Art is not only a testimony of history, but also a channel for past, present and future to contact one another. If the existence of art is like a virus in a vaccine attacking and generating antigens, perhaps human society has a chance to gain this and be able to resist the inevitability of future extinction.
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Foundation
Our planet has experienced countless events of destruction and rebirth in the span of 4.6 billion years. If the demise of mankind has a certain inevitability and cycle, and art has often become a victim of historical crises, does art have the guarantee of a gene pool? In the movie Children of Men, the exile of artworks is probably our likely future.
At the beginning of human civilization, art was often used as a source of prophecy or knowledge. This tradition is also obvious in present-day contemporary art. If "prophecy" often appears in the form of art, we assume that people projected their modern-day anxieties into its creation, achieving the imaginary in real life, and, thus, creating what is seen as a prediction of the future. Art serves to convey the possibility of the future through different artistic languages, to vaccinate mankind before the advent of the end times. After the destruction, it provided a fragmented jigsaw for later generations to return to the crest of civilization.
'Foundation' borrows its title from the American writer Isaac Asimov's book series. In the novel, Asimov foresaw the tragic future of mankind, which sets up the Foundation whose stated goal is to compile a text, called the Encyclopaedia, containing the sum total of all knowledge of the Galactic Empire. In preserving their society's knowledge, they hope to avert a dark age lasting tens of thousands of years following the Empire's collapse. Human beings under the current epidemic are also facing struggles, but how should the seeds of art be dealt with? At the same time, if darkness is bound to come, how prepared are we? What should we do more?
For the 2021 edition of Art Taipei, we have divided the exhibition into three areas for discussion, aim to examine three different topics, and shall present each topic individually in three different spaces, in which art as the "Foundation" of the dialogue will stand. We attempt to imagine the existence and possibility of art in the Foundation when the end is coming.
Participating Artists｜
Chen Sung-Chih
Chen Yun
Chiu Chen-Hung
Chiu Huai-Hsuan
Hirako Yuichi
Jiang Meng-Si
KINJO
Lai Wei-Yu
Laura Limbourg
Lin Yi-Pei
Ong Hong-Chuan
Shih Yung-Chun
Daniel Sueiras Fanjul
Made Wiguna Valasara
Wang Yu-Song
Wu Ming-Hsing
