Mixed Emotions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum

I did not expect the Taipei Fine Arts Museum to make me feel so unsteady. On each floor, there is a maze of connected rooms featuring art installations and multi-media displays by various contemporary artists. One floor, likely a special exhibit, revolved around local ecology. Some pieces celebrated nature and others presented compelling facts (such as information about how water is tested at specific sites around Taiwan island), but the overall exhibit had an underlying suggestion of impending catastrophe brought on by human waste. Even some of the pieces that seemed beautiful and peaceful at first ended up eliciting melancholy. I especially loved the prints by Lucy Davis (The Migrant Ecologies Project) - Fragments from the Together Again woodcut series:

This work belongs to a "ten year material-led process of research into stories of wood in Southeast Asia." The description explained that "instead of searching for 'the spirit in the wood'...the collages are made of small variegated fragments of prints of the objects, pasted laboriously together again." The works themselves were each meant to elicit different feelings and stories, but the overarching theme of "wood cuttings" were representative of regional deforestation. On another floor, each room was dedicated to a different artist who had received top accolades in the Taipei Art Awards 2018 competition. As such, each room felt very different as it took on the message and content of the individual artist.

Walking into some rooms felt like a joy. Perhaps my favorite installation in the museum was a man-made tree of hanging wooden boxes, each one with a small piece of material being struck by a rotating piece of metal about two inches long. The effect of these noises, each one at a different pitch and on different time delays, created a room full of chirping birds. The mechanics were fascinating in themselves, but the overall experience of listening to man-made nature sounds inside a museum nestled in a bustling metropolis on a tropical island created a feeling of irony and awe.

Another artist made curio-like wall hanging boxes comprised of small dancing plants. The movement of the plants was subtle, so an onlooker would only notice if he stood around long enough to appreciate the detail. Such a little tree wiggle made me giggle.

However, other exhibits brought on so much anxiety I quickly left the room. One room was kept dark and featured grimly lit mechanical and scientific instruments that spelled out war, torture, and the sick twisting of science for sinister motives. Another room was comprised of nothing but mechanical desks that automatically flipped paper booklets. Each page was flipped in sync across all desks while a rote recording of children read aloud the book's contents in a monotone and droning chorus. The soullessness of the atmosphere brought on chills.