Venue:
Palazzo delle Prigioni
Castello 4209
San Marco

Vaporetto station S. Zaccaria,
next to Palazzo Ducale

Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan

7 June - 22 November 2009
Tuesday to Sunday 10 am 6 pm

Press Preview: 4 - 6 June 2009, 10 am - 8 pm
Vernissage: 5 June 2009, 6 pm - 8 pm

Artists:

Chien-Chi CHANG
* 1961 Taichung, Taiwan. Lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
more info & photos

CHEN Chieh-Jen
* 1960 Taoyuan, Taiwan. Lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
more info & photos

HSIEH Ying-Chun
* 1954 Hualien, Taiwan. Lives in Taiwan and China.
more info & photos

Cheng-Ta YU
* 1983 Tainan, Taiwan. Lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
more info & photos

Commissioner: Fang-Wei CHANG
Director, The Biennial and International Projects Office, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. She was Chief Curator of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum during 2002-08 and has organized the 1998-2008 Taipei Biennials and working as in-house curator, collaborating with Taipei Biennial curators. She has also organized the Taiwan Pavilion exhibition of 1997-2007 Venice Biennial, working with 4 curators.
more information

Consulting Committee:
Amy CHENG, Manray HSU, Hong John LIN, Chia-Chi Jason WANG, Jun-Jieh WANG

For a long time, the Taiwanese people have been locked in a difficult political conundrum in terms of foreign affairs, and have developed their own means of reaction and response, both individually and collectively. At this year's Venice Biennale, the Taiwan Pavilion takes Foreign Affairs as its title and to serve as the exhibition's unifying metaphor and concept. The selection of works explores the practical state of cross-regional art in the context of the operative logic of contemporary global politics, economics and society; alternative possibilities for communicative interaction; and also the question of Taiwan's status and identity. The participating artists, according to their own identities, enter into other regions, with their unique personal modes of practical application - to observe, document, and intervene - in order to communicate, interact and collide, with that area of the world, concretely putting a system of foreign affairs into action.

The four artists featured in this exhibition share common points of intersection. They have all long focused on the unequal treatment of the disadvantaged in the midst of globalisation, and have taken action through distinctive, personal, and practical means. Furthermore, they have all engaged in dialogue and interaction with other areas of the world, from the individual identity of an artist and through direct involvement, even personally colliding with specific international systems in order to highlight its problematics. Whether it be the social-activist open architecture that Hsieh Ying-Chun has employed both in Taiwan and China, Chen Chieh-Jen's exploration on the borders of Empire that has commonly presented in Taiwan since World War II, Chien-Chi Chang's long-term concern for the problem of illegal immigration between China and the United States, or Cheng-Ta Yu's video of foreign women married into Taiwanese society and the circumstances of international travellers visiting Taiwan, all are personal, informal expressions and practical applications of "actual foreign affairs," exploring the current state of the individual in the imbalanced unsymmetrical circumstances of globalisation.

Extracts from a
>> Press release
General information, theme, meaning and implications of the term "Foreign affairs" in the context of the exhibition, artists, contacts, etc.

Organizer:
Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan

See also in Universes in Universe:

Taiwan - Venice Biennale 2007
Shih-chieh Huang, Kuo-min Lee, Huang-chen Tang, Ming-liang Tsai, VIVA

Taiwan - Venice Biennale 2005
Chung-li Kao, I-chen Kuo, Hsin-i Eva Lin, Kuang-yu Tsui

Taiwan - Venice Biennale 2003
Lee Mingwei, Daniel Lee, Shu Lea Cheang, Yuan Goang-ming

Taiwan - Venice Biennale 2001
Chang Chien-chi, Lin Michael Ming Hong, Shu-Min Lin, Liu Shi-fen, Wang Wen-chih

Taiwan - artist's index
All the artists from Taiwan in Universes in Universe.

Taipei Biennial
Summary of information. Presentation and photos of the 6th Taipei Biennial, 2008

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