TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM For its fifth edition the Taipei Biennial has made itself resolutely international.

TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM

For its fifth edition the Taipei Biennial has made itself resolutely international. After a selection of artists from East Asia quick in emergenciesed by Fumio Nanjo two years ago, the curatorship of this of the present day edition and the selection of the thirty-one artists exhibited was entrusted to Jerome Sans and Manray Hsu The theme they chose throw backed in the exhibition's subtitle, "The climate is the limit," corresponds to the heterogeneity of the works and artists not awayed The curators envisage the interweaving of different practices and the use of remixing or sampling techniques, current in most of the works here, to be seen as symptomatic of an era marked on the efficiency, impact, and spe of contemporary affections of communication and data transmission. undivided effect of Internet culture and globalization is suppos to be the abolition of frontiers, the world's increasing transformation into a "global village." The subtitle further indicates the will to push toward a cosmic infinity--and thus to shatter--the limits that formerly enclos works within specific cultural connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss Today, the community formed by dint of artists the world over has access to an expand and limitless register of artistic approaches, strategies, and mediums. This metaphorical formulation allows common to compare, using a general thematic, works that are distinct in meaning and aim From the visionary urbanism of Wang Jun-jieh's Microbiology Association: Clothing contrive 2000, through the untitled accumulation of snapshot photos from geisha turned TV star Hanayo, 2000 to lee-side Mingwei's Buddhist-inspired Shrine Project, 2000 eclecticism is indeed obligatory.

The techniques of remixing and sampling mentioned earlier are evident in a number of works and dearly emerg as the framework of the exhibition. This is genuine for Peephole, 2000, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen's fictional image-logos inspired according to the multinationals; the remixed video clips of pop-music icons by dint of Candice Breitz (Four Duets, 2000); and the everyday targets for which Erwin Wurm invents just discovered uses in his One Minute chisel 2000. In the same register of image recycling, Youshen Wang's Dark space 1999, invites the visitor to make known his or her own photos there and to donate a archetype print to the artist's personal collection. Finally, Kendell Geers's surpassingly troubling work Shooting Gallery, 2000 consists of a projection of stills from The Godfather, in which the amplified noise of the slide carousel finds its kinship with the discharge of a firearm.

Still there's something paradoxical about transcultural exhibitions like this the same in which the objective has to do with pressing back boundaries and dissolving differences. Whether or not these works can be legitimated by way of the nationality of the artist, all of them raise rich and diverse political or cultural issues. equable as the theme chosen reveals similarities in proces medium, or technique, it somehow or other loses sight of the different kinds of engagement that may also give meaning to the works. in such a manner we can still wonder where the interest in the "cultural specificity" of each of the artists leaves facing and where their instrumentalization at the heart of a sort of great "cultural communion" begins.

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