Dear friends and colleagues
I have just got back from Taipei in Taiwan. We normally think of it as Chinese – the PRC certainly does! – but in a way it is also South-East Asian.
It is the “urheimat” from whence came all the Austronesian people (called “Malays” in the nineteenth century) who went on to settle maritime South-East Asia: firstly the Philippines and Indonesia, then further – indeed, as far as Madagascar and Easter Island. Half a million of these Austronesian “aboriginals” still live in Taiwan – along with 23 million of the Han people who arrived from the sixteenth century onwards, eventually driving out the Dutch and taking control.
Geologically it is has been formed by pressures between the Luzon and South China plates – which is somewhat symbolic of its political status, formally neither an independent state nor part of China, In fact it works as a separate state and is very different from the People’s Republic of China
More importantly, the people are different: they did not experience the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, the one child policy, etc. All the Singaporeans and Filipinos I know like going here and will say that unlike the people in the PRC or, notoriously, in Hong Kong the Taiwanese are polite, helpful and smile. The landscape and the food is also wonderful.
But I am not going to talk about mountains or Taiwanese hot pot. I went because of the art fair.
However first I went to see the Castiglione exhibition at the Palace Museum. Giuseppe Castiglione is also known by his Chinese name, Lang Shining. A Jesuit who had trained as a painter in Italy he went to China in 1715 and spent the next fifty years painting for the emperor, pairing European perspective painting with Chinese ink style. It’s fascinating. He is perhaps the first artist to try and blend “East” and “West” – and what is intriguing is sometimes he blends, but sometimes he counterpoints one against the other. Sometimes it is a motif (dog, person, flower) painted in western style against a Chinese style background – especially if an assistant helped; sometime its truly blended. The motifs are very precisely painted, clinically even. The pleasure is in that precision, not in any expressiveness.
I loathe art fairs. I hate the oppressive lighting, the repetitious way stands are blocked out and the way everything becomes reduced to commodity, Alas, in Asian art fairs there is rarely any education programme or special project to break the monotony. You are stuck with the sheer bulk of mediocre, meretricious, bad, vulgar and insincere art. And amidst this one’s eye gets numbed and misses most of the good art that is there. Am I the only person who gets more intrigued by the people and what they are wearing?
Or wondering about the bad taste of some people with a lot of money.
Why is the Filipino artist Ronald Ventura so popular with collectors in South-East Asia? Are they lacking in discrimination? Or is there something I am missing? One gallery showed nothing but his work. I am told he is the only artist in the region to sell more than one art work for more than a million USD. Granted, the production values are very high. But in terms of meaning or aesthetics it all seems so banal and vulgar to me. His admirers always go on about his inventiveness, as for example with these frames, but to me they look remarkably like the frames Robert Morris was making in the Eighties. Many artists in Manila feel he has similarly purloined images or forms from them.
I escaped to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The retrospective by the senior Taiwanese artist Chuang Che was interesting. It was more than highly competent – you could see a personality and an intelligence at work. Like Zao Wou-Ki his paintings try to blend of Chinese ink and Western abstract oil painting. It is true they could have been made twenty years earlier than they were, but does that make them bad? One day we need to write a global history of abstraction that includes people like this.
But what I remember most from the museum and Taipei was a work in a show called Alice’s Rabbit Hole – Everyday Life, Comprehensible and Incomprehensible by Joyce Ho, a young Taiwanese artist. I walked down a long corridor and a young woman (dressed in bright green) behind a glass screen stared at me but did not speak, she held her hand out to me, held it for some time and stared into my eyes, then she wrote, carefully and upside down, the time and date and gave me the piece of paper it was written on. After an art fair where everything had seemed blanded down, how wonderful to be reminded that art can be strange and compelling.
Have a good week and I hope you too come across something strange and compelling,
Tony