Love and Death of Sentient Beings
Taiwan Biennale
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
2022.11.05-2023.03.05
https://2022taiwanbiennial.ntmofa.gov.tw/index-en.html
https://2022taiwanbiennial.ntmofa.gov.tw/artist-02-en.html
2022 TAIWAN ART BIENNIAL
The Taiwan Art Biennial, organized by National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, provides an overview of the status and development of Taiwan’s contemporary art and summarizes developmental directions in the arts ecology in the span of two years. Since its inception in 2008, the Taiwan Art Biennial has continually broken down pre-existing barriers, and the exhibition parameters have gone through various experiments and innovations. Whether in the makeup of the curatorial team, or the diversity of the artistic formats, to the experimental self-exploration of the institution, the execution of various curatorial teams has gradually developed into a biennial of unique character. Curators Manray HSU and I-wen CHANG are experts respectively in the visual and performing arts fields, mutually sparking novel perspectives and inquiries. Through diverse and rich exhibition formats, the current state of Taiwanese contemporary art is presented. The 2022 Taiwan Art Biennial (8th) takes to account the ‘sentience’ of the digital age: technical questions of what is ‘sentience’? For what? And how ‘sentience’, on one hand dialogue with the avant-garde thought of the contemporary, and on the other, further re-evaluates various questions around Taiwanese history and subjectivity formation through the worldviews and chrono-concepts expanded upon by artists, weaving an artistic universe of overlapping democracies but rich in local character.
Taken from: https://2022taiwanbiennial.ntmofa.gov.tw/2022-taiwan-biennial-en.html
CURATORIAL STATEMENT: “LOVE AND DEATH OF SENTIENT BEINGS”
The exhibition title “Love and Death of Sentient Beings” comes from the poem “雁丘詞” (Song of the Wild Geese Mound) by twelfth-century poet Yuan Haowen. The oft-quoted lines “ask of the world, what is love that makes one devote to each other in life and death.”, here becomes a negative interrogative, transforming its popular meaning of romantic love into an investigation of the nature of “sentient existence” in the age of digital technology.
The character “情” (translated as ‘sentient’ in the title) in Chinese has multiple meanings: its “heart” radical hints at the movement of the heart, leading to words such as “affect” (情動), “desire” (情慾), “mood” (情緒), “feeling” 情懷), etc. However, relative to desires of the flesh, in the context of ancient metaphysics, “情” holds even deeper meanings. “The Operation of Etiquette” chapter in the Book of Rites states, “What is human emotion (人情)? Joy, anger, grief, fear, love, disgust, desire, these seven are innate.” On one hand, “情” is seen as intrinsic to human nature, an instinctive sentiment; on the other hand, the dynamic facet of human nature — the motions of the heart — are also addressed, and viewed as inherent faculties of life that require no additional learning. From this, we can extrapolate the dynamic “emotions” [情緒], “situations” [情況], and “affairs” [事情] it can mean any great Bodhi-sattva of life throughout the universe; so, as the fundamental mode, situation, happening, affection, or state of affairs of existence, ‘情’ is not an object that can be unitized, but is a dynamic relation between the various elements of the universe. Through exhibiting different forms and discrepancies in strength and reality, they appear as ‘sentience’.
The metaphysical history of ‘情’ is also reflected in the evolution of the concept of ‘sattva’ in Buddhism. In orthodox Buddhism, sentient beings (‘sattva’ in Sanskrit) refers to all conscious life that falls into the six realms of reincarnation. The main tenet of Buddhism is freeing all sentient beings from the cycle of reincarnation. In Mahayana Buddhism, this Atlas-like burden falls upon the Bodhi-sattva Bodhi-sattva, meaning ‘awakening-sentient’, can mean any sentient being that embarks on the path of the Buddha from the heart; it can mean any who seek wisdom as a willing sentient being; it can mean any great Bodhi-sattva who after having achieved wisdom chooses to remain in the cycle of life, death, and reincarnation and has the ability to bring other sentient beings into transcendence. Mahayana Buddhism proposes that “all sentient beings have the potential to become Buddhas”, and are all able to awaken and attest to the philosophies of the Buddha. We can further extend this to insentient beings having the potential to become Buddhas, as in East Asian Buddhism (Getz 2004). As such, the decoupling of ‘情’ and consciousness allows ‘情’ to become the force that runs throughout the universe. This aptly corresponds to the metaphysical meaning of the term ‘情’ in Chinese: What exists that is not sentient? What is not sentient that exists? Judging by the historical development of ‘sentient beings’ or ‘sattva’, if all sentient beings have the potential to become Buddhas, then we must ask, do all technological or digital objects also have the potential to become Buddhas — sentience?
The task of the Taiwan Art Biennial, which runs once every two years, is not only to examine the main trends or creative directions of art nowadays, but also to reflect the important issues of this age through art creation, becoming an interface for the public to dialogue and reflect. The Taiwan Art Biennial is also one of the few biennials with Taiwanese artists at its center. The works embark from local artists, ruminating upon Taiwan’s local contexts, speaking out for local diversity and allowing history to present its different faces. Every iteration of the “Taiwan Art Biennial” revisits the variousness of Taiwanese history; as such, we can say that in the past sixteen years, over the accumulation of eight biennials, that the Taiwan Art Biennial has shaped the diverse viewpoints of Taiwanese art, becoming an important reference for Taiwanese contemporary art history.
As such, the exhibition Love and Death of Sentient Beings embarks from the exploration of ‘sentience’ to discuss the mutually evolving relationship between technology and sentient beings, responding thereby to biopolitics in relation to contemporary Indigenous representation and bodily performance, and allowing meaningful and edifying space for discussion to form between contemporary art and techno-philosophy, trans-species ethics, new animism, Indigeneity, and locality. The participating works thus intersect and weave between the four subtopics of the exhibition through different methods of dialogue.
Taken from: https://2022taiwanbiennial.ntmofa.gov.tw/curatorial-statement-en.html