Artists have often asked 'What is art?' Now the curators of the 2010 Taipei Biennial, which opened at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum earlier this month, are taking that process a step farther by asking 'What is an exhibition?'
The question is timely and especially relevant in this region, given the Taipei Biennial opens during what can be considered the Asian biennial season.
It has been estimated there are more than 200 biennial art exhibitions worldwide, and the two big South Korean events - Pusan and Kwangju - started just days after Taipei's opening. The Korean exhibitions showcase more than 200 artists between them. The Shanghai Biennial will open on October 23 and promises to be a mammoth showcase of star artists.
The Taipei event is, however, attempting to buck the trend of bigger, newer and more expensive. To this effect, curators Hongjohn Lin and Tirdad Zolghadr have done things that are just not done: they invited a small number of artists - only 24 - and a third of those are repeats from the previous biennial. They have also invited both artists and outside groups to create works that will critique the biennial even as it happens.
'It can be terrifying,' says Zolghadr, an Iranian-born curator and art critic based in Berlin.
Still, he believes these steps are necessary in order to ask, as he did in his curator's statement: 'What can you do with a biennial that you cannot do with anything else?'
