The Taishin Arts Award Archive sprang from the imagination of a new form of exhibitions.

 

When the Taishin Arts Award approached its 10th anniversary in 2011, we started to reflect upon the implications of the decade-long practices of the Award. In the face of hundreds of documents and audiovisual samples by the nominated performing arts groups and visual artists in our collection, we pondered how we should sort out the large data to make them reconnect with the contemporary art environment , to generate new meanings out of new threads of contexts, and to further establish new systems of knowledge. Through numerous brainstorming sessions and discussions with the Taishin Arts Award 10th Anniversary Committee, we finally gave birth to the 2002-2012 Taishin Arts Award Archive.

 

In the world of the Internet, tags and keywords are created to generate cross networks, free coupling and open search. Based on this logic, we invited artists, creative teams, nominators and observers of the Taishin Arts Award, art scholars, critics and the colleagues of the Foundation to establish a large set of keywords from the 154 works of the past decade (2002-2012). By establishing a broader context of keywords, the works are no longer limited to traditional classifications of the elite. Everyday language of ordinary people is also included to help explore the possibility of reconnecting contemporary art works with social texts. 

 

In 2002, the Taishin Arts Award was launched as a unique model which recognized both performing arts and visual arts. With the passing of the ten years, has the Award started to form a perspective which links different art disciplines in the contemporary art history of Taiwan? The Taishin Arts Award Archive is the beginning of this quest, not a self-defined completion. Although the Archive, as a database, still keeps the search functions of a traditional database, such as, by year, author, material or creative form, it is also an open, digital, interactive archive which facilitates active search, knowledge building and thinking, and enables a gaming experience. It is a dynamic archive creation developed by art concepts rather than a static storage which accumulates past data. The user chooses a keyword and initiates a contextual restructure among the Award’s nominations. This not only crosses over the two spheres of visual and performing arts but forms a brand new connection which is otherwise impossible to achieve through the use of current art vocabulary. We expect that the Taishin Arts Award Archive will provide a dynamic process of finding, defining and re-defining. We attempt to help the works escape from their existing cultural contexts and meanings through a new network composed of brand new keywords. The Archive aims to provide a new vision or a new event to reflect upon the decade-long history of the Award as well as to create a new platform for engaging discourses between the past and current winners/finalists. It is hoped that through the viewing of self-selected “history,” future arts and social communication can be created for unlimited imagination. 

 

I would like to thank the members of the Taishin Arts Award 10th Anniversary Committee, CHEN Tai-Song, HUANG Chien-Hung, HUNG Hung, LI Huan-Hsiun, LIN Ping and WANG Jun-Jieh and the board members of the Foundation, LIN Mun-lee, SHIH J.J. and WU Jing-Jyi for participating in the Award’s exhibition review discussions and contributing their ideas. In addition, I’d like to express my gratitude to the scholars, experts, art leaders and foundation colleagues as well as the project manager CHANG Mei-Lin and the website designer Marc Lin who proposed many ideas for execution, and for establishing the archive database. 

 

Artistic Director

LEE Yulin