An Opening

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) has an auditorium outfitted with rows of cushioned seats, a raised stage that offers favorable sightlines, lights, a sound system, a high-quality projector, and other good equipment for hosting public programs. The curators of the Taipei Biennial 2023 rejected this venue for their performance and discussion series. Instead, they repurposed one of the largest galleries in the museum for music and conversation. The Music Room, as they called it, was packed with audiences and performers during the exhibition’s opening week and during a series of subsequent residencies by artists and musicians. Absent active programming, the space was dark and contemplative. Visitors could find themselves alone to wander. Through this ebb and flow of energy, the Music Room became a set piece for dramatizing a tension, or rather interdependency, between community and isolation.

“Artists and musicians inevitably need to be isolated and hidden at some points and intensely connected at others,” the curators wrote in their statement, and this is exactly what the space facilitated, starting with performances during opening night celebrations. As lines formed in the museum’s entrance hall for beer dispensed from a gas station pump, C. Spencer Yeh inaugurated the Music Room with a solo performance on amplified violin. Yeh marched around, sometimes using two bows simultaneously to conjure both continuous drones and spiking peaks from the instrument. Yeh had an audience, but the performance felt intimate, almost secret, and at a subterranean remove from the festivities elsewhere, higher up in the building. (As Yeh prepared for his performance, the other artists posed for a big group photo, to which he digitally added himself later.) 

The experimental, introspective sounds of the lone performer offered a special counterpoint to the house music of Terre Thaemlitz a.k.a DJ Sprinkles. Her set inspired feelings of community, or at least encouraged late-night physical togetherness, on an outdoor dance floor. As intensely connected as the audience may have been, the fleeting exuberance didn’t last. The night’s good vibes were later checked by Thaemlitz herself during a public conversation with Alexander Provan. Thaemlitz noted the complicity of art institutions in the cultural circuits of neoliberal capitalism and discussed artistic integrity as a process of combatting and withdrawing from these systems of control and exploitation.  

In videos of the events, available on Youtube, the Music Room has an oceanic quality. Turquoise felt-like fabric covered the floor as well the wood ovaloid structure that defined a loose theater-in-the-round and served as both stage and stadium-style seating. The design was by AAU ANASTAS Studio, founded by Palestinian architects Elias and Yousef Anastas. Speakers, performers, and audience members bob up and down on cresting turquoise waves amid a vast darkness beyond the spotlights. In part because the seats lacked lumbar support, many attendees leaned forward and appeared to be huddling together, staving off the emptiness that surrounds them.

The Music Room was a theatrical intervention, an architectonic experiment in creating a community setting. This made it especially conducive to a conversation between artists Wang Wei and Lai Chih-Sheng, moderated by Anthony Yung of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. In their contributions to the show, both artists engaged directly with the architecture of the museum as well as the modes of attention typically imposed by art galleries.

“Nature is the most important protagonist in Wang Wei’s work,” said Lai Chih-Sheng. Many of the projects that Wang discussed involved creating simulacra of the natural world: a mosaic tile floor placed adjacent to a tree that replicates the shadow cast by that tree at a certain time of day; serpentine mosaic humps placed on a beach that replicate small waves on shore. Yung described Wang Wei’s work as expressing a desire to create art that is “not so different from the world; part of the world, but changed.” Yet this minor change often takes the form of a scission. Wang’s works often block sight lines or create obstructions. His contribution to TB23, Mirror, is a long mosaic mural that replicates the view through the museum windows blocked by the mural itself. He described it as a confrontation of “two realities” that encourage viewers not just to look at the piece but to look at each other.  

What did we see? Wang spoke of finding inspiration for his mosaics at the Beijing zoo, where animals are displayed in pens decorated with mosaic abstractions—tree-like, sky-like, leaf-like— calling to mind, for humans, the animals’ natural habitats. John Berger once wrote about such paradoxical settings. “Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life,” he observed. “The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.” Both Lai and Wang seemed interested in questioning what kinds of encounters are possible in a museum, and what we might observe there.

Lai described his ambition to “shine a spotlight on the bathroom.” His intervention involved removing a partition in front of a second-floor restroom that usually facilitated discreet entrances and exits. He also added a tightly spaced row of wall-mounted electric fans opposite the bathroom entrance, a hyperbolic post-pandemic monument to good ventilation. The space he modified had been a transitional one in TFAM, a hallway where visitors might have expected to gather themselves between galleries. Lai’s simple alterations made the bathroom entrance into a proscenium stage. “Everything becomes part of the scene,” he said.

