Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury’s Comments for the Grand Prize Winner

This award pays homage to TheCube Project Space as an independent art institution. Their attempt in re-considering history through excavation of sound culture has enriched the historical complexity of sound culture in Taiwan. At the same time, this effort has provided us an alternative threshold to go through contemporary creation. Through the process of teamwork curating, and dialectic discourse, this reflective community succeeds in suggesting multiplying perspectives, and at the same time, challenge the linear historical narrative.

Altering Nativism—Sound Cultures in Post-War Taiwan offers an opportunity to re-examine the value of marginalized cultures and make them the subject to reflect mainstream culture and to rethink the real. At the same time, they also suggest a trail to bring back what had been unheard in our common history. 

Jury’s Comments for the Annual Shortlist Award Winner

This exhibition does not lay claim to newly discovered historical documents, nor categorize the historicity of established art forms. Altering Nativism is a reexamination and reanalysis of the production of sound culture. A series of topics related to native conventional concepts are cast back to the ideologies and social relations of a specific temporal space, so that this exhibition that uses genealogy to upturn its theme does not linger at privileging an established sound aesthetic, but presents practitioners applications of the heterogeneity of sound, resistance, utterance, and sound creation in a dialectical process. The themes that have been ejected by the ideological context trajectory of sound activists: nation/state, Han/indigenous, colonial/decolonized, homegrown/modern, commercial mainstream/alternative independent – are presented as audio documents, and successfully render the social initiative of an arts performance. 

Comments on the Finalist

The exhibition did not advertise new discoveries of historical documents nor focused on the contextualization of a certain artistic genre. Through re-examination and a dialectical process of the production and realization of the sound culture, Altering Nativism re-contextualized several sets of subjects related to nativism and common people within the ideology and social relation of a certain time and space. Via this genealogical approach that altered the theme, this exhibition did not simply celebrate certain sound aesthetics, but emphasized how the sound makers created a dialectical process of fighting, sounding and altering by using heterogeneous sounds. Altering Nativism displayed the sound culture with documents and files in a visually oriented museum. The curatorial framework provided a form of dual reading (listening): the object of perception and the conceptual ideology. The exhibition effectively brought into full play the spirit of “curating is an attitude, and the museum is a public forum.”(Commentator / GUO Jau-Lan)

Artwork Introduction

Altering Nativism is a project that integrates research, exhibition and publication; it proposes a construction of knowledge and conception of history based on the experience of listening—an investigation into the experience of the “sound culture” in Taiwan—and hopes to discover the meaning conveyed and advocated by this “sound culture.”

In Taiwanese modern history, the Japanese colonization opened the door to the experience of modernity in Taiwan, and this process had been through constant vicissitudes of political powers. From the post-war period to the imposition of martial law and its lifting, people faced continuation and discontinuation in all kinds of experience and perception all the time. The fabrication of history has structured in people’s consciousness complex and multiple realities in different time and space as well as in perception.  If we view the memory of sounds as a kind of perceptual experience existing in between the private and the public domain, would it be possible to conjure up the sense of history hidden in everyone’s consciousness through the representation of sound as well as its documentation, literature and art exhibition?

Additionally, if we should view sounds—the musical as well as the non-musical—as an expressive form of a human’s mind, would an understanding of the social progress from making sounds to listening to them provide us an alternative channel to comprehend the individual or collective condition in history? Would it further reinforce the construction of the “imperceptible conception of history,” resurrecting our thinking about the cultural condition of place, of identification and even of the times?

Based on these questions, this project intended to take “sounds” as a force of thinking, and would like to travel through time and space, transcend all language barriers, revive the forgotten bodily perception and reexamine our current condition of existence and reality through this medium of perception, “sounds.”

About the Artist

Since its founding in 2010, TheCube has devoted itself to several ambitious missions such as promoting contemporary art, enlightening rich and profound humanistic thinking, constructing a network between local and international art communities, and perpetuating the historical context of art. TheCube has grown quickly in influence and today serves as a multi-functional space for exhibitions, lectures, exchange, and archival collection. By April 2015, TheCube has organized over twenty exhibitions and over thirty lectures, and published related research articles and publications. It is one of the few independent art spaces in Taipei that has the ability in organizing quality international exhibitions on a non-profit basis.