Preface

Art museums play unique roles in the arts sector, and contemporary art museums become venues collecting different opinions and knowledge, platforms depicting trends and vibes. Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) welcomes artists to apply for exhibiting at its halls and organises Taipei Art Awards annually, and it also initiates open call for curatorial projects to offer its resources to independent curators and allow them to introduce issues and art practices to TFAM.

The exhibition Cross-Domain Reading & Writing: A Biblioecology in Art, a collaboration of JIAN Liting and PO Ya-Ting, stands out in the Museum's 2nd call for curatorial projects. It begins with cultural activities related to books, such as reading, writing, conserving, and categorising, to examine the relation between art and books. The exhibition titled "Cross-Domain Reading & Writing" illustrates interdisciplinary practices of art and cross-domain solution in IT industry, which suggests sharing information with other domains as a metaphor to liken new state of art through interdisciplinary practices.
The two curators tackle with cultural universals with cross-cultural perspectives, exploring how artists respond to common knowledge, construction of knowledge, and knowledge system with their artworks. They categorise the issues into three aspects, reading and researching, writing and bookmaking, and books and knowledge schemes, whilst they do not consider it necessary to classify artworks and practices of art under these schemes; instead, they divide the exhibition hall into two separate spaces, the dark room and the library, to contain different forms of art. The exhibiting works give conceptual interpretation on objects and historical archives to different degrees. The artists begin with questions and curiosity and take on different paths for exploration of knowledge, which remind us of transitional forms of knowledge schemes and enunciate that knowledge itself is changing and people's varied interpretation gives it different remarks as well.
Production of knowledge is an ongoing process and the environment built up accordingly lasts longer than the very present moment as expansion and re-production will take their place. Whilst artists examine knowledge framework through their own works, we should be aware of how an exhibition functions in society as a medium facing the public, a channel generating knowledge, and the curatorial team can thus incorporate diverse practices to create theory upon artworks.
This exhibition has observation and discussion on certain phenomenon to explore how they began, and it also raises questions and assumption to the key issue: what do people of the art segment read? The curatorial team present not only artworks speaking of processes made by artists but their research and analysis indicating production, The Most Popular References of Art Theses and Dissertation in Taiwan 2017. Moreover, the diverse events regarding this exhibition, including the online book fair collaborated with TAZZE, the Eslite book fair collaborated with Eslite Bookstore, and several series of talks and workshops, all showcase the curators' aim to cross different segments to integrate multiple resources.
An exhibition is made possible through endless series of collaboration. Here I want to thank all the participated parties for making this exhibition possible. My special thanks go to WANG Te-Yu, HSU Manray, Iris Shu-Ping HUANG, TANG Fu-Kuen, Jo HSIAO, and Frankie SU of the judging panel for their efforts in selecting the curatorial projects, also the curators, the participating artists, all the people who worked for this exhibition with different responsibilities, and our partners and sponsors.

Ping LIN
Director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum