Comments on the Finalist

With “secret” and “south” as metaphors, the exhibition on the one hand examines the forgotten puzzle of Taiwanese art history and the history of museum collection, particularly the aspects that have been stressed or overlooked due to the continuation of diplomacy and politics. On the other hand, the curator re-examines the exhibition mechanism and disparities in the art history studies built on geographical reality and on historical identity, and investigates whether the art ecology continuously changes with the international environment, economy and trade as well as strategic positions. As part of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s experimental collection exhibition series, artworks included in the museum collection can still be adapted to reflect the situations at the time of the exhibition. This is also the curator’s strategy to render the exhibition mechanism more political. (Commentator / WU Chieh-Hsiang)

Artwork Introduction

The “Global South” roughly refers to a set of developing countries, former colonies and non-Western cultural regions, among which Taiwan finds itself in a rather paradoxical position in this regard. From serving as a springboard for the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia during the period of Japanese rule, to providing logistics facilities during the Cold War, and then looking for allies despite difficult diplomatic situations, Taiwan’s role as a go-between seems to be a recurrent theme in the history. Most of the works in the exhibition are from the collection of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and some from different museums and foundations in Taiwan. In a way, this exhibition not only features the history of post-war artistic exchanges between Taiwan and the “Global South,” it also offers a glimpse into the art from the South in Taiwan’s museum collections.

About the Artist

TAKAMORI Nobuo. He is an independent curator and the director of Outsiders Factory, a curators collective. He has endeavored in facilitating contemporary artistic exchanges between Taiwan and other heterogeneous cultural regions as well as researching on the history of modern and contemporary artistic  exchanges, through which he highlights the diverse cultural contexts and curatorial narratives in Taiwan’s visual art. His curatorial works in recent years include Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition – The Return of Ghosts (2014), Tabaco, Carpet, Lunch Box, Textile Machinery and Cave Men: The Narratives of Craftsmanship and Technologies in Contemporary Art (2017), The Middleman, the Backpacker, the Alien Species and the Time Traveler (2019), etc.