The Taipei Biennial 2020 titled “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet” further investigates the issues first explored in the previous edition of the Biennial in 2018. Titled “Post Nature”, the 2018 Taipei Biennial took the museum as an ecosystem, exploring the entanglement of humans and non-humans and thereby allowing an exploration of the process of decolonization of the former by the latter. The 2020 Biennial goes further in thies examination by looking at the implications of the 2018 event in order to explore the current divergences, and tries to imagine and shape what could be the direction towards a “terrestrial” mode of existence.
The 2020 edition explores geopolitics and our worsening ecological crisis by investigating our differences and influences on a planetary perspective. By tansforming the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) into a sort of planetarium, the curators have selected artists and artworks that align themselves with different versions of Earth, therefore presenting a range of options to visitors of which planet they want to live on. The public programmes represent the moments when these different planets collide, maintaining the biennial in a dynamic state and constantly sparking the participants to engage in micro-revolutions in everyday life.
The exhibition sets out to highlight the existence of important conflicts in our co-existence, departing from the well-known fact that we have very different views of the world and of how we live in it, but that the most important issue to consider now is the material nature of the world we are talking about and best to continue living in it and with it. The exhibition further suggests we are in need of new diplomatic skills to tackle what have become geopolitical questions of co-existence.
We have seen how there are escapist political views calling for nations to escape globalisation and live inside their own states as independently as possible, or views that acknowledge the limited resources and the fragility of our world, and thus the need to protect it and develop sustainable ways of living with it, in a “terrestrial” way. There are views that deny the ecological emergency, while others that decry the lack of action to fight against ecological destruction. As the curators point out, there seem to be “no common ground at all”; hence, the need to talk about our land/territory and engage in a geopolitical debate.
One way to frame the conflicts inside the exhibition is to consider that “there is an increasing gap between the land necessary for our subsistence and prosperity on the one hand, and the territory that we recognize as our legal and affective abode, on the other”. The curators – French philosopher Bruno Latour and independent curator Martin Guinard – go on to explain:
Talking about this gap between the source of prosperity and the reality of our legal and affective framework necessarily implies becoming aware of the material conditions that we depend upon to subsist, conditions which the project of modernization has constantly ignored, evaded or even denied. This implies a deep shift in what we consider to be a land or a territory. In our view, a land is not just a chunk of space on a map but the list of all the elements, no matter how remote, which are necessary for any living being to subsist. The challenge for us is to render such a list visible so that visitors become finally able to reconcile the real lands they live on with the one they like to dream about. In sum, reconciling the two conceptions of land and territory amounts to transforming what was formerly framed as a set of ecological questions into a new set of more urgent and more tragic political struggles. Where to land? On what planet are we living? These are the questions we wish to continue exploring through the Biennale; they are central to what we are calling a “new climatic regime”.
The exhibition makes use of the TFAM museum space as a “scale model” of the situation postulated by the curators. Following the form of a planetarium or space map, the show features different planets – Planet Globalization, Planet Security, Planet Escape, Planet Terrestrial and Planet with Alternative Gravity. Other areas like the Critical Zone and Gaia approach the terrestrial sphere. The new diplomatic skills the curators suggest we need in this new era are expressed through the public programmes – New Diplomatic Encounters – curated by Eva Lin, in which the different planetary views collide.
The public programmes included the Theater of Negotiations gathering participants from different disciplines, who carried out “political and diplomatic tactics” through role-play, debates and negotiation. Another highlight was The Wild Trail to the World, a 3-day-2-nights trekking workcamp with hunters, oceanographers and artists, which included three different paths of exploration in January, February and early March 2021.
Eva Lin said about the programmes:
We believe the current imperative is not simply fostering discussions from multiple perspectives; instead, our aim is to explore alternative procedures to reach a point of mediation since we realize the importance of divisions. It is through irreducible boundaries, native philosophies which differ from contemporary mainstream logic, and non-anthropocentric memories out in the field that a turn in the irreversible ending could be possible.
In Planet Globalization, artists question what it means to live in a globalised world. The dream of globalisation reveals itself as a narrow view of what a common world could be, now faced with the fact that modernisation is undermined by climate change and inequalities.
Taiwanese artist Huang Hai-Hsin depicts the society of abundance in which we indulge, wenn in the painting River of Happiness (2015), where people enojy themselves with cakes, massages, in amusement parks and a myriad other elating activities.
On the happy-scape, though, a dark shadow looms: scenes of dramatic natural disasters, fossil fuel and nuclear energy production sites are all visible in the background. Zooming into the art world and a symbol of cultural and market globalisation, Huang draws a typical Art Basel landscape on closing day, when everyone is rushing to empty their booths – typical that is, until Covid.
In his video installation, Moroccan artist Hicham Berrada illustrates how an urgent problem of globalisation is the hyper-localization of certain polluting particles.
