Taipei Biennial 2023: Small World, Visitor by Wang YaHui is exhibited at the Cinema Program. Image courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
16 January 2024, Taipei –– Organized by Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) and co-curated by independent curator Freya Chou, director and curator of Beirut Art Center Reem Shadid, and New York-based senior writer and editor Brian Kuan Wood, the Taipei Biennial 2023, titled “Small World,” is currently on view through 24 March 2024. Presenting a diverse range of 58 artists and musicians from more than 20 cities, the Biennial has attracted more than 100,000 visitors since its opening in November. The Biennial hosted a series of programs during the opening week, with conversations, screenings, live performances, listening sessions, DJ parties and more, celebrating the return to the grandeur of the Biennial before the pandemic.
Following in the footsteps of Taipei Biennial 2020, which held an international collaboration with the Centre Pompidou-Metz, TFAM will showcase the Cinema Program and selected video works from Taipei Biennial 2023 “Small World” at SculptureCenter in New York. “Small World Cinema” will run from 25 January through 25 March and feature over 20 video works by several participants, including Taiwanese artists Li Yi-Fan, Su Yu-Hsin, Yin-Ju Chen, and Wang Ya-Hui alongside Taiwanese-American artists Jen Liu and C. Spencer Yeh.
Sound and music connect the “Small World”
Music, in parallel to visual arts, plays an important role in Taipei Biennial 2023 as a medium for communicating and exploring intimate and vulnerable relations between our societies, and ourselves, and each other. By transforming one of the gallery spaces into the Music Room, three groups of musicians are invited to organize diverse programs such as forums, screenings, concerts, listening sessions, and live performances. Segments of the events will be recorded to play back between performance periods in the Music Room.
In an enormous world, the Music Room is designed as a temporary gathering space allowing intercultural exchanges and connections between different small groups of people who make significant contributions to their own fields. In December 2023, the first Music Room program, “ex-DJ,” was organized and hosted by dj sniff in collaboration with turntablists, composers, and performers. Spanning a week, “ex-DJ” kicked off with an introductory lecture by dj sniff on the history of experimental turntable art, followed DJ Rex Chen, a Taichung-based turntablist, who through his own creative process, shared the historical development of experimental music in Taiwan in the 1990s. The second day started with artist talks by SlowPitchSound, a Sci-Fi turntablist from Toronto, and Mariam Rezaei, a turntable composer and performer from Newcastle, followed with a roundtable discussion hosted by dj sniff in the evening on how the practice of turntablism relates to the body, machine, and histories. The program concluded on the third day with a concert by the four internationally acclaimed experimental turntablists. A limited number of mix tapes will be released in the future to showcase their musical practice during the residency and sources of inspiration.
The second Music Room program “Hostbuster,” runs through 27 January 2024. As musicians, artists, curators, and organizers active in Indonesia, Julian Abraham “Togar” & Wok the Rock have cultivated a practice of hosting and being hosted, listening and being listened to. During their month-long residency at the Biennial, they aim to explore and unfold the sonic connection between Indonesia and Taiwan by facilitating a series of gatherings. This multifaceted program takes shape as conversations, listening sessions, jamming sessions, karaoke parties, concerts, film screenings, and more. Through these meetings, they seek out musicians in Taiwan’s Indonesian migrant community, including ID-TW Pop Bureau who has been involved in the Taiwanese music scene for more than a decade, Wu Ting-Kuan and Yogi Music, Lo Shih-Tung (Open Contemporary Art Centre) and Lai Tsung-Yun (Lacking Sound Festival), alongside local punk collective Suck Glue Boys, aiming to strengthen the existing networks of exchange and solidarity as well as build a “sonic library” that can be shared between people from Indonesia and Taiwan.
The third and final Music Room program “Sound Worlds Rotation” will be hosted by Ting Shuo Hear Say from 21 February to 17 March. Based in Tainan, Taiwan, and run by Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Nigel Brown, Ting Shuo Hear Say will invite ten artists for a series of rotating three-day residencies exploring new improvisational possibilities. Recordings, documentation, and other artifacts and traces of the collaborations will remain as “residue” within the space following the residencies. Resonating with the Music Room programs are works in the exhibition that engage with music and sound. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork expands acoustical treatments of space into objects of heightened sensitivity and feeling. Her work Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), 2017 - ongoing, blasts resonant frequencies from an array of blowers which inflate a soft vinyl structure whose black color blurs into the darkness of the room. The complex effect of sonic immersion and spatial reconfiguration causes the room itself to appear emotionally responsive, transforming the private sensations into the ambient and reflective states of being shared with surrounding and sympathetic architecture. In Nikita Gale’s GRAVITY SOLO III (HYPERPERFORMANCE), 2022, the weight of two large pieces of red calcite “play” a droning tone from a keyboard, provoking the question of how systems too vast for our understanding express themselves; in Gale’s other work, PRIVATE DANCER, 2020, stage lights are animated by an unheard soundtrack of music by Tina Turner, meditating on the limits of the body, the demands of celebrity, and silence as a political position. Patricia L. Boyd’s Operator, 2017–ongoing, was shot using a custom-built system of motorized camera rigs, which functions as an interrogation of the soundstage as a site of production. By equating the duration of the film for each presentation with monetary value from loan repayment scheme, Boyd also reflects the economic relationship between artist and institution.
Meanwhile, one of the participating artist groups, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art, brings together a group of Chinese-speaking cultural workers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Malaysia to explore how people with subtly different individual experiences can find a place for themselves in mainstream culture. Through collaborative writing, the participants will produce interpretations of some of the Biennial works, which will be recorded as audio guides and made available in a first-floor corridor of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, alongside a talk in February where they share the process of creation. For further and latest information, please visit the official website (https://www.taipeibiennial.org/2023/), or follow us on Facebook and Instagram (Taipei Fine Arts Museum).
Opening review video: https://reurl.cc/rrDkGZ
Music Room Program and Records: https://www.taipeibiennial.org/2023/list/musicroom
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