Imagining Taiwan : the making and the museological representation of art in Taiwan's quest for identity (1987-2010)

This thesis probes and analyses the critical role of art in the shaping of Taiwan's national identity during the period 1987-2010. With the rise of democratisation and national identity consciousness (bentu yishi), Taiwan's quest for national identity intensified after the lifting of martial law in 1987. The thesis challenges the view that art has played an inconsequential role in this identity discourse by demonstrating that artists, curators and art museums have significantly contributed towards the processes of identity formation, particularly during the peak period of the early-mid 1990s. Focusing on the nature and extent of the contribution of artists, curators and art museums to Taiwan's quest for identity, the thesis explores how national identity narratives were imagined, interpreted, projected and transmitted, nationally and internationally, through the production, selection and exhibition of art from Taiwan. Structurally, the thesis contextualizes each socio-political period, providing the backdrop for a series of case studies. These demonstrate how artists, curators and art museums became active agents in the processes of national identity formation, not only promoting but also critiquing and contesting identity narratives revolving around the concept of a 'Taiwan nation'. Given that national identities are relational and fluid constructs, the thesis reveals how identity discourses in art had diminished in significance by the early twenty-first century when globalisation, the rise of China, and art market forces transformed identity discourses in art from a Taiwan-centred narrative into one embracing not only regional and global perspectives but, most critically, dialogue and exchange with China

Creative Machine

Curators: William Latham, Atau Tanaka and Frederic Fol Leymarie A major exhibition exploring the twilight world of human/machine creativity, including installations, video and computer art, Artificial Intelligence, robotics and Apps by leading artists from Goldsmiths and international artists by invitation. The vision for organising the Creative Machine Exhibition is to show exciting works by key international artists, Goldsmiths staff and selected students who use original software and hardware development in the creative production of their work. The range of work on show, which could be broadly termed Computer Art, includes mechanical drawing devices, kinetic sculpture driven by fuzzy logic, images produced using machine learning, simulated cellular growth forms and the self-generating works using automated aesthetics, VR, 3D printing, and social telephony networks. Traditionally, Computer Art has held a maverick position on the edge of mainstream contemporary culture with its origins in Russian Constructivist Art, biological systems, “geeky” software conferences, rave / techno music and indie computer games. These artists have defined their own channels for exhibiting their work and organised conferences and at times been entrepreneurial at building collaborations with industry at both a corporate and startup level (with the early computer artists in the 1970s and 1980s needing to work with computer corporations to get access to computers). Alongside this, interactive media art drew upon McLuhan’s notion of technology as extensions of the human to create participatory, interactive artworks by making use of novel interface technology that has been developed since the 1980s. However, with new techniques such as 3D printing, the massive spread of sophisticated sensors in consumer devices like smartphones, and the use of robotics by artists, digital art would appear to have an opportunity to come more to the fore in public consciousness. This exhibition is timely in that it coincides with an apparent wider growth of public interest in digital art, as shown by the Digital Revolution exhibition at the Barbican, London and the recent emergence of commercial galleries such as Bitforms in New York and Carroll / Fletcher in London, which, acquire and show technology-based art. The Creative Machine exhibition is the first event to make use of Goldsmiths’ new Sonics Immersive Media Lab (SIML) Chamber. This advanced surround audiovisual projection space is a key part of the St James-Hatcham refurbishment. The facility was funded by capital funding from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Goldsmiths, as well as research funding from the European Research Council (ERC). This is connected respectively to the Intelligent Games/Game Intelligence (IGGI) Centre for Doctoral Training, and Atau Tanaka’s MetaGesture Music (MGM) ERC grant. The space was built by the SONICS, a cross-departmental research special interest group at Goldsmiths that brings together the departments of Computing, Music, Media & Communications, Sociology, Visual Cultures, and Cultural Studies. It was designed in consultation with the San Francisco-based curator, Naut Humon, to be compatible with the Cinechamber system there. During Creative Machines, we shall see, in the SIML space, multiscreen screenings of work by Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Naoko Tosa, and Vesna Petresin, as well as a new immersive media work by IGGI researcher Memo Akten

Imaginary Aesthetic Territories: Australian Japonism in Printed Textile Design and Art

This creative production thesis considers how Japanese aesthetic philosophies have influenced textile design and art by examining its use, significance and representation in fashion and art in Australia. Correlations between the space indicated in Japanese pictorial principles and the open space of the Australian landscape are considered, as are the conventions of constructed exoticism inherent to Japonism. The thesis and creative works respond to issues of Australian cultural identity, hybridity, orientalism and cultural yearning

Handling Religious Things. The Material and the Social in Museums

Museums are receiving currently a lot of public attention with regard to the material objects they host, and the historical and contemporary handling of these objects. There are global public debates about the origins, paths, and futures of museum things. Since at least 2018, with the report on the restitution of African cultural heritage, which Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy presented to the French president, the legitimacy of objects from colonial contexts in museums and collections in the global north has been widely debated. Furthermore, disciplines within cultural studies, including the study of religions, have taken a material turn, and now focus on the material, and thus also on museum things. This has brought the material dimension of religion into the focus of research in various disciplines. Studying materiality can thus open a pathway for potential critique of established patterns in research, historiography, and society, widening our perspective. It was against this multifaceted background that the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion (ZIR) and the Museum of Religions (Religionskundliche Sammlung) of the Philipps-University Marburg, the Museum of the Frankfurt Cathedral, and the GRASSI Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig formed a research network on the topic of Dynamics of Religious Things in Museums (Dynamiken religiöser Dinge im Museum, REDIM in short). This cooperative alliance, under the leadership of the ZIR, is based on the common interest in the relevance of religious materials in museums for social transformation, and in how social processes are reflected by material things

