DIRECTOR'S PREFACE

The key person for Erwin Wurm's solo exhibition in Taipei Fine Arts Museum is Jérôme Sans, co-curator of The Sky is the Limit at the Taipei Biennial 2000. He invited Erwin Wurm to Taipei who realized a series of One Minute Sculptures in the streets of the city. Twenty years later, the artist and the curator returned to TFAM with One Minute in Taipei. The exhibition begins with Outdoor Sculptures (Taipei) and extends to Vienna, where Wurm currently lives, with Indoor Sculptures (Vienna). The old and new works juxtapose and reference each other to create photograph sculptures, unveiling this exhibition of cultural crossing between two cities.

The exhibition also features One Minute Sculptures, Word Sculptures, Performative Sculptures, and Climbing Taipei 101. Wurm's iconic work One Minute Sculptures turns the participants into exhibits momentarily to challenge the classic and sacred notion of sculptures through public participation and its performativity. Word Sculptures transforms words into liquid sculptures in space at the moment when the participants recite the texts. The Taipei edition of Performative Sculptures are a new series of physical performances on clay models of landmark Taiwanese buildings. The performers performed an instructed physical exercise on these models to change their shapes while listening to a reading in Chinese of a text by the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Climbing Taipei 101 represents the iconic building which we are supposed to watch from a distance in front of the viewers to rethink the relationship of the scale of this building and themselves while touching and climbing it.

The exhibition One Minute in Taipei features a high degree of publicness with audience participation as the essence. It is inevitable that we had to make compromises in organizing this exhibition amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It can be described as a miracle that the exhibition opened on schedule. First of all, I would like to thank the crew of VOGUE magazine for travelling to Vienna with TFAM's exhibition team for pre-production, assisting the artist in his creative practice and expanding the public domain of his creation. Special thanks to the artist and curator for giving their guidance online remotely and opening the exhibition with their virtual presence via video conferencing. In response to the pandemic, they have flexibly modified the operation mode of the exhibition, the way the audience interact with the objects to minimize skin contact, as well as made alternative programs for this exhibition, while considering our actual needs with great creativity. I want to thank the faculty and students of Tatung University for their full support in the gallery. They stand on the front line to replace the audience in the interaction with the objects and become the protagonist of being watched because the audience cannot participate in the One Minute Sculptures. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the partners and performers who participated in the preparatory process. This exhibition was successfully launched because of your support. One Minute in Taipei in the prevention mode to fight Covid-19 inevitably has an unspeakable sense of suppression. The audience quietly concentrates on watching the demonstration of the performers instead of having their own participation experience. I hope the pandemic will be behind us as soon as possible, the works can gradually restore their original appearance and spirit, and we can jointly rethink the relationship between humans and objects again.

Ping Lin / Director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum

CONTENTS

Ping Lin
└ Director's Preface

Jérôme Sans
└ One Minute to Eternity…

Erwin Wurm—Interviewed by Jérôme Sans
└ Aesthetics of Paradoxes and Absurdity

One Minute Sculptures
Word Sculptures
Climbing Taipei 101
Performative Sculptures
Outdoor Sculptures (Taipei)
Indoor Sculptures (Vienna)

Acknowledgments