Curator's Words

Something about On The Way
Yeh Tzu-chi

Geographically, “on the way” refers to a moving/unsettled state before one reaches some destination. One’s life is also often looked as a journey. It’s also “on the way”, isn’t it? As an artist who practices an art form that emphasizes the process, interaction with the audience/public, and the difficulty to reach a fixed/final edition of his art because sometimes even the same piece might come to an opposite outcome when practiced under different times and spaces, the performance artist might have a much stronger sense of “on the way” than any other artist.

In about recent 10 years, many performance artists are always on their way to some live performance art festival/event/spot to show their performances, and to communicate with other domestic or international performance artists together with the audiences. They are always on the way, though not necessarily on the same way. However, they do come across one another sometimes and somewhere. When they see one another’s performance, they learn that this artist is doing this and that artist is doing that, this artist is going to this direction and that artist is going to another direction. That’s how they come to know that every one of them is pursuing his/her dream of art in this or that way. And thus did they move, if slowly, toward some big vague similar direction.

As an avant-garde and marginal art form, live performance is hard to attract critics or scholar’s attention. Perhaps that accounts why people fail to have a clear map of it in their mind. But being a member of international performance art circle, I’ve found somehow there are still some different “schools” in this circle, and artists can develop in very different multiple ways. This year, we would like to have audience in Taiwan to see more outdoor durational performance, to experience the durational that involves and hides itself in the daily public space. For the past few years, we have quite a few indoor performances, but we hardly have outdoor durational. Besides, a group performance that many individual performances happen in the same time in the same venue is also what we want to experiment this year. I hope that the practice of these new forms of performance may bring a new perspective to our local artists and audience.

We will also ask some of the overseas artists to talk on some certain topics during the event. Hopefully, there will be one speech in every city. And we will also invite local art critics or scholars to come to see our performance in every city and write something afterwards, which we will try to publish in one of our local art magazines.