Asian Art Biennial 2013

Am 5. Oktober 2013 eröffnete das National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts’ (NTMoFA) seine Präsentation der 4. Biennale Asiatischer Kunst. Das Rahmenthema dieser Edition ist Everyday Life [Alltagsleben]. Kuratiert von Iris Shu-Ping Huang, Kuratorin des NTMoFA, werden unter diesem Thema kreative Trends gezeigt, die in der Kunst Asiens in den letzten Jahren zu beobachten waren. Desweiteren ist die Ausstellung auf die "Alltäglichkeit" täglicher Erfahrungen sowie auf die ästhetische Entwicklung einer Rückkehr zum Alltagsleben fokussiert . Darüberhinaus verkörpert das Thema Everyday Life auch eine weitere Bedeutungsebene als Antizipation der Erforschung von und Reflexion über die aufkommenden irregulären sozialen Konventionen und Systeme sowie der Wiedererlangung eines genuinen Sinnes für Selbstachtung und eine Berücksichtigung der Essenz des Lebens in einem sozialen Milieu.

Asia is blessed with richly diverse geography, ethnicity, culture, and history, and as artistic expressions seem to become more homogeneous due to globalization, the boundaries from one place to another and from private realms to public are undoubtedly becoming more ambiguous. As cross-territorial and cross-cultural impacts become tightly intertwined, various issues of homogenization and life’s transitions are challenging our comprehensions for Asia and also our customary thoughts.

As the features of everyday life are no longer ordinary and realistic, Everyday Life thus intends to reflect on this sense of ironic everyday-ness. It inches closer to reality to carefully experience life’s current conditions; however, it also needs to break away from conventions and to examine the unordinary aspects present in life.

In the midst of the rise of a cultural phenomenon which brands itself as the "new Asian experience" of the 21st century, traditional core concepts are being replaced by everyday trends, and the phenomenon also signifies that people’s everyday responses have gradually become the base for mainstream values, with "day-after-day recurrences" being fully re-examined. As the main structure returns to being comprised of the basic elements and with the return to individuals' internal values, people’s emotional capabilities are being re-examined, with thoughts returning to the core essence.

Asia is faced with the challenge of how to respond to reality, and "how to live the everyday life" is a situation that we must deal with on a daily basis. People are concerned with how to dwell in the everyday life, which includes ways to coexist with life’s different uncertainties and irregularities. Recent years have seen a growing trend in Asian contemporary arts to resort to the aesthetic language of everyday life in the efforts to reflect on the workings of the social mechanisms, with special emphasis on micro-actualizations, mundane knowledge acquirements, visual styles, social relations, and also changes in the society that one dwells in. Through concerns for life and creative language and aesthetical forms that have come from critical realizations, artists are replacing the grand narrative of history with individual styles, and the most ordinary aspect of everyday realities becomes the best mirror for reflecting the current conditions and also one's personal premises.

The objective of the theme of Everyday Life for this year’s biennial is to contextualize the chaotic and irregular life that we are facing in today’s time, with perceptual experiences and rational assessments of life’s minute conditions. The exhibition will include about 35 contributing artists from Asia presenting artworks of different styles and genres, and they will offer their unique viewpoints for the social landscape that is increasingly being made into a spectacle. The exhibition also intends to invite artists from Israel, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to produce new projects locally, and these artworks will present various aesthetic languages and personal social realizations through diverse perspectives and different reflections for life.

In addition to the exhibition, Asian art and curatorial symposiums will be held on the weekend following the opening, with scholars invited to conduct discussions on the subject of Asia’s cultural diversity.

(Aus Presseinformationen.
Erster Absatz aus dem Englischen: Haupt & Binder)