Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

In VARIATION XANADU, Curator Chia-chi Wang employs literary strategies and tropes to manifest the cultural, technological, political and social logics of contemporary art and to create a poetic of technological art.  The show draws upon various models, including Coleridge, Foucault, Bachelard, and Project Xanadu (the forerunner of hypertext), to explicate the logic of creation via imagery.  From this perspective, VARIATION XANADU not only revises the aesthetic of new media art but also outlines a preliminary exploration of Taiwanese media logic.  Namely, it reveals how the political logic of the dualistic positions of de-globalization/locality manifest in an impressive media vocabulary.  The curator is not simply looking to position art to reality but also to make a political admonition of this reality.  This differs from the point of view proposed by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle.  Rather, Wang's is an artistic strategy presented through classical ways of seeing, one that reveals the political logic behind the artists' documentality of heterotopias.  (By Hong-john LIN)