The Taiwanese capital sets the stage for an exhibition contemplating an art world in flux

Gary Zhexi Zhang

Breaking up with globalization at the Taipei Biennial

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is close to the
Taiwanese capital’s Songshan airport. Every 10 minutes or so, a passenger jet
roars low overhead, appearing between buildings as though one is standing under
the migratory path of some great mythical bird. Beneath this flight path, in
the museum’s garden, lies Watershed (2023) by Natascha Sadr Haghighian,
a new commission for the 2023 Taipei Biennial. Half a dozen clear iridescent
plastic forms made by combining DIY animal sculpture kits are filled with fairy
lights: hind legs, antlers, and animal heads melt into one another like a
metamorphosis gone awry. Each creaturely amalgam sits atop a mobility walker,
lending the group an anthropomorphic air of pride and fragility.
Watershed, says Haghighian, is dedicated to the figure of the caretaker. Her animals are a motley crew, looking out for one another while contemplating the open skies over their walled courtyard garden. Within each creature’s casing, a speaker plays a crystalline rendition of Cantopop singer Karen Mok’s 1999 hit, Suddenly, sung in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Minnan. Haghighian’s alien choir resonates through the garden’s cubic enclosure, humble and transcendent. In the intervals between her woodland karaoke, a modular synth patch designed by the Taiwanese-American artist James T. Hong fills the air with the warbling rhythm of synthetic tongues. The rip-roar of jet engines periodically overwhelms their chorus.

The strange alchemy of Watershed is the
most compelling manifestation of the Taipei Biennial’s titular theme, ‘Small
World’, which seeks to evoke the tensions of intimacy and scale, dissociation
and hyper-connectivity, agency and alienation, of a post-pandemic planet. Its
three curators –Reem Shadid, the Palestinian director of Beirut Art Center;
Taiwanese-American editor of e-flux, Brian Kuan Wood; and Hong
Kong-based Taiwanese curator Freya Chou –&nbsp;began their association online,
during the pandemic’s tail-end. As they write in their curatorial text, a small
world ‘suggests both a promise and a threat: a promise of greater control over
one’s life, and a threat of isolation from a wider community.’

‘Small world’ might well describe the lives of
those working in the international contemporary art scene. A professional
diaspora that weaves migratory networks across centers and peripheries, as they
canalize the channels of global culture, annihilating geographic distance with
fungible discourse, one biennial at a time. Watershed brings a deeply
ambiguous emotional texture to this small, cosmopolitan world: Haghighian’s
chintzy, fragile bodies sing and ponder beneath a screeching sky, at once
hypermodern and helpless, frivolous and profound.

The modernisms of the 20th century, and what
came after, were forged in the accelerating interconnections of an increasingly
‘small’ world, often shaped by warfare and the innovations they catalyzed in
communication technologies. With the fall of the Soviet Union, a consensual
fiction took hold around a unipolar Northern Atlanticist political and economic
world order. It was in these decades of globalization that the borderless
transnationalism of contemporary art emerged as the cultural logic of the end
of history. At the same time, contrapuntal futurities abounded from diasporic
cultures and ‘emerging economies’ located below, within, and beyond the Global
North: all of them seeking, in different ways, to provincialize Atlanticist
modernism and feel out a more complex spectrum of cosmologies. Whether in the
cosmic jazz of Afrofuturism, the desert racers of Gulf Futurism, or the swarm
intelligence of Sinofuturism, these temporal rifts were often articulated by
artists, writers, and curators caught in the speculative gravity between one
world and another: cosmopolitans par excellence.

But much has changed. In some ways, as the
political geography of the world tilts towards multipolarity, these
cosmo-futurities are being consolidated: not as the frisson of postcolonial
speculation, but as full-blooded nation-building projects and neo-imperialist
visions that take ownership of the future they seek to forge, for better or
worse. From China’s Belt and Road Initiative to futuristic Saudi megaprojects
like NEOM, sovereign – and often ethnocentric –&nbsp;power remains the unit of
historical agency. Perhaps contemporary art tried to have it both ways, at once
rooted in liberal teleology and yearning for a counter-hegemonic futurity – but
now that history has caught up, what will become of its cosmopolitan desires?

‘Small World’ carries this melancholy resonance.
At times the exhibition feels like a dream pop album, nostalgic for unrequited
histories and mourning for a globalization which never kept its promises. It
opens with a grand wall of images by the Taiwanese photojournalist Hsu
Tsun-Hsu, The More We Get Together, documenting the turbulent energy of
the first decade of Taiwanese democracy from 1988 to 1998. Nearby, Sculptured Decompositions (2023) by Nesrine Khodr comprises topographical drawings found
in the abandoned architectural office she uses as her studio in Beirut, which
date back to the 1960s, and are here covered in plaster, resin, and glass
detritus – best-laid plans which have become material witnesses to a
disintegrating socio-political fabric in Lebanon.
One talk staged during opening week confronted
the scope of individual and collective agency – artistic and otherwise – in a
world of compounding crises. In conversation with Freya Chou and artist Ellen
Pau, legendary Palestinian-American painter Samia Halaby, who just turned 87,
spoke powerfully of Palestinian liberation and the genocide being unleashed on
the people of Gaza by Israel. Halaby’s voice burned with truth and righteous
anger, but in this dissociative reality, where so much is seen and so little is
done, truth appears ever necessary but increasingly insufficient to bring about
justice. Inhabiting a deeply connected world, it turns out, is not the same as
being able to change it. If anything, the way global proximity can turn
ineffable scale into something familiar, navigable, and hopeful –&nbsp;that
microcosmic feeling – makes it all the harder to swallow when it falls
apart.

What happens when the conditions of this world
are upturned and the ground moves and the horizon can no longer be trusted? It
can feel like a breakup, which circles back to the song serenading Haghighian’s
installation. Karen Mok recorded Suddenly in response to the 1999
Jiji earthquake in central Taiwan, whose aftershocks included the 2000
electoral defeat of the Kuomintang, ending the party’s half-century rule over
the island. ‘Suddenly, the sky dims and the land darkens,’ Mok sings, ‘The
world can so suddenly be emptied of everything.’ The ballad became an instant
classic, helping the Hong Kong star become an idol in Taiwan. It speaks to the
inability to let go of a lover following a split; the jolt of lost familiarity;
and the irony of love made palpable by vulnerability.
Contemplating the small world as a romance that
never completed its arc, Haghighian’s aptly titled Watershed speaks to
what has been left suspended, half-cooked, and overexposed to the noise of an
inchoate reality. A sense of suspension resonates, too, in the Taiwanese
capital, which is a homely, nostalgic place, in spite of its position within
the geopolitical fray, its high technology industries, and the fraught colonial
history of its young democracy. One friend observed that most of the city feels
like it was built in a few years in the 1990s. As if to prove a point, my hotel
room kept a vintage Casio radio alarm clock and a bible on the bedside table.
It’s a fine place, then, to contemplate the uneven legacy of globalization and
the cosmopolitanisms to come. As with any good breakup song, the art that
thrives in times like these is feeling things out, just like the rest of us. 
<hr>

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and strategist based in London and Shanghai. 
 
Published on December 19, 2023.
Captions for full-bleed images: 1.Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Watershed, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.&nbsp;2.Hsu Tsun-Hsu, The More We Get Together: The Annual Autumn Worker's Struggle series, 1996-1998. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

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