2017 Asian Art Biennial: Negotiating the Future for Changing the Society and Fashioning the Future

Wafaa Bilal, 168:01, 2016-, participatory installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

2017 Asian Art Biennial
Negotiating the Future
September 30, 2017 – February 25, 2018
http://english.ntmofa.gov.tw/English

The 6th Asian Art Biennial will be grandly on view at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts on September 30, 2017. For the first time in more than a decade, the biennial this year is curated by a joint team of an in-house curator and three foreign curators, a mechanism fairly distinct from its previous curatorial practice. Treating “Negotiating the Future” as the theme, the curatorial team plans to invite around 30 artists/collectives to accomplish this great achievement with concerted efforts.

The theme Negotiating the Future features the momentum and limitless potential of contemporary art, as well as the possibilities for art to negotiate and strike a balance among various conflicts of power and relations. By virtue of the creations of these participating artists, this biennial also seeks to address the recent events and latent tension in Asia, thereby reflecting people’s desperate yearning for changing the society and fashioning the future through a concatenation of negotiations.

The three guest curators of this biennial include Kenji Kubota (Japan), Ade Darmawan (Indonesia) and Wassan Al-Khudhairi (Iraq), and Hsiao-Yu Lin is the in-house curator who works in collaboration with them. Speaking of the theme of this biennial, Kubota believes that our future is incubated by myriads of negotiations, and highly creative, unconventional things would be produced if all the negotiations are charged with imagination. For Kubota, the artworks that inspire the viewers’ imagination are closely related to the construction of a brave new world.

On the other hand, Darmawan argues that seeing art as a social practice is essential for us to view artistic practice as a way to speculate about the future. Future might be a luxury idea in certain contexts, but art can always negotiate and strategize for it from the present. As far as Al-Khudhairi is concerned, the 2017 Asian Art Biennial aims to explore the tool of negotiation as a means to navigate the possibilities for the future, and how art, the public and society interact as a relational trinity on the platform provided by this biennial.

The exhibits at the 6th Asian Art Biennial serve as the epitome of contemporary artistic diversity. They comprise a riotous profusion of forms ranging from painting, installation and image to performance art and workshop. The biennial program also includes many exciting events. Please visit the museum website for detailed information about this elaborately organized biennial.