ABQ Free Press, January 14, 2015

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/abq_free_press/1018/thumbnail.jp

The earth and the elements: multi-screen documentary and how the cinema migrates

This research explores responses to global ecological issues via an intercultural and multi-screen approach that focuses on the resources exchange between China and Australia. The project reflects on the proposition that Australia and China are equally implicated in climate change. Drawing on case studies of the work of Bill Viola, Isaac Julian and Yang Fudong, the project begins from a critical enquiry into intercultural documentary and experimental cinema. It proposes the “intercultural” as a key mode through which artists might approach the parallel aesthetic histories found in the treatment of nature and landscape—in both Australian and Chinese contexts. The final chapter examines the history of ecological art making in Australia, locating this practice within the boundaries of ecological thought and documentary film. In the creative component of this project, Daoism provides a framework for a multi-screen installation by offering working metaphors for environmental and cultural interconnectedness. In the creative work, five channels of video explore the movement of coal and mineral ores across the two continents through the elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. The “stories” told through these elemental perspectives concern environmental impacts, with particular emphasis on climate change and Australia’s fragile landscape. The architecture of this five-channel installation works in parallel with the non-linearity of the video. This creates a space that contemplates ecological issues in relation to globalisation and the resources relationship between China and Australia

Art, Shamanism and Animism

Art, shamanism, and animism are mutable, contested terms which, when brought together, present a highly charged package. Debates around these three terms continue to generate interest and strong opinions in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The editors recognise the urgency to explore them together in an unprecedented exercise which, to date, has only been attempted with reference to selected disciplines, periods, or regions. The contributors to this collection reignite debates around the status of ‘things’ identified as ‘art’ through the lens of theories drawn from new materialism, new animism, and multi-species and relational thinking. They are concerned with how and when art-like things may exceed conventional understandings of ‘art’ and ‘representation’ to fully articulate multiple scenarios or ‘manifestations’ in which they interface with academic discourses around animism and shamanism. The authors put in sharp focus the materiality of art-things while stressing their agentive, emotive, and performative aspects, looking beyond their appearances to what they do and who they may be or become in their dealings with diverse interlocutors. The contributors are united in their recognition that things and images are deeply entangled with how different communities, human and other-than-human, experience life, shifting attention from an obsolete concept of worldview to how reality is perceived through all the senses, in all its aspects, both tangible and intangible

Museum Representations of Contested Spaces: The Kuril Islands

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a boom of museums focused on the Ainu cultural subject has emerged in both Russia and Japan. By conceptualizing museums as nonneutral and culturally embedded productions which attempt to convey knowledge of foreign spaces to home spaces, this thesis will analyze the ways in which various museum institutions in Russia and Japan, as well as those produced by Ainu activist groups, choose to tell certain stories about the disputed Kuril Island territories and the Ainu people, and to map those stories within the broader colonial framework of the Kuril Islands dispute and indigenous rights in Russia and Japan. The institutions discussed in this text are the Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park, Japanese National Museum of Territory and Sovereignty, Russian Ethnographic Museum, Omsk Oblast Museum of Fine Art, Nibutani Ainu Cultural Museum, and Ureshipa Shirarika

Transcending boundaries : the arts of Islam : treasures from the Nassar D. Khalili Collection

This thesis examines and problematizes curatorial decision-making favouring the experiential encounter over interpretative/didactic modes of display when the museum’s mandate is to promote cross-cultural understanding between Muslim and Non‐Muslim communities through displays of Islamic art and culture. Based on a case study of the travelling exhibition The Arts of Islam: Treasures from the Nassar D. Khalili Collection, this investigation traces the journey of a collection of artifacts through four exhibitionary sites (Sydney, Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Amsterdam) from 2007-2011. A central aim of this study is to demonstrate the polysemic nature of artifacts when placed in the museum context by exploring the notion that objects acquire additional meanings as a result of site‐specific curatorial decision‐making. To this end, a theoretical model is developed and applied that profiles how differing practices, procedures and policies of display involve a process of (re)presentation, (re)contextualization, disruption and transformation, affected by and impacting upon particular social, political and cultural nuances in the wider public sphere. A ‘tool box’ approach to analysis is adopted, drawing on a range of theories from the fields of post-colonial studies, museology, and cultural theory. Interviews with a cross-section of stakeholders from exhibition venues provide empirical evidence for the evaluation of the experiences, opinions and perspectives of sponsors, curators and museum audiences who were involved in or attended exhibitions and their related events. Additionally, conversations with museum professionals from a range of prominent institutions are included to allow comparison with the travelling display. In conjunction with findings from primary and secondary sources, discussions will involve reference to museological challenges and dilemmas including: East/West relations historically; Orientalism and practices of Islamic collecting by individuals and organizations; the effects of patronage and sponsorship especially the influence of corporations; the material, aesthetic and commercial properties of the museum object; and questions arising from representations of cultural and aesthetic objects through particular politics of display. These issues are analysed for their interaction with discourse and debates concerning: identity politics, nation building, modernity, governmentality, colonial legacies, multiculturalism, art markets and their collectors, and influence of the media. Final conclusions evaluate the success of these cultural and artistic enterprises and recommendations include the adoption of new museological practices and policies of display that are inclusive of diverse audiences and have the potential to increase cross-cultural understanding on both the local and global level

文化論の視座からみた日中のギャラリーに関する研究

筑波大学 (University of Tsukuba)201