Artists Explore Notions of the Body and Land at Taoyuan Arts Center
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Delphine Pouillé, the Grand Award winner of the 2023 Taoyuan International Art Award (TIAA), will present her installation Pull Up (2020) alongside works by 14 finalists at Taoyuan Arts Center until 30 April 2023.

TIAA is organised by the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA), which has been establishing itself as a major player in Taiwan's cultural sector with ambitious curatorial projects and art competitions. The museum actively supports emerging international artists through TIAA, formerly the Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award, which it expanded in 2020 to accept entries from overseas.

This year's TIAA received 687 submissions from around the world, with the 15 finalists hailing from Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, Peru, Syria, and the United States. 'An international perspective, local creation and contemplation are the common outstanding features of these award-winning artists,' said curator and critic Hou Hanru, who was among the international jury for the finals.

While eclectic in their choice of medium—video, embroidery, sound, and photography, but also chocolate and foam—the artists are united in their engagement with the human body that extends into the diverse notions of identity, migration, nationhood, and history.

Delphine Pouillé, who was announced the Grand Award winner on 21 March, combines sculpture and drawing to produce work centred on the body. Her winning work Pull Up (2020) shows a sheet of black foam, suspended from the ceiling and crawling across the floor, with a partial cut-out of a T-shaped torso. The actual body sags on the floor, exhausted, while its negative counterpart appears to stand at its full exertion in a reversal of associations between athletic tenacity and the concrete body.

The body and its presence and absence, as well as movement across the land are central concerns in the works by three Honourable Mention winners Belén Santamarina, Lee Kai-Chung, and Yan Jiao.

Santamarina takes an empathetic approach to bodies in Migran-t, First skin: Nostalgia (2020–2021), embroidering human hair onto flat cotton sheets. She began the work when she moved from Argentina to the UK, utilising the ubiquity of hair and fabric to activate a smooth transition between the personal and collective. The resulting work is an arresting imagery evocative of topographic maps, whose meandering contours recount drawings and poems by the artist and her friends.

Lee's multi-channel installation The Shadow Lands Yonder (2022) combines research and creative writing to travel back in time, tracing the stories of Manchu-Japanese settlers who were repatriated to Japan after its surrender in 1945. Seven videos are installed in a narrow room with hay on the floor, where scenes of grey-blue winter in northeast China abound. As the refugees cross a field or huddle together to brace the cold, Lee brings to life a multi-layered historical consciousness that resonates with forced displacement and identity transition in the present-day.

Yan explores ways of documenting disappearance in I CAN NOT BE WITH YOU (2021), a multi-channel installation that began with word searches on China's website for missing persons. Negative terms were commonplace, among them 'hunchback', 'depression', and 'mental retardation', that led the artist to consider the nuances of language and difficulties of representing such individuals.

In her work, Yan shows herself standing still in front of a structure or in the midst of nondescript landscapes as subtitles describe the missing. 'She can do house work and farming, has a poor sense of direction, can't use money,' one scene reads, showing the artist in a bright pink jacket, while another says, 'Take care of yourself.'

The complexities of identity building and authenticity are also central to Li Kuei-Pi's Clement Town (2022), comprising video installations that focus on the eponymous town in Uttarakhand, India. Built with the financial support of the Taiwanese government during the Cold War, Clement Town was home to, among civilians, local intelligence agents working for Taiwan to infiltrate China and prevent the spread of communism.

Li's work revolves around three sets of photographs taken during this time, depicting military personnels and refugees who were, in fact, villagers hired by intelligence officers for propaganda. What the viewer sees in her videos are not reenactments of the staged photographs, as some might expect with works involving historical archives, but the ten seconds before said images were taken. Li imagines yet another fake reality, complicating the already slippery boundary between the real and fictional.

Liu Zi-Ping navigates farther into the history of Taiwan, creating cyanotype portraits of Austronesian groups in Taiwan in the installation Austronesian Icon (2022). Encased in oval frames, these works feature silhouettes that refer to Japanese anthropologist and folklorist Mori Ushinoske's Atlas of the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan (1915); Liu has substituted the photographic portraits for cyanotype prints of her images of Taiwan to reflect on the colonial history of the island. Austronesian Icon also consists of 'Map Images', presented on the floor, that was made by deconstructing and reconstructing maps of China and historical maps of Taiwan.

Lin Yu-Sheng, in contrast, travelled in company, driving artists in a minivan as they created artworks or performed inside. This decade-long project, titled Car Artists Village, casts the car as a moving arts village for resident artists whom Lin recruits from around the world. Constantly on the move, Lin's work attempts to rethink the methods of performance and the role of mobility in contemporary art production. At Taoyuan Arts Center, the artist is showing photographs, car seats, and documents of the project's journey over the years.

Liu Yunyi lingers on select locations in Risen from Ruins (2022–3), an installation encompassing photographs, paintings, and geological forms from a range of WWII landmarks that include Kinmen and Matsu Islands in Taiwan. The artist conceived the project while studying in Germany, where she became fascinated with dilapidated buildings from East Germany, and took to examining the effects of warfare on natural landscapes. Resulting paintings depict military architecture and natural formations, falling apart or under attack by penetrating rods, while the photographs show traces of violence embedded into landscapes—visual reminders of trauma that still remains.

The inseparable and inevitable triad of labour, production, and consumption is another recurring theme in the finalist exhibition. Sojourn Award winner Wang Yen-ran targets the contentious ground between the handmade and the mass-produced in Productivity by Labor 2023 (2018–2023), creating IKEA mugs by hand.

Despite their neat presentation on long, narrow tables reminiscent of conveyor belts, Wang's mugs are certainly not machine-copies of one another. One handle is slightly smaller than the rest, and some rims seem thicker than their surrounding neighbours'. Alongside videos documenting the artist's process, Productivity by Labor 2023 raises questions about the place of artisans in a world of industrial mass production and how the consumer—and viewer—participates in that system.

Nowhere are the activities of labour and consumption more compressed into one than perhaps in the kitchen. Tseng Li-Chuan reflects on domestic labour in Youth Diary (2022), a dazzling installation of bright orange walls and a dining table covered with photographs of foodstuff. For nine years, the artist cooked and documented her daily meals, preserving the evidence of her labour before its products were completely devoured, in an ode to the time that young women spend in front of the stove.

Delicacies are the subject of Andrea Ferrero's food-based Architectural Digest (2023), which consists of fragments of Greco-Roman columns made from gilded chocolate. The columns are incongruously housed in a white industrial fridge, plugged to a wall of neon green that further broadens the divide between remnants of an ancient past and their contemporary surroundings. Emerging from such fissure is the arbitrariness of symbols, especially of power and prestige, that often go unnoticed in daily life.

From the ceiling to the floor, works at the 2023 Taoyuan International Art Award exhibition speak across boundaries, highlighting the significance of places like the TMoFA in creating context for local and international artists. The call for the next TIAA will be announced at the end of this year.—[O]