Project Glocal: Transi(en)t is an experimenting project co-organized by the independent curator Dayang Yraola and No Man’s Land in early 2014. This project invites three artists respectively from the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia to reside in Taipei for a month and create works in collaboration with three Taiwanese artists. Before the end of their residency, the three pairs of artists will present their respective live performances that cover the forms of sound art, performance art and media art.

The curator’s strategy based on the one-to-one interaction is not novel. Previously, there have been exhibitions featuring artists presenting Four Areas around the Strait (i.e. China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) or two specific cities (Taipei and some foreign city), which prompted the visitors to associate these exhibitions with dialogues. Prior to 2012, nevertheless, Taiwan’s contemporary art circle in general had only fragmentary understanding of and sporadic exchange with Southeast Asian art circle. In view of this deficiency, Yraola invites three artists from three different cultures and languages

and situated them in two contemporary art/sound art scenes in Taiwan, namely TheCube Project Space and Lacking Sound Fest. Such a practice surely can be regarded as the experiment, exchange, and artist-in-residence project through which Taiwan’s contemporary art circle seeks to engage in a “Asian dialogue” on the basis of reciprocal creation. Its diverse attributes blur the boundaries among live performance, performing and sound art, and therefore make this project difficult to be framed by single exhibition venue. Somehow, this strategy without presuming any existed difference inevitably attracts bitter criticism.

What is worth noticing is that the cultural production or activism mentioned here refers to that the curator decides the forms and tools for creation before producing discourses, and such a meta-referential statement makes collective production the most significant part in the curating process. In other words, the final results are embedded in the exchange, and the participating artists in this experiment treat co-production as the underlying principle. The practice transforms the conventional relationship between curator and artist in today’s art world. In this project, the concept formulated by the curator is intergrated into the actual works completed by the artists.

Asian Cities inTransi(en)t

In this project, the curator develops a main theme that runs through and therefore connects Asian cities such as Taipei, Manila, and Penang. The term “transi(en)t” carries two implications. One refers to “transit” and the other “transient.” With the embedded (en), the term “transi(en)t” not only leaves room for the audience’ interpretation, but also encompasses the inconclusive visual variables and actions from one end to the other that implied by the term “transit.” In other words, “transi(en)t” is simultaneously a temporal and spatial term. It keeps reminding us of the following questions when we try to identify the functions of this exchange. What does the exchange run through and from where to where? What is the subject in transit? Or, in the end, how transient is the existence that gets passed through?

Under the aforementioned signification, the term “Asia” lurks in all themes in a self-evident posture. Here “Asia” serves not only as the common context for Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia but also as the prime intersection of the conditions for artists’ creation in these countries. However, the fact that Taiwan is not acknowledged as a normal state by the international society makes the implicit intersection incomplete. Apart from this, these countries share common geographical and historical trajectories shaped by the ocean, islands, climates, cultures, immigrants & migrants, decolonization and re-colonization (on the border of the empires), as well as the capitalist context. Under these common trajectories is the intricate exoticism with which these countries alienate, bury, or disclose the multiple features reflecting their respective technological development, political agenda, and economic inequality.

Technology

In the chapter of “The Disciplining and Domestication of Body” in 亞洲身體論,  performance artist Wang Mo-Lin claimed that,

When the globalization of capitalism meets the body which is treated as the tool for production, the body’s existence in a consumer society seems to be redundant. The bodies of migrant workers and denizened spouses have nothing to do with exoticism. However, the set of exclusive mechanisms established by the consumer society regards them as heterogeneous groups. That is, the consumer society still oppresses the bodies of “immigrants/migration.”

For the Filipino artist who belongs to a labor-exporting country, Taipei as a consumer society exhibits extreme ruthlessness disguised by conservative moralism. Cultural pluralism is reduced either by the beautification-based action of expelling the migrant workers who gather around the Taipei Railway Station on Sunday or by the gentrification process of urban renewal, that eliminates the diversity with bulldozers to create a homogenized space. Mannet Villariba, who collaborates with Li Bo-ting in the project, creates their work performed by his own body. He notices the Filipino economic structure based on long-term exportation of cheap labor, and transforms it into his presentation of bio-politics. For the viewers, however, such a bio-political interpretation does not insinuate how ruthless the migrant workers are exploited in others’ viewpoints, but can be read as an allegory of recapturing their autonomy by reversely appropriating technology. (Marcin Ramocki: “DIY: The militant embrace of technology”)

It’s convenient to apply technology to artistic creation in a consumer society such as Taiwan that pursues high-tech products. Nonetheless, people still cannot help but associate this scene with the alienation caused by rapid advances in the modern civilization. As a result, the scene tends to be the target of ideological criticism toward the technogy topic addressed in artworks. There may be a “digial divide” between Taiwan and many Southeast Asia countries regarding the circulation of technological and electronic products. The reverse engineering adopted by the Filipinos and Indonesians eliminates not only the priority of technological application but also the poverty of creativity in our thinking. In terms of the liberal attitude about emancipation and exploration, Southeast Asian artists show us a practical technique of struggling against exploitation. Such a technique not only helps them resist the alienation of commodities but also invokes the metaphor of resisting the alienation of labor through the artist’s body.(註1)

The Asian Body

As the common framework of understanding shared by the audience and the artists, Asia not only opens up the horizons through which we stretch beyond our status quo, but may also define our dialogue relation in an intangible way. This project intends to create a stretchable subjective dialectic with sound art, visual art, performance art, together with various technologies. However, we are unable to discuss why Taiwan’s visual art community seemingly inclines to bypass the communication with or visit to the heterogeneous adjacent regions but unreservedly accept the “international” (or De-Southeast Asian) artistic context that deliberately ignores the asymmetrical production relationship in the real world (formed under the process of Neo-Liberal globalization with incompatible de-colonisations of different Asian countries.)

The materiality demonstrated by individual Asian bodies is reminiscent of the goals of performance art using bodies as the media for creation. The goal is twofold. The first is to topple the rigid hierarchical regime and agency status of the Western art scene and the second is to challenge the established knowledge (of art-making) through the connection among people, environment, and media. Nowadays, should we uphold the legitimacy of a “meta-mediated” body as a production tool, whether in terms of the contemporary instrumental rationality seemed progressive but actually regressive, or the manifestation of the “Asian body” in the digital map of the Internet? Besides, who is responsible for this subjectivity redeemed in/for the Asian body, the performers or the viewers? How can the Asian body as the subject resume its “ability of percetion” with(in) new media if its construction is not meant to conjure up people’s memory of history?

No matter what, the viewers must not reject that the question “why do people move” asked by the artist in this project exactly corresponds to the free trade/market issue in the real world. The Glocal Project also carries the connotation of “glocalization.” Even though the curator of artists cannot directly influence the course of regional free trade or avoid the risk of being incorporated in a larger market, they still can do something to help people revisit the concept of “glocalization” and develop more threads of concerns (particularly about Asia) from the perspective of body as the physical basis of existence when they encounter the bureaucratic machines, market economy, and demographic transition.

Perhaps the relationship of artistic collaboration gradually formulated between Taiwan and part of Southeast Asia can be understood within the context of how to respond to the capitalist society, and thereby provides fresh realizatin for us.