local and international jurors decides on the winners. This year, the final selection jury members included professors, curators and directors from East Asian countries, the United States and France.
An important element in designing the awards to establish a good foundation and gain credibility over the last four years was to make sure they involved international expertise, Cho said. "This is twofold: One element is to rely on these experts from different parts of the world to give us comments and opinions on the art, and the second is to incorporate some type of international exchange, because the underlying intention of it all is that these judges, who are really important individuals in the arts, might be able to do something further with Taiwanese artists." Cho gave an example of how one juror, disappointed that his work of choice was not among the finalists, later commissioned the artist for an exhibition in Europe.
"We don't judge what is good or what is bad," said Danny Yung, artistic director of the Hong Kong cultural collective Zuni Icosahedron, who was one of the performing arts jurors. "We are just having a dialectic discourse, which can hopefully help in overall cultural development."
"The importance of this award is in looking back at the production of contemporary art in Taiwan and examine its significance," suggested Lin Hongjohn, associate professor of fine arts at the TNUA and a member of the visual arts jury. "When artists win these awards, their lives change; they become important in Taiwan and overseas. It really helps artists, and it builds a discourse on Taiwanese art, which is important."
Although it is not necessary for the nominees to have concrete connection to Taiwan, the foundation requires "half or more Taiwanese artist involvement in order for a work to qualify, and at least the primary applicant has to be a Taiwanese organization or artist," Cho said. "This award is for local Taiwanese artists and the local Taiwanese scene, and only Taiwanese citizens can apply for it."
"But nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to draw the line because there is a lot of international exchange, whereby you may have a choreographer from France but the dancers are Taiwanese, or you might have a director that's Taiwanese but the singers are foreign," Cho admitted.
"It's really hard to define 'local art,'" Lin added, "because art actually happens internationally, and artists are showing everywhere." Hence, it is not a specific view or interpretation of Taiwan that judges look for. Rather, "innovation and creativity are the key criteria when judging," he said.
In the case of "Beware of GOD," however, it conveniently happened that Peng's work, in addition to being innovative and creative, also carried a distinct connection to Taiwan. His art related to the social phenomenon of gambling in Taiwan, Peng explained. "The text I use in the video is about the appearance of numerous statues in Taiwan during the 1980s, when the lottery was very popular and people went crazy over it. A lot of people went to temples to worship the statues and ask for lucky numbers. When the statues didn't help them win, people got angry and started burning them, cutting off their limbs or decapitating them."
The phenomenon of statue proliferation also paralleled the Taiwanese stray-dog phenomenon, Peng continued. While the dog in the video was his own dog, it had originally been a street dog. Street dogs, tending to be mongrels, were of low status, he said. "Coincidentally, 'dog' spelled backwards is 'god,' and this connection allowed me to create an association between dogs and the divine. So for me, the installation is about social issues, social hierarchies, reversals of these hierarchies, and also about appearances," Peng explained.
"From the perspective of humans, we look down on dogs, but religion is something related to god and the divine, which are things you look up to," he elaborated. "I wanted to blend these superior and inferior perspectives."
"Beware of GOD" was one of eight videos Peng created with assistance from his four-legged companion. Others have included Yukie writing in Sanskrit, Hebrew, English and Arabic. The Arabic video, also displayed at the Taishin Tower exhibition, included a text in Arabic next to a bust of Jesus, displaying such phrases as, "And I will execute vengeance in anger and fury upon the heathen, such as they have not heard."
"Some people think that, because it's in Arabic, it's from the Koran, but it actually comes from the Bible, and I am using an Arabic translation," Peng explained. "I do this because I think people have the idea that Islam is very violent, but the Koran is not violent. It was only when I started looking through the Bible that I found a lot of violent verses, which I had never seen in other religious texts; verses that talked about revenge, blood, killing and even 'killing for peace.' And that is the contradiction, because you can never have peace by killing other people. That was the reason why I wanted to do that piece."
Despite the serious nature of his work, Peng utilizes humor to convey his meanings. He makes his pet dog deliver his solemn messages, constructing the words using dog food, which his dog then eats as he videotapes. In post-production, Peng plays the video backward, making it seem that Yukie is writing the words out.
"Beware of GOD" captured the attention of the Taishin Arts Awards judges, who were impressed by Peng's critical evaluations of society blended delicately with wit and ingenuity. "Humor is a characteristic of my art," he said. "People should be able to communicate with art, and I see humor as a way for people to really connect to it. All I hope is that people can connect to my work."
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