Session 2

Manray Hsu

Date
2019/10/12 14:20-14:50
Venue
TFAM’s auditorium

Indigeneity and Contemporary Art: Some Curatorial Thoughts

What is the most daunting challenge for a curator to organize an exhibition on Taiwanese indigenous contemporary art, especially when the curator is an outsider whose ethnic and educational background can be “legitimately” identified as part of the cultural “mainstream,” which implies that he is a living descendant of the “colonizers” over the past four centuries? I have no intention to simplify the complexities of all stripes that a curator may encounter. However, we may identify ourselves, whether actively or passively, consciously or unwittingly, as the advantaged or disadvantaged in terms of social status, gender, ethnicity, nation, inter alia. Besides, at different life stages with introspection, external impacts, contingencies or epiphanies, we may more or less adjust our identities, and ergo alter our relations to others or change our political stances. Hence, the present era can be construed as “the age of perpetual revolution of identity.”

The talk centers on the two bottlenecks (i.e. two sets of problematics) that stymied my curating of When Kacalisian Culture Meets the Vertical City: Contemporary Art from Greater Sandimen, as well as the “solutions” I worked out in the curatorial process. The first bottleneck was the “outsider” problem. The outsiders who possess special cultural power are usually the authority of artistic mainstream incarnate. The indigenous contemporary art exhibition curated by such an outsider inevitably involved the anthropological issue of “contact zone.” In my curatorial statement, this contact does not refer to the encounter between a mainstream art museum and the colonized indigenous people or between a scholar (an ethnographer?) and his or her research object, but that between a “freelance” (independent) curator and “native” indigenous artists. In the meantime, as the curator, I further took my identity as a descendant of Taiwanese plains indigenous peoples (cooked savages) into consideration in the process of close dialogues (with for instance heated debates and hilarious jokes interlaced by betel nuts and millet wine in bulk). In this exhibition, the “contact zone” is understood not so much a geographical concept as a field opened up by the dynamic interaction. It was everything to the exhibition.

The second problematic, to put it in a nutshell, was the lack of an art museum, history, and discourse dedicated to Taiwanese indigenous contemporary art. The necessary funds, administrative professionals, and policies remain wanting. As these shortages oscillate between alleviation and exacerbation, tackling the aforementioned lack has become a more urgent and challenging task. Indigenous artists’ oeuvres are seldom incorporated into the contemporary art system and the artistic evolution in the last century. How should we define art, contemporaneity, and indigeneity? How does art relate to our society and politics? The answers to these questions can be analytically outlined only through a “nativist” and down-to-earth process of historicization, rather than through theoretical speculations within the frameworks of “globalization,” “modernity” and “cosmopolitanism.”

This exhibition illustrated how the curator broke the abovementioned bottlenecks from multiple dimensions, such as the title conception (When Kacalisian Culture Meets the Vertical City), exhibition form (instead of confining their works to the traditional houses and the quasi-white box space in the cultural park, the participating artists staged their respective solo exhibitions in the Park’s preserved traditional buildings that not only highlighted their sui generis creative contexts but also addressed different questions of their times and the environment), exhibition catalogue, art forum, and so forth.

In his article “Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties,” anthropologist James Clifford accentuated that we need to understand the indigeneity embodied in migratory movements from different, varying spatio-temporal scales and intertwined, interactive processes of diaspora and homecoming, insofar as to allow the vicissitudes of identities and “indigenous peoples” to manifest themselves in such an understanding. Exhibitions constitute a small yet physical link in the chain of manifestation. As a curator of contemporary art, I tend to think by doing something, thereby deepening my thoughts, innovating my experiments, and creating new possibilities. The instable structure of contemporary art exhibitions, along with artists’ motivations and institutional ambitions, renders the profession of curator captivating.

 

Manray HSU
Manray Hsu is an independent curator and critic. His intellectual work focuses on cultural conditions of globalization, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and geopolitical situations of contemporary art. Manray Hsu has curated exhibitions include Wayward Economy (2005), Liverpool Biennial (co-consulted/curated with Gerardo Mosquera, 2006), Naked Life, Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art (2006), Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (co-curated with Jerome Sans, 2000; co-curated with Vasif Kortun, 2008), Forum Biennial of Taiwanese Contemporary Art, TCAC (2010), Autostrada Biennale (Kosovo, 2017), The South –An Art of Asking and Listening, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2017). Manray Hsu often engages in collective work on workshop, conference and publication in Europe, America, Asia and Australia.