The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is close to the Taiwanese capital’s Songshan airport. Every 10 minutes or so, a passenger jet roars low overhead, appearing between buildings as though one is standing under the migratory path of some great mythical bird. Beneath this flight path, in the museum’s garden, lies Watershed (2023) by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, a new commission for the 2023 Taipei Biennial. Half a dozen clear iridescent plastic forms made by combining DIY animal sculpture kits are filled with fairy lights: hind legs, antlers, and animal heads melt into one another like a metamorphosis gone awry. Each creaturely amalgam sits atop a mobility walker, lending the group an anthropomorphic air of pride and fragility.
Watershed, says Haghighian, is dedicated to the figure of the caretaker. Her animals are a motley crew, looking out for one another while contemplating the open skies over their walled courtyard garden. Within each creature’s casing, a speaker plays a crystalline rendition of Cantopop singer Karen Mok’s 1999 hit, Suddenly, sung in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Minnan. Haghighian’s alien choir resonates through the garden’s cubic enclosure, humble and transcendent. In the intervals between her woodland karaoke, a modular synth patch designed by the Taiwanese-American artist James T. Hong fills the air with the warbling rhythm of synthetic tongues. The rip-roar of jet engines periodically overwhelms their chorus.
The strange alchemy of Watershed is the most compelling manifestation of the Taipei Biennial’s titular theme, ‘Small World’, which seeks to evoke the tensions of intimacy and scale, dissociation and hyper-connectivity, agency and alienation, of a post-pandemic planet. Its three curators –Reem Shadid, the Palestinian director of Beirut Art Center; Taiwanese-American editor of e-flux, Brian Kuan Wood; and Hong Kong-based Taiwanese curator Freya Chou – began their association online, during the pandemic’s tail-end. As they write in their curatorial text, a small world ‘suggests both a promise and a threat: a promise of greater control over one’s life, and a threat of isolation from a wider community.’
‘Small world’ might well describe the lives of those working in the international contemporary art scene. A professional diaspora that weaves migratory networks across centers and peripheries, as they canalize the channels of global culture, annihilating geographic distance with fungible discourse, one biennial at a time. Watershed brings a deeply ambiguous emotional texture to this small, cosmopolitan world: Haghighian’s chintzy, fragile bodies sing and ponder beneath a screeching sky, at once hypermodern and helpless, frivolous and profound.
The modernisms of the 20th century, and what came after, were forged in the accelerating interconnections of an increasingly ‘small’ world, often shaped by warfare and the innovations they catalyzed in communication technologies. With the fall of the Soviet Union, a consensual fiction took hold around a unipolar Northern Atlanticist political and economic world order. It was in these decades of globalization that the borderless transnationalism of contemporary art emerged as the cultural logic of the end of history. At the same time, contrapuntal futurities abounded from diasporic cultures and ‘emerging economies’ located below, within, and beyond the Global North: all of them seeking, in different ways, to provincialize Atlanticist modernism and feel out a more complex spectrum of cosmologies. Whether in the cosmic jazz of Afrofuturism, the desert racers of Gulf Futurism, or the swarm intelligence of Sinofuturism, these temporal rifts were often articulated by artists, writers, and curators caught in the speculative gravity between one world and another: cosmopolitans par excellence.
But much has changed. In some ways, as the political geography of the world tilts towards multipolarity, these cosmo-futurities are being consolidated: not as the frisson of postcolonial speculation, but as full-blooded nation-building projects and neo-imperialist visions that take ownership of the future they seek to forge, for better or worse. From China’s Belt and Road Initiative to futuristic Saudi megaprojects like NEOM, sovereign – and often ethnocentric – power remains the unit of historical agency. Perhaps contemporary art tried to have it both ways, at once rooted in liberal teleology and yearning for a counter-hegemonic futurity – but now that history has caught up, what will become of its cosmopolitan desires?
‘Small World’ carries this melancholy resonance. At times the exhibition feels like a dream pop album, nostalgic for unrequited histories and mourning for a globalization which never kept its promises. It opens with a grand wall of images by the Taiwanese photojournalist Hsu Tsun-Hsu, The More We Get Together, documenting the turbulent energy of the first decade of Taiwanese democracy from 1988 to 1998. Nearby, Sculptured Decompositions (2023) by Nesrine Khodr comprises topographical drawings found in the abandoned architectural office she uses as her studio in Beirut, which date back to the 1960s, and are here covered in plaster, resin, and glass detritus – best-laid plans which have become material witnesses to a disintegrating socio-political fabric in Lebanon.
One talk staged during opening week confronted the scope of individual and collective agency – artistic and otherwise – in a world of compounding crises. In conversation with Freya Chou and artist Ellen Pau, legendary Palestinian-American painter Samia Halaby, who just turned 87, spoke powerfully of Palestinian liberation and the genocide being unleashed on the people of Gaza by Israel. Halaby’s voice burned with truth and righteous anger, but in this dissociative reality, where so much is seen and so little is done, truth appears ever necessary but increasingly insufficient to bring about justice. Inhabiting a deeply connected world, it turns out, is not the same as being able to change it. If anything, the way global proximity can turn ineffable scale into something familiar, navigable, and hopeful – that microcosmic feeling – makes it all the harder to swallow when it falls apart.
What happens when the conditions of this world are upturned and the ground moves and the horizon can no longer be trusted? It can feel like a breakup, which circles back to the song serenading Haghighian’s installation. Karen Mok recorded Suddenly in response to the 1999 Jiji earthquake in central Taiwan, whose aftershocks included the 2000 electoral defeat of the Kuomintang, ending the party’s half-century rule over the island. ‘Suddenly, the sky dims and the land darkens,’ Mok sings, ‘The world can so suddenly be emptied of everything.’ The ballad became an instant classic, helping the Hong Kong star become an idol in Taiwan. It speaks to the inability to let go of a lover following a split; the jolt of lost familiarity; and the irony of love made palpable by vulnerability.
Contemplating the small world as a romance that
never completed its arc, Haghighian’s aptly titled Watershed speaks to
what has been left suspended, half-cooked, and overexposed to the noise of an
inchoate reality. A sense of suspension resonates, too, in the Taiwanese
capital, which is a homely, nostalgic place, in spite of its position within
the geopolitical fray, its high technology industries, and the fraught colonial
history of its young democracy. One friend observed that most of the city feels
like it was built in a few years in the 1990s. As if to prove a point, my hotel
room kept a vintage Casio radio alarm clock and a bible on the bedside table.
It’s a fine place, then, to contemplate the uneven legacy of globalization and
the cosmopolitanisms to come. As with any good breakup song, the art that
thrives in times like these is feeling things out, just like the rest of us.
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and strategist based in London and Shanghai.
Published on December 19, 2023.
Captions for full-bleed images: 1.Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Watershed, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. 2.Hsu Tsun-Hsu, The More We Get Together: The Annual Autumn Worker's Struggle series, 1996-1998. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.