Studio one eighty nine series#

On the day I returned, my flight landed at the Taipei Songshan Airport just a few hours before Nancy Pelosi’s. For example, it failed to dispel the anxiety that punctuated my first international trip post-pandemic, which felt uncannily caught up in current events: On the day of my visa appointment, the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association opened its door for the public to express their condolences on the passing of Shinzo Abe. Such a shift in perspective, however, can easily be seized and violated by exigent realities. When the axis of time is stretched to encompass a mega-annum, the frictions and tremors before us today seem like little more than trivial occurrences. Kataoka seems to favor grandiose temporalities: When asked about her thoughts on the future, she referenced another work by Kawara, One Million Years.

Broodthaers’ iconic Entrance to the Exhibition, 1974, opened the exhibition on another floor next to it was a work by US-based German artist Diemut Strebe, where Socrates, resurrected by AI technology, engages in a conversation on wisdom and truth with artificial intelligence. Pablo Dávila’s Buddhist-inspired film consists purely of patterns reminiscent of white noise, which, algorithmically generated, can ostensibly flicker into eternity. Roman Ondak’s sliced-up tree trunks resemble the dials of clocks, each solemnly stamped with a key moment in history, from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party to the Battle of Stalingrad. A collection of telegrams sent by the artist to his family and friends over three decades, the work launches the exhibition into a discourse on the concept of temporality.

Studio one eighty nine series#

Following Broodthaers’s work were selections from the series “I Am Still Alive” (1969–2000) by Aichi native On Kawara, from which this edition of the Triennale borrows its title. There was a certain elegance in this restrained opening act, which nevertheless seeded in me a skepticism toward the curator’s overly optimistic assessment of the role of art in our time. In these first few words the Triennale utters for itself, Broodthaers swaps the word “ monde” on a commercially made world map for “utopia.” Sometimes the alteration of one word could change the world, Kataoka said during the guided tour, and that is the power of art. The main exhibition at the Aichi Art Center opened with an annotated map by Marcel Broodthaers. Indeed, a rather flat sense of uneventfulness was this edition’s most lingering impression. WHEN CONFRONTED by a Japanese journalist about the scandal that haunted the previous Aichi Triennale, artistic director Kataoka Mami responded with: “This has been asked too many times,” and “Let the exhibition speak for itself.” Leaving us “outsiders” stunned, these statements seemed calibrated to banish from our minds that now-distant conflict, when outrage over a sculpture commemorating Korean women enlisted into sexual slavery by the Japanese military forced the closure an entire section of the exhibition (ironically titled “After Freedom of Expression?”), let alone the myriad other storms that have roiled international art exhibitions in the intervening years. Photo: ToLoLo studio/Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee. View of Delcy Morelos’s Prayer, Horizon, Tokonam, 2022.