Archive on Live

Through the lens of Taiwan’s political development, the long history of the 1990s began with the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 and ended in 2000 when CHEN Shui-Bian was elected as the president. Within those years, the symbolic state violence gradually became mild, allowing multiple social forces to burst from the existing repression as they rapidly emerged from a civil society. It was during the same period that the newspaper ban was lifted and the number of cable television channels increased, as if to suggest that the whole society were self-representing in a performative way. As both the individual and the society were seeking self-identity in the 1990s, the exploration featuring body as the medium and exhibition/performance as the form created a unique artistic landscape.

In this respect, either cinema, theatrical event, or performance art offered a new and differnet exploration in terms of the establishment of diverse social roles, the use of body, the development of performative techniques and the reexamination of an institutionalized body. When it came to the new age with a recently formed Taiwanese subjectivity, especially through the gradual process of institutionalization and professionalization, the fierce boldness brandished in the 1990s has lost its once irrepressible impulse, and what remains is mostly the form reminiscent of the sentiments, if not to become another pioneer ready to be borrowed by the recently developed art forms such as live art, participatory art, immersive art, etc. The differnet contexts provide a motivation for us to return to the 1990s to investigate into the genealogy of the body on display at that time. Following CHEN Wu-Kang’s exploration of the tradition, we think about how theatrical events frame our understanding of exhibition/performance in the contemporary world; meanwhile, KAO Jun-Honn’s self-explorative journey to the end of the 1990s brings us back to the self-addressed issue of the performance art scene at that time, demonstrating in slices the general spirit of the 1990s where both the individual and the whole society were dedicated to the pursuit of identity.

Performance Process

The tendency of performance and reenactment has lately suggested how reproduction and production(or representation and presentation) speculatively intersect in artistic practice, while expanding the spectrum of live art in the contexts of historicalization, diffusion and liveness.

Artists graft the bodies, texts and notions of selves or others collectively onto new works of art as creative strategies. Extending previous works of their own, they investigate and renew specific and ongoing research and concern; revisiting or subverting works of other artists, they propose alternative perspectives; they borrow and collect an individual history of viewer-turned-participants to be part of their work; they as well reply to and forward those called ready-made to negotiate what the originality arguably means today. Back and forth between“mine” and“theirs,” the iteration makes such artistic process performative with a chain of open-ended, reusable and process-oriented matters. Continuously,“in-process” has become how artists act, move and perform.

To navigate the in-process performativity, the section Performance Process: Rehearsing, Restaging or Reentering situates projects as a conceptual and immersive instrument in which artists are invited to replay and revise their or others’ work with participants. Artist-duo CHIANG Tao and TSENG Yen-Ting will be encoding their concerted research and practice on the intersection of performing object, the sonic and surroundings. SU Pin-Wen will be reforming her radical investigation on feminist sexuality and ecology through the lens of cultural studies and performance. River LIN will be exploring the notion of expanded choreography through Gutai artists who have pioneered performance art in postwar-Japan context.

Through“rehearsing” the methodology and findings of artistic research,“restaging” discourse, notions and practice of the works of the artists and(or)“reentering” archival situations without conclusive aspects, this project series manifests discursive and performative process between(re)performance and reenactment.

(Photo: CHEN You-wei)

Display on Live

Aiming at the two concepts to“retell the historical narrative” and to“alienate the everyday life,” Display on Liveinvites artists to develop and present their interpretations of historical narrative, daily life, and atemporal text, while the performative exhibition also evokes various fragments from both the macrocosmic(of the history and the mass) and microcosmic(of the individual) perspective. The exhibits allow us to see how the artists bring in the forms of performing arts to rewrite and to expand the performative nature practiced in visual arts. The creative attempts featured in Display on Liveshow a focus on archive interpretation, spatial quality, and temporal expressions with several works emphasizing on the employment of the spectatorial perceptions. To briefly summarize, it adopts a greater scale of the performative framework to demonstrate a more complicated and multi-dimensional concept.

The artist as an interpreter in the practice of visual arts often anchors the attempted discussion with“representation.” However, when the form of the narrative departs from its material nature(as in painting and sculpture), to“perform” becomes the most efficient expression apart from image. Performance artists express the concepts through the physical practice of the body, while live art in a performative context offers the most powerful retelling of the text. With live art, the narrative structure of the work is performed and thus returns to the omission and oblivion of the text with an attempt to search for a new form of telling. In the performative display, the work replicates the shapes of life and alienates the context for the spectators to be aware of the gap and singularity in-between. Through the arrangement of sounds and senses, eventually, the work recruits spectators’ physicality and consciousness, if not to expand and enlarge it, allowing the performed scene to develop an abstract form within the spectator’s body as if they were experiencing some performative moment as well.

Featuring siren eun young jung from Korea, Samson YOUNG and LEE Kit from Hong Kong, and the Taiwanese artists including SU Hui-Yu, WANG Te-Yu, Joyce HO & Snow HUANG, CHIA Chien-Ju, CHANG Wen-Hsuan, and LEE Ming-Chen, Display on Livereexamines the different meanings of liveness between the motion of the performance and the stillness of the image/installation.