2019 Asian Art Biennial: The Strangers from beyond the Mountail and the Sea

Exhibition Dates: 2019.10.05 – 2020.02.09

Curators: HSU Chia-Wei, HO Tzu- Nyen

Taiwanese artist Hsu Chia-Wei and Singaporean artist Ho Tzu-Nyen are invited to curate this prestigious exhibition. The museum’s expectations regarding the two “artist-curators” are threefold: (1) bringing the process of artistic production into the curatorial horizons; (2) advancing research at different levels and introducing transdisciplinary curatorial practice through a more flexible and adaptive exhibition installation; and (3) carefully exploring the cultural issues and formal hybridization exclusive to Asian arts from multiple dimensions and perspectives.

Both curators jointly developed a conceptual matrix diagram (as shown below), and searched for the links between them, based on the concepts of two pairs of relatives in the diagram, as the thinking method and conceptual model of the biennial exhibition, and focus their respective oeuvres on excavating, encrypting and reconstructing critical events in Asian history, in which a diversity of issues are touched upon. Against the background of the Anthropocene and the information society, this biennial will investigate the possibility of the intersection between technological issues and politico-historical propositions, thereby addressing the question as to how contemporary artists re-interpret humanistic and technological issues simultaneously in terms of politics, history and economy. By virtue of its non-human orientation, this biennial will also shake off the shackles of mainstream narratives, insofar as to spark broader imagination and discussion. We plan to invite a total of 30 artists/artist groups from Asia to accomplish this great achievement with concerted efforts.

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