雙軌制台北雙年展的思考—交流展現平台／凝聚社會想像及啟動話語行動的機器

Abstract

With the assistance of well-known international curators and years of internal hard work, the Taipei Biennial has come to be considered one of the more important international biennials. But now it seems to have reached a new checkpoint, such that we must consider: Must we continue to mount an internationally important biennial, which, though it has undergone local packaging and modification, is basically imported from the mainstream of international art? Or should we begin preparing to construct effective capabilities to express, or even enact, a broader subjectivity? From the point of view of the public art institution which has spent years cultivating international exchange, if you compare the Taipei Biennial to the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art's Taiwan Biennial and other Asian biennials, it's not hard to discern the Taipei Biennial's role in international dialogue as well as the new strategic positions it has necessarily adopted towards new relationships to Asia and the world. In practical terms, it is this role and this position that have allowed the Taipei Biennial to become a mechanism for consolidating and accentuating the social imagination and also capable of initiating domestic and international discourse.

But the next question we must face is, in striving to attain these new capabilities, are we equipped with the sufficient tools? Are we ultimately lacking Taiwanese international curators of sufficient caliber? Or is this the case because there are neither clear policies offering guidance nor mechanisms for administrative support? Or, is it because we have not sufficiently and consistently allowed time for development, nor provided sufficient space and resources to experimental platforms, such that this issue of a curator's level of subjectivity and the local inability to produce international level curators has made it so that attendant artistic production has become for the most part unsustainable? For this reason, the author speculates: How has the packaging of multiple curators and its attendant issues been used to structure the Taipei Biennial? Has this method of dual curators been a liability? Or an asset? According to this line of inquiry, this essay will reconsider the issues produced by the 2012 Taipei Biennial "Modern Monsters: Death and Life of Fiction", from the participation of Taiwanese artists to the organizational model of initiating micro-museums, in order to understand whether Taiwan has sufficient ability at this level to respond to the various problems mentioned above.

Finally, by interpreting and assessing both subjective and objective factors, the author attempts to propose a structural model for an alternating, two-track system for the Taipei Biennial, in which one edition would continue to have an international curator plan an exhibition that brings Taiwanese or Asian society into close contact with international art trends, and the subsequent edition of the Taipei Biennial would be collectively developed by Taiwanese, Asian and international curators as well as the museum's internal curatorial team. This would allow both international and local capabilities to develop to their fullest respective extents, rather than as a combination of mishmash ideas and policy declarations.