The beautiful multi-coloured scenes he presents are the result toxic chemicals he poured into an aquarium. He then filmed the process of chemical solidification in the water and projected the outcome onto a 180° screen. The work reveals how deceptive an image of beauty can be and how globalisation also brings destruction if uncontrolled.
Shanghai artist Cui Jie dives into “the symbolic dimension of post-modern mythology” with paintings of architectural landscapes that reflect a fascination for the aesthetics of “global” architectures. The artist draws from buildings in Yaunde, Doha, Belgrade and New Taipei City, to portray buildings imagined as a “flux”, crossed by roads, and connected in a whirlwind of constructions and infrastructure. Using imagination and memory, Cui constructs an architectural heritage of global architecture.
Those that felt betrayed by the ideal of globalisation have sought refuge in a safe haven, where each has their own piece of land. This is Planet Security, which references the tendencies of populism and its dream of ‘independence’ from everyone. While Chin Cheng-Te, Lee Chia-Hung, Lin Chuan-Kai and Chen Yi-Chun’s project “Making Friends/ Fire” looks at Cold War Taiwan and the contrast and dialogue between people’s narratives and the state’s, Ducth artist Jonas Staal explores Steve Bannon’s alt-right propaganda under Trump’s presidency. The artist deconstructs Bannon’s work and creates an installation that explains precisely what makes this propaganda attractive in order to better understand how it can be countered.
Taipei-based artist James T. Hong further challenges the populist stance, by presenting a pre-production series of concept storyboards for a speculative science fiction film entitled The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend. The film presents a military conflict in Taiwan involving forces from China, the USA, Japan, Taiwan and other nations. Among the characters followed in the movie is a teenage girl who finds herself separated from her family during the chaos of the conflict. She starts out as an optimistic, skillful and agile hero only to finally turn into a broken-down survivor who eventually acquiesces to defeat.
The artist proposes only a limited film narrative, as a tentative outline with little details, to reference our own experience of the world today, fed by bits and pieces of information.
Planet Escape is an ideal solution for the “immensely wealthy”, who can think of planning a colonisation of Mars or building a dwelling underground to survive major disasters. Dutch artist Femke Herregraven presents the only works here. The installation Corrupted Air—Act VI is a survivalist bunker-installation that “explores the imaginary of the “panic room” in case of catastrophe”. Inside the room, closed by glass doors, are three strange creatures: the avatars of extinct elephant bird, trilobite and lizard. They came back to life following scanned digital models and engage in a conversation in which the “Last Man,” a sort of prophetic figure, recurrently comes up. The Last Man nevertheless brings no salvation: “when he arrives, I’ll be even more bored” says the digital trilobite. One of the meaningful phrases that they exchange says: “You can only die twice. First when you stop breathing and second when somebody says your name for the last time.”
After exploring these diverse planetaryperspectives, we finally encounter the terrestrial sphere. The curators, and artists within the Planet Terrestrial section, propose new ways of looking at Earth in order to develop a more sustainable life in harmony with our planet and its resources, but without losing our progress.
First we must look at the Critical Zone, that thin superficial layer that covers the Earth, like the skin of an orange. It is on and within this layer that the majority of life takes place, and where water, soil, plants, rocks, weather or anima life all interact together.
Taiwanese artist Chang Yung-Ta developed his work on who during a residency in two pivotal locations for the ‘measurement’ of the Critical Zone’s activity. One was an observatory at Taroko Gorge in central Taiwan, and the other the GFZ laboratory in Potsdam, Germany. At Taroko, the geographic dynamics such as earthquake, landslide, erosion,and weathering are particularly active. The data collected at the observatory is then sent to labs such as GFZ (German Research Centre for Geosciences).
The installation spreads over two floors – the entrance corridor and the basement courtyard – to remind us that the Critical Zone is above our heads and under our feet. The corridor display features data, sensors and also a seismometer that can capture movemement on the ground, from steps on the floor to planes flying over the museum. In the basement, the artist has installed nine tubes that reproduce the process of erosion of the water current of the Li-Wu river in the Taroko Gorge on rock formations. The turbulence of the water in the tubes agitates sand and bits of rock to gradually carve the flat rock disks at the bottom, eventually leaving them modulated like riverbeds.
Another Taiwanese artist, Su Yu-Hsin, also looks at the Taroko Gorge site and follows scientists from the GFZ as well as from the NCTU Disaster Prevention and Water Environment Research Center in Wuhe and Wulu there to observe landslides, and examine how they are driven by weather and how they affect the climate. There are cameras, seismometers and weather stations that observe in place of the human eye, which in turn examines that data recorded by such instruments. The artist’s video installation offers insight into how we see beyond the scale of human perception, through different technological means, while also questioning the presence and location of the body of the observer.