Lai discussed his practice of subtle interventions that dramatically alter the social contract embedded within architecture, scrambling in particular the distinctions between viewer and viewed, public and private. The architecture of the Music Room achieved something similar. The curvaceous seating often pushed audience members to within social distance of those performing or sharing. The visual distinction between audience and performer effectively vanished during a performance by Li Jiun Yang together with the band Buddha, Tiger, Dog, as part of his presentation The Psychedelic Spiritual Ceremony, an installation on view that traces his artistic journey over the past few decades. The opening events also included a series of casual-feeling listening sessions focused on independent, artist-run record labels. The act of listening became common ground, joining biennial artists and audience members in shared discovery. As people milled around and relaxed, Yogyakarta-based musicians, Julian Abraham “Togar” and Wok the Rock played samples from their label Yes No Wave Music and talked about their work supporting other artists.  The event served as a precursor to their residency for which they hosted musicians from the large Indonesia migrant community in Taiwan.  

When defining the social relations that structure our lives and communities, “listening leads the way,” said Natascha Sadr Haghighian. She spoke with Takuro Mizuta Lippit a.k.a. dj sniff, in a conversation moderated by Brian Kuan Wood. The curators noted that Haghighian and sniff were among the first artists they selected for the exhibition; discussions about their commissions drove further curatorial research and informed the concept for the show overall. This conversation was especially instructive about the biennial’s themes.

Haghighian selected an open-air garden atrium in the center of TFAM for her installation. She fabricated a series of irregular, bulbous forms from iridescent plastic sheets and mounted them on prosthetic walkers. Embedded in the plastic forms were small lights and speakers. Arrayed in the garden, the sculptures played in concert a multi-channel sound piece that included English, Cantonese, Minan, and Mandarin versions of a pop song by Hong Kong icon Karen Mok. Haghighian selected the song by asking museum staff for their favorite break-up songs, seeking “the kind of break-up song for when you’re already in the taxi on the way to the airport.” This music is cherished as a prelude to isolation.  

Haghighian wrote new lyrics for the song and developed the sound piece in collaboration with Taipei-based filmmaker and artist James T. Hong. What brought the two artists together was not an affection for sentimental Cantopop, but the shared experience of caring for a parent with dementia. For Haghighian, the work, titled Watershed, emerged from thinking through multilingual and multigenerational communication. When caring for an elderly parent, she said, the roles of parent and child are upended.

Dj sniff’s commission developed from his concern for “knowledge that isn’t formal knowledge.” His Transformer pays homage to Grandmaster Flash, the pioneering turntablist who developed the fundamental techniques of hip-hop and created innovative electronic equipment to accelerate their adoption. Flash epitomizes informal knowledge, which is likely why he’s treated as a popular performer as opposed to experimental electronic composer. One of these devices he created, the Flash Former, is part of sniff’s installation: a deconstructed turntable set-up in which some of the component electronic parts are suspended by wires in the gallery. The operable, electrified components produce a low hum audible throughout the gallery. This bare sound, made audible by the substrates of the medium, reflects “knowledge that is in our touch, in our feelings: a tactile knowledge that emerges through the contact of our skin and also when we touch instruments.” Before narrative, political meaning, cultural significance, there is the raw sound of electricity moving through equipment, ready to be shaped by virtuosic hands.

Haghighian’s experience of caretaking unearthed knowledge at the same sort of root level. She described a “moment that comes close to … social death, when the social contract between parent and child is abandoned.” This reversal is “extremely cruel,” said Hagighanian, but it is also extremely liberating because something new comes to the fore, “that current, that vibration that runs through bodies and is completely non-ideological, not shaped by social belonging.” The ineluctable contact between human and human, mere life and life, calls into doubt the apparent invariability of social relations.

A fragment of a speech, embedded with other sounds, linked the intimate world of the Music Room–a minor testing ground for different ideas about community and connection–with the big world and its cruelty. True to the exhibition’s theme, the Music Room was special but not precious, designed to hold tensions and contradictions. This is why, as the programs ended and the space emptied, its energy seemed to disperse outwards rather than disappear.