Art Histories of a Forever War:
Modernism between Space and Home
The Cold War and the Taiwanese Modernism

Curated by guest curators Kathleen DITZIG (Singapore) and HSU Fang-Tze (Taiwan), the exhibition features modernist classics from TFAM’s permanent collection presented alongside artworks loaned from contemporary artists and archival materials from Taiwan and around the world.

With the Cold War as its analytical point of departure, the exhibition examines the resonances of the Space Race and the idea of Asian modern art and design upon the development of the Chinese Modern Art movement from Taiwan. In addition to exhibiting artworks, the exhibition also showcases different historical materials that together constellate the development of modern art in Taiwan as part of a global history. Organized through three interwoven themes, the exhibition addresses the complex contexts that inform this history through examining the effects of the Space Race, United States Foreign aid projects and aesthetic networks of the Free World.

Art Histories of a Forever War is as much an inquiry into the interrelations between a global cultural Cold War and Taiwan art history as it is an artistic investigation of the persistent legacies of this longue durée, a forever war that endures in the art histories we write and the objects we populate our lives with.

News

• 2021/10/22 | Press Release | Launch of Out of Bounds: TFAM Expansion 
• 2021/10/21 | Visitors Information | From Oct. 26th to Nov. 7th, the museum's Main Entrance is temporarily closed. Please enter the museum from the South Entrance.

The Modern Exorcist 2021/11/27 - 2022/03/06  1F Galleries 1A& 1B, Lobby (1F), Courtyard (BF)  In the posthuman era, if “exorcist” replaces “God,” will the concept of divinely created humanity collapse as well? And if, through the ritual of exorcism, the existence of humans becomes the existence of nothingness, how can everyone in the future world attain the heights of technological civilization, and where will we go from there? This exhibition explores and poses questions about different contemporary propositions of posthumanity. This generation of artists has perceived the current chaotic, indeterminate state of change, and has thus shifted to the form of new technology. All the installations in the exhibition are based on the underlying idea of techno-animism, evoking the constantly escalating influence of the central premises of posthumanism. These ideas include prosthetic or virtual bodies such as the digital forms of Second Life, networks of informationized economic systems generated by high-speed algorithms, and the chain of connections joining people to objects and other species. The exhibition blends objects, sound and images, including static displays and live exhibition: Yin-Ju Chen, Kate Cooper, Cécile B. Evans, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Pakui Hardware, Po-Chih Huang, Stefan Kaegi / Rimini Protokoll, Lawrence Liu, Su-Yuan Wu, Slow Geng and the M-Exo Con Production Committee will collectively interpret the new vantage points of interdisciplinary aesthetics.

Affect Machine: Self-healing in the Post-Capitalist Era 2021/09/18 - 2021/12/19  BF Galleries F& E The exhibition explores an “affective” art history through the audio-visual poetics of 7 artists and art collectives, including Rebecca Horn, Chen Chen-Yu, Cam Xanh, John Akomfrah, Olafur Eliasson, Chu Hao-Pei and Lee Chang-Ming. Affect emerged with various crises, such as the spectacle, anxiety, and violence in the era of post-capitalism. “Affect” and “machine” appear to be antithetical, they coexist in the painting machine, prosthesis, biological and informational coding of the exhibits. We invite the audience to imagine the exhibition as an ensemble of healing machines. In the process of negotiating with various mediums, viewers can practice self-pacifying and the releasing of tension.

Worldward: The Transformative Force of Art in Taiwan’s New Cultural Movement 2021/10/02 - 2021/11/28  3F Gallery 3A This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Taiwan Cultural Association (“TCA”). As the most important organization of the nationalist movement and ideological enlightenment of Taiwan in the 1920s, TCA advocated a new cultural movement to “achieve cultural progress”, including launching a petition movement to allow Taiwanese to participate in politics and striving to follow the trend of modernization. To commemorate this occasion, we are curating the exhibition featuring mainly classic representative works of the first generation of Taiwanese artists during the period of Japanese rule from the 1920s to the 1940s from our collection.

 

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