Medi(t)ation

National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts || Taiwan

10/31/2011 - 01/01/2012 click for show info
Newton & His Eastern Peace

Medi(t)ation

National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts - Taiwan
10/31/2011 - 01/01/2012

The 2011 Asian Art Biennial proposes the theme Medi(t)ation, a concept that reflects the trend across Asia towards an M-shaped societal structure and the related threats it poses, while presenting a strongly communicative Asian cultural stance and stressing methods for mediating conflicts and tensions.

This biennial features 40 artists and collaboration groups from 21 Asian regions, including Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Russia, Vienna, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Australia, New Zealand, and artists from Central and West Asia as Iran, USA/Iraq, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Israel, and Pakistan. Presenting works in form of installation, painting, video, sculpture, onsite projects, performance, and interactive workshop to enrich the perspectives of Asian Art.

Medi(t)ation is a neologism coined especially for this exhibition. This new term combines the two core concepts of mediation and meditation, stressing mediation of conflict while also standing for the longing for reconciliation inherent in the human spirit. By coining the term “M-shaped society,” renowned Japanese economist and trends expert Kenichi Ohmae placed his finger on the changes to the social and economic structure we are currently undergoing. Medi(t)ation refers to exploring changing Asian culture, and how artists search for a middle ground between traditional values and modern cultural development amidst widely varying extreme influences; and how they look for the room for “cultural mediation” over the course of reflection and shifting power structures, to establish their position in the anxious area of global cultural competition.

Pieces In Collection

Newton & His Eastern Peace

09/01/2011

The works speak of mediation; through terms of being a cultural bridge through its materiality and response to offering in sacred sense and also meditation that activates the space for considered thoughtful engagement to occur. The work is a hope that by combining cultural materials associated to festival and ceremony the opening the work will then allow audience engagement and creation as communities are bridged and built, as a greater sense of understanding and respect is generated via the spiritual overtones of the work.

Newton & His Eastern Piece 2011 is a site specific reinvention of the original work Newton & The Piece Bomb 2010. The work presents an intrinsic connection to environment context and co-authorship as the work presents art as a gift that provides an alternate pathway to healing, as the channels for communication and cultural education are opened and the relationship between artist and audience, site and spirit gives way to neutralizing ownership, becoming an evolving living body of work.
The work functions with the intention of making tangible the exposure too and interaction of different cultures, sacred tradition, and alternate sensual languages that help to interpret and resolve the duality of worlds both internal and external, sacred and secular, eastern and western, communal and individual.

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