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The Taoyuan International Art Award (TIAA) has ended in the evening of April 18. During the pandemic, the award still received a remarkable number of more than six hundred entries. After a month of meticulous selection, seventeen finalists were presented at the award exhibition, featuring artists from Asia, Europe and America. Since the very beginning, the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA) has adopted a global perspective to organize the jury committee, craft the position of the award and conduct its marketing, demonstrating the multifaceted viewpoints of global contemporary art while transforming Taoyuan into an international art stage.

Facilitating International Exchange with the TIAA and Creating the Museum’s Brand of “Biennial Award/Exhibition”

The 2021 Taoyuan International Art Award, formerly known as the Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award (TCAA), encourages contemporary artistic experimentation and innovation. In 2020, the TMoFA transformed the award into an international competition that accepted entries of different media and genres. In addition to Taiwanese artists, this edition also received entries from forty-six other countries. After the reformation, the TIAA adopts a biennial timeframe and pours even more efforts and resources in the exhibition’s production and promotion, elevating the award and exhibition to an international standard by creating “a competition-based biennial” with a global scope and scale. By doing so, it is hoped that the competition will facilitate international exchange between artists worldwide and build a converging hub of artistic thoughts.

According to the TMoFA Director LIU Chun Lan, starting firstly from the museum’s branding, the TMoFA has concentrated on curating an exhibition of international exchange with the finalists that could display the zeitgeist; and secondly, in order to demonstrate the expansive global vision embodied by the finalists, since the initial stage of the award, the organizer has invited professional artists, curators and art critics to form international jury committees. Robin PECKHAM, Co-director of Taipei Dangdai and a juror of the second-stage selection, has made the following comment, “It is truly exciting to see such results because Taiwanese artists are now able to compete and exhibit with fellow artists from around the world in the same exhibition.”

With Taoyuan as an International Stage, the TIAA Has Focused on Experimentality and Public Participation

Located in the city of the national gate, the TMoFA has continuously endeavored in realizing its strategy of facilitating international exchange even though the museum building is yet to be completed. The first edition of the TIAA, facing the challenge of halted global movement during the pandemic, has still transformed Taoyuan into an international stage to present a physical exhibition that showcased all finalists from different parts of the world. CHEN Yung Hsien, the Chair of the second-stage selection, has given the following comment on the artworks featured in the exhibition, “Encompassing artistic viewpoints from the early modern period, the modern era and the future, they have shattered the boundary of genre-based thinking and moved towards new aesthetic forms, enabling us to reflect on contemporary thinking and the future possibilities of art.” KAO Chien Hui, Visiting Professor at Tainan National University of the Arts, commented on the finalists and stated, “Overall, the subject matters of the works reflect four major trends of this era: the post-colonial shadow, land and border, the Anthropocene halo and spatial conflicts.” According to the TMoFA, the objective of the award is to construct an interdisciplinary, global platform of exchange that allows artists to freely express their subjectivity. It is worth mentioning that the museum especially produced a program offering online guided tours of the exhibition to increase the award’s global visibility, inviting online audience to tour the virtual exhibition. During the run of the exhibition, the museum also launched a public participation program of voting for the “Audience Choice Award” and presented the TIAA’s “Let’s Q&A,” which collected questions from the audience that were later responded in a dialogue between invited experts Emerson WANG and SHEN Bo-Cheng, establishing further connection with the audience.

The Construction of the TMoFA Main Building Is On-going and Expected to Inaugurate in 2024  

The worldwide open call for the next TIAA will commence in 2022 and its exhibition will take place in 2023. Director LIU states that although the main building of the TMoFA is expected to complete in 2024, the museum has already endeavored in facilitating international exchange early on. An instance of such effort was the inter-museum exchange exhibition collaborated with the Centraal Museum Utrecht, Netherlands in 2020. This year, despite the tremendous challenge of the pandemic, the museum presented the first edition of the TIAA, attracting entries from artists in forty-six countries. In spite of the on-going construction of its hardware, the museum has overcome the limitation of time and space to steadfastly promote the TMoFA as a global museum brand. The main building of the TMoFA museum cluster is located in the Chintan Park, which is close to the HSR Taoyuan Station and Taoyuan Metro’s Taoyuan Sports Park Station (A19), making the museum the international art exhibition venue closest to the national gate. Designed by Japan’s Riken Yamamoto and Field Shop Co., together with Taiwan’s Joe Shih Architects, the museum’s architecture adopts the fresh look of “a hill.” Soon, the TIAA is expected to be exhibited in the museum’s expansive space raised nine meters from the ground after the museum’s inauguration, which will serve as an international hub that embraces creative imaginations from artists worldwide.