A native of Taiwan from Rinari, Pingtung, Cemelesai Takivalet puts together a sort of inventory of plants, fungi and other vegetation of the island. His drawings are a result of both close observation and memory. Many of the species he once used to see as a child have now disappeared, thus the artist uses his imagination to recreate what has been lost. An artist from the Paiwan tribe from southern Taiwan uses “Lemikalik”, a Paiwan technique that consists in weaving in concentric circles. Aruwai Kaumakan creates sculptures with wool, cotton, copper, silk and glass beads, weaving organic or vegetal forms, and references life memories of tribal nobility to create a space for conversation. Her tribe was forced to relocate to Rinari after a major typhoon in 2009, and the artist has been looking for ways to connect members of her displaced community through a creative process, in order to develop ways to dwell in a disturbed environment.
FabLab Dynamic, a design collective founded in Taipei in 2013 with seven members, offer a view on what alternative energy sources we could use. In the installation Deep Loop the collective use the acid produced by the plants via photosynthesis to generate the electricity required to power the LED lights. The project is illuminated by 60 sets of high-voltage electrodes to light up the lamps, which need regular maintenance. The LED lights are also programmed to go on at preset times, so as to provide constant light to stimulate the plants’ growth.
In the second part of Approaching the Terrestrial, artists look at the concept of Gaia, which was coined by the engineer/inventor James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. The system that Gaia represents is complex and self-regulating: every single element – rocks, gas, minerals, water, atmosphere, soil –has been modi ed by the action of life forms. On Gaia, species not only adapt to the environment but also shape it.
Cemelesai Takivalet creates another inventory, one that records all types of viruses and bacteria, imagined and shaped by the accounts of the artist’s tribe elders. During field research in their traditional territories, a group of young people from his tribe contracted a mysterious disease. The artist recalled the legends of the elders about certain territories that should be protected from human intervention. If disturbed, Gaia thus might respond in unwanted ways, like releasing such viruses and bacteria from the wild.
French artist Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro collaborated with Taipei-based, Hong Kong artist Margaret Shiu and Taichung artist Ming-Jiun Tsai to create Arts of Coming Down to Earth.
The project departs from the curators’ idea that becoming terrestrial implies rethinking all means of production, including cultural networks. The artists address the political significance of the atmospheric reality of exhibition-making; the project is an exercise carbon mirroring, which measures the Taipei Biennial 2020 material existence in terms of CO2 emissions. The artists set out to investigate to what extent the Biennial exhibition contributes to the combustion of the world, from artwork production to artist travels and the museum’s controlled climate. They employ a variety of greenhouse gas emission tracking tools and sets of data to demonstrate their findings. Ultimately, the artists bring awareness to the necessary transformation towards sustainability that involves all sphere of human activity, including cultural institutions. In relationto this aspect, it is important to mention TFAM’s committment over the next few years to reforest a large area of land in Taipei, in collaboration with Geotechnical Engineering Office of Taipei City Government and Taipei Forestry Technologist Association.
Anothe project in this section points to the role of culture in creating a more sustainable living environment. Taiwanese architect Huai-Wen Chang and his MAS (Micro Architecture Studio) have developed Museum as a Third Skin, a design project that uses meteorological and micro-architectural elements to propose changes to TFAM’s structure. The project uses that data collected during the past two years (Taipei Biennial 2018-2020) with the weather station on TFAM’s roof, including light, wind, rain, temperature, heat radiation, ultraviolet light, wind ow velocity, wind direction and rainfall. The station also receives remote data on air quality and information on pollutants in nearby rivers. The five architectural transformations – developed with the aid of the data collected – would reduce CO2 consumption and optimise the museum’s interaction as a building with its immediate surroundings.
Finally, we come to Planet with Alternate Gravity, which looks at the forces of attraction and repulsion between the different planets, a strange form of geopolitics. Taiwanese artist Chen Yin-Ju has created a series of astrological maps that show the configurations of the stars at the beginning of five dramatic dates in recent Asian history: the massacres in East Timor in 1999, the Lieyu Massacre in 1987 (Taiwan), the Sook Ching Massacres in 1942 (Singapore), the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1975 (Cambodia), and the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 (South Korea). The artist questions the origins of history and suggests that the astrological forces are there, whether we want to believe in them or not.
To close our exploration of the Taipei Biennial 2020, we look at Taipei artist Yao Jui-Chung project Incarnation. Beginning in early 2016, the artist photographed more than 220 temples, cemeteries, public gardens,and amusement parks featuring the statues of deities created by the Han people in Taiwan. The artist is fascinated by the way in which belief systems operate, and within the context of the exhibition, this documentary-spiritual exploration brings us back to the interaction of human life – and death – with the environment. The projects poetically reminds us of the material legacy left by humanity on the Earth’s Critical Zone that helps us live through time, clinging to a spiritual sphere that promises eternal salvation.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
‘You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet”, Taipei Biennial 2020, runs from 21 November 2020 to 14 March 2021 at Taipei Museum of Fine Art (TFAM), Taiwan.