主編語
Editor-in-chief’s Note

《現代美術學報》第34期由本人策劃、台北市立美術館與春之文化基金會合辦的「檔案轉向：東亞當代藝術與台灣（1960-1989）國際學術研討會」論文為內容。會議在2017年4月8-9日舉行，來自澳、德、美、中、馬、新、日、港、法、菲、韓、台等多國學者，共發表共15篇論文發表與8篇個案研究，是近年來國內藝術界較具規模與學術深度的國際會議。會議係為了回應近年來國際間對二次大戰後東亞各國的當代藝術的重探歷史趨勢。

A Note from the Editor-in-chief

CHIANG Po-Shin

Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Institute of Art History and Art Criticism, Tainan National University of the Arts

Abstract

The No.34 issue of the Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum is composed by the theses from the international symposium titled Archival Turn: East Asian Contemporary Art and Taiwan (1960-1989). Collaborating with Taipei Fine Art Museum and Spring Foundation, I planned the conference, which took place on 8th and 9th April 2017, with the participation of scholars from various countries, such as Australia, Germany, America, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, France, the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan. Fifteen essays and eight case studies were presented at the venue, and it was an international symposium with relatively massive scale and academic depth in the Taiwanese art circle lately. The conference aimed to make a response to the recent trend to re-explore the history of contemporary art in various countries of East Asia after World War II.  

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Indeterminate Temporality Embedded in Nam June Paik’s Early Experiments from 1959 to 1963

KIM Hee-young

Professor, Department of Fine Art, College of Arts, Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea

Abstract

This paper revisits Nam June Paik’s early experiment from 1959 to 1963 in Germany as an archive, which is not fixed in history, but still viable to our understanding of the indeterminacy in contemporary experiences. It intends to evoke a future-oriented model of memory by investigating the historical, aesthetic, and socio-cultural context, in which his early work was formed and structured. His early work addresses his critical questions posed on the conventional boundaries between music, sound, electronics, space, and time. His initial interest in music had developed by embracing electronic music and consequently performance. Employing television as a medium, his first solo exhibition Exposition of Music-Electronic Television in Wuppertal manifested his radical experiment in art. This paper contends that Paik’s early experiment, which challenged the conventions in art, was an invasive effort to intervene what was centralized and established. It looks into the conceptual and practical paths, in which Paik developed his interests in indeterminate temporality against the backdrop of the historical context of postwar West Germany. His radical experiment made a breakthrough in both the aesthetic and the political rebels.

Keywords: Nam June Paik, indeterminacy, action music, television, Exposition of Music-Electronic Television

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Descent to the Everyday: The Emergence of Critical Exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1970s

Seng Yu Jin

Senior Curator, National Gallery Singapore

Abstract

This paper focuses on the birth of a new exhibitionary mode—the critical exhibition—that emerged and proliferated across Southeast Asia in the 1970s. It traces the exhibition histories of the region and locates the emergence of the critical exhibition out of the Cold War that resulted in student protest movements, rapid industrialisation, internationalism, and emerging nationalisms. The critical exhibition marked a shift towards the conceptual, the assembly of found objects, the dissolution of the ‘white cube’ gallery into public spaces like streets, a desire for participatory and social engagement, to subvert Euroamerican notions and categories of art centred on a turn to the everyday. The descent to the everyday, a phrase taken from Miyakawa Atsushi's influential text, 'Anti-art: Descent to the Everyday' (1964) that explains the shift towards the rupturing of barriers between art and everyday life. This paper draws on the theory of the everyday as a process of defamiliarising the familiar in everyday life as a form of resistance against the experience of modernity as routine, repetition, bureaucratic and capitalistic. The critical exhibition was transformed into a site for resistance to re-order power relations, and challenge fixed hierarchies as a vehicle in the process of decolonisation.

Keywords: Exhibition, Southeast Asia, art history, the everyday

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Delayed Plasticity: A Preliminary Investigation of the Political Criticism of Sinophone Single-Chann

SING Song-yong

Professor in Graduate Institute of Animation and Film Art, Tainan National University of the Arts

Abstract

Video art emerged in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China during the 1980s. While video art came into existence in Taiwan and Hong Kong during 1983-1984 when their overseas-studying artists returned to the native lands with new thoughts, it had to wait until the late 1980s to have its nascent stage of development in China. The adoption of this Western media, especially single-channel video art, not only allowed those Chinese-speaking artists to embody the experimental ideas, but also helped them to record the political transformations at that time in Sinophone regions. This paper aims to recount the early days of video art development in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, with a special focus on how artists responded to waves after waves of local political turbulence (the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987 and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989) with the artistic experimentations and political criticism of their single-channel video art. The impacts of these volatile events immediately influenced the poetic, linguistic and political expressions of the art works, and continuously shaped the practices and beliefs of the artists long after. Through the lens of particular visual aesthetics, this paper examines the anti-imperialist and anti-hegemonic tone of art works in these three places to cast the fledgling video art of the 1980s in Sinophone area in political light.

Keywords: Single-Channel Video Art, Sinophone, 1980s, Delayed Plasticity, Political Criticism

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The Photographic Conditions of Contemporary Thai Art

Clare Veal

Lecturer, Masters of Asian Art Histories, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

Abstract

This paper takes as a point of departure, Rosalind Krauss’ essay ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, in which she describes the relationship between photography’s indexical function and its position as the example par excellence of Surrealist artistic practice. In the same way, this paper examines changing attitudes in Thailand towards photography’s artistic status and presumed indexicality as paradigmatic examples of a transformation from the modern to the contemporary. Photography’s crucial role in this shift is located in key alterations to the medium’s functions and perceptions of its artistic legitimacy. On the one hand, the acceptance of photography as an art form reflects developments in imbricated networks of legitimation, occurring with the rise of international education and exhibition opportunities in the post-Cold War period. On the other hand, the conditions of photography itself, or rather its ontology, produce a conceptualisation of the contemporary as manifested in a desire for proximity with difference. In examining works by a number of contemporary Thai artists, I argue that photography’s visualisation of the ‘optical unconscious’  allows one to fulfil this desire for contemporaneity, while also pointing to the limits of representation as a means of asserting coevality.

Keywords: contemporary Thai art, contemporary Southeast Asian art, Biennales, photography, documentation

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