Tracing Taiwan: Contemporary Works on Paper

Before her tragic death in early February of the year of the exhibition, guest curator Alice Yang (1961–1997) organized Tracing Taiwan: Contemporary Works on Paper at The Drawing Center as one of her final projects. While Taiwan emerged as one of the four economic "tigers" in postwar Asia, its contemporary visual art had received little attention in the West. The exhibition explored contemporary developments in drawing in Taiwan, focusing particularly on its relationship to Chinese artistic traditions, among the most in-depth exhibitions of Taiwanese contemporary art in the United States of the time. The exhibition introduced the unique cultural and social contexts which gave rise to a rich and vibrant artistic scene in Taiwan.

In the same way that oil painting had been regarded as the dominant language of Western art, so had ink brush painting rendered on silk or rice paper once served as the principal idiom of Chinese art. Because of these differences in vocabularies, painting and drawing were not distinguished as separate formal categories in China as they were in the West. Tracing Taiwan endeavored to expand conceptions of the drawing medium, by introducing contemporary artworks derived from non-Western models and conventions to The Drawing Center audience. Given the complex history of the island, the question of Chinese tradition posed complex cultural and political ramifications in Taiwan. Not only was this artistic tradition often considered at variance with the process of modernization, its Chinese origin was also viewed with some ambivalence by those in search of a distinctive Taiwanese identity. Taiwan's phenomenal postwar economic growth and its later democratic reforms gave artists the impetus and opportunity to explore these questions in a more probing fashion. Since the 1980s, Taiwan had thus witnessed the emergence of a dynamic generation of artists who sought to come to terms with these multiple, sometimes contradictory, artistic inheritances and influences—Western, Chinese, Taiwanese—at the core of their culture and their work.

The exhibition featured four artists whose work engaged with these cultural and social tensions from different viewpoints: Huang Chih-Yang, Hou Chun-Ming, Yu Peng, and Hsu Yu-Jen, and was a joint presentation of the Taipei Gallery and The Drawing Center.