September, 8th - 17th
Taipei Artist Village & Taipei University of the Arts
Taipei Drift is organised by the College of Fine Arts of Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), with the guest institutions Kunsthochschule Kassel in der Universität Kassel (Germany), Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Finland), Lasalle-Sia College of the Arts (Singapore), École Nationale Superieure d’Art de Bourges (France), University of Cape Town (South Africa), Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Israel), University of Michigan (USA), Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Czech Republic), Griffith University (Australia), the Chosun University of Art (Korea)，and Tainan University of Arts.
The workshop aims to navigate issues in contemporary art and culture with an anchor in Taipei. To this end a range of excursions, site visits and conversations will be initiated in order to experience Taipei’s urban space as a psycho-geography. Experiments, collaborations, brainstorming tools, and workshops will be encouraged throughout the workshop.
The title of the workshop is derived from the cult movie Tokyo Drift. The approach will not only stress the notion of different levels of 'shifting and speeding' in a given space, but will also attempt to reach beyond the city's boundaries. The rapid expansion of urban space in Taipei has created an amalgamation, where old and new, modern and hyper-modern, ugly and glamourous, and finally the dead and the alive are contained in one space altogether. This heterogeneity is inscribed with various periods of the city from the pre-colonial aboriginal period, to the Japanese colonial period. It also marks Taiwan’s ambivalent national identity, and the new social boundaries produced by immigrant labour. Taipei Drift will offer a range of frameworks to help workshop participants interpret the in-between urban spaces, as well their socio-political dimensions.
In keeping with the 2008 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Drift plays an active role in reading and referencing from the local, by sharing and shaping diverse urban experiences with the participation of different cultures. In exploring psychological and geographical effects of collective experience, Taipei Drift reinvents what is pertinent in the local from within and without.
The curatorial team comprises Chen Kai-huang, Lin Hongjohn, Liu Hsi-Chuan, and Huang Chien-Hung. The production assistants are Wu Su-Mei, Liao Yun-Ching, Erica Yen, Wang Pei-Hsu, Ko Tzu-Miao, Lin Why-Son, and Fu Daniel. Taipei Drift is an associate of the Taipei Artist Village and Association for Artist & Culture Exchange. The project was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Education, the National Science Council, the Department of Culture Affairs, and the Council for Culture Affairs, Taiwan.
For program details: 
http://taipeidrift.tnua.edu