Universes in Universe

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Exhibition Concept: Visual Attract and Attack

By Maple Yujie Lin

Contemporary art is constantly reflecting the most representative imagination of the current generation, pushing it to its limit and exploring its boundaries. In contemporary art, the trend of Animamix (animation + comics) art is a breakthrough of aesthetic standards, for it captures the lifestyles of subcultures, blending the contradicting worlds of high art and popular culture, mainstream and subculture, and consumer culture and counter-culture.

Illustrious Japanese manga comic artist Tezuka Osamu paved the path for Animamix century in his country. After the Second World War, Animamix became the largest publishing and creative industry in Japan, influencing East Asia nations such as Korea, China, and Taiwan, and even reaching to Western regions of Europe and America. In the 21st century, the new generation of Animamix artists are not exclusively producers of Animamix art, but branching out in all other creative industry domains as well. Western and Asian Animamix art begin to complement each other and entwine with contemporary art, permeating the mass entertainment culture and new trends of visual art with their colors.

The most fascinating aspect of Animamix art is that it interchanges the nature of real and fictitious world, allowing its works to transcendentally utilize the humorous, satiric, and subverting nature of contemporary visual aesthetics, and represent in a bold and heterogeneous manner the clash between artistic thinking and living imagination. Professor Victoria Yung-Chih Lu concludes that Animamix Art of the 21st century has four characteristics: the forms of Animamix in popular culture center on the worship of youth and youthfulness; pursuit of narrative scripts that are full of surprises and diversity, transforming the images into a visual language by making them strongly descriptive; integration of the colorful lights in the electronic media, providing the opportunity to create an extremely novel colorful visual experience of light; and heterogeneity resulting from the interaction and intermingling of large amounts of money, as well as of people and resources from strikingly different fields, establishing a new form of creative industry.

Animamix art is the most important creative source among all creative domains in the 21st century, playing a critical role in contemporary art. MOCA Taipei held Fiction.Love – Ultra New Vision in Contemporary Art back in 2004. The exhibition obtained much attention and feedback both nationally and internationally by introducing an overview of the rise and influence of Japanese and American Animamix art. Five years later, at the end of 2009, MOCA Taipei introduces Visual Attract and Attack, a hyperlinked exhibition hosted simultaneously by four different museums in China and Taiwan, presenting the most recent development and trends of Animamix art across the world. More than 150 artists from 30 countries are involved in this exhibition which will be held from 5 December 2009 to 31 January 2010.

 

© Copyright text: Maple Yujie Lin
Photos, text: Press information of the Animamix Biennial

Animamix Biennial
2009 / 2010

MOCA, Taipei
Taiwan

5 December 2009 -
31 January 2010

Curator:
Maple Yujie Lin
Chief Curator and Head of Exhibition Department MOCA Taipei

Educational Background: M.A. in Museum Studies / Graduate Institute of Museum Studies Fu Jen Catholic University; B.A. in Chinese Literature / Providence University Taiwan

Work experience: Art 168 program Producer, HiTrust International Group C.E.O / ET TV; Senior Editor in Entertainment News Department / The Liberty Times; Senior Editor in Important News Department / The Liberty Times; Exhibition Assistant Organizer / Fu&Lu Workroom

Conceived by Victoria Lu, Animamix Biennial 2009/2010 is a hyperlinked exhibition series in museums in Taiwan and China: MOCA Taipei, MOCA Shanghai, Today Art Museum Beijing, and Guangdong Museum of Art.

 

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