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.

1The Ecology of Modern Technology – The Lost Space as Metaphor

After the 1874 Mudan incident, the Qing government began its policy of “opening up the mountains, pacifying the savages” in Taiwan, expanding colonial rule from the western plains to the depths and backs of the mountains. Wave after wave of military conflict rose between them and the Indigenous peoples who had lived there since time immemorial, as they took over their land, dismantled their social structures, and began to bring post-industrial basic infrastructure to Taiwan, such as electrical wires, railways, highways, and irrigation projects, continuing into the Japanese colonial era, which brought Taiwan one step further into the technical rule of modernization. Since the end of the Second World War, the Great Acceleration of technological modernity has built up the urbanizing system of the globe through the internet, aviation vehicles, satellites, undersea cables, finance, artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, and the development of sustainable agriculture. Taiwan’s modernization, then, is a process of assimilating itself into the planetary urban network.

Philosopher Félix Guattari borrowed Lewis Mumford’s description of the concept of the ‘megamachine’ to describe the modern city. All modern humans live in the ecology of this giant machine, “through collective machinery (education, health, social control, culture…) and the media” (Guattari 2015, 105), the megamachine of the city is the production of individual and collective subjectivity, fundamentally altering the symbiotic relationship between humanity and the planet, other species, and olden cultures, as the material basic infrastructure, communications, and services of the city all have the function of existential definition: “the megamachine imitates sensibility, wisdom, the style of mutual relationship, even unconscious fantasies” (ibid.). Because of this, Guattari reminds us, living in an environment where various ecologies intertwine, modern people not only need to pay attention to the natural ecological disasters of environmental pollution and climate change, but also to social and spiritual ecological disasters (Guattari 2015). In this new mega-ecological combination, from the mountains to the fields and beaches, from the rural communities to urban centers, no one is an outsider when it comes to facing ecology.

The Great Acceleration produced by technological advancement and the flow of capital has resulted in many lost spaces scattered throughout our surroundings. In building codes, lost spaces refer to a foundation small and narrow in area or crooked land foundations, which do not meet the smallest area required by law, or if the diagonal angle at which the foundational line intersects the building line, leads to a piece of land that cannot be built on. Broadly speaking, lost spaces refer to spaces left behind by urban development that are difficult to make use of (Roger Trancik), which create an obstacle in the user’s line of movement, a loss of direction, or visual disturbances that cause discomfort, becoming an unused space. These can be abandoned parks, military bases, or factories, but they can also exist in indoor spaces, such as inside an art museum. In fact, living in an accelerating city, whether in our natural, social, or spiritual environments, lost spaces left by violent change are scattered all about. Taiwan, which now stands in the face of change, holds lost spaces felt deeply by individuals and collectives: in the lost memories left behind by war and authoritarian rule, individual or family traumas, spectres of ethnic migration and interaction buried in communities and on the land, the overlapping memory of mediatized urban spaces, the broken relationships between people and other species. How we search for invisible ‘lost spaces’, how to once again confront lost spaces, has become a pivotal issue in contemporary art.

2Re-Weaving the Cosmos - Presence of Contemporary Indigeneity

From the perspective of technology and modernity, fraught identity and historical scars are evident in the colonial history of Taiwan. The Indigenous people original to Taiwan had lived here for hundreds of years, even thousands of years prior to the coming of the early modern explorers in the 16th and 17th century. We know these peoples belong to the Austronesian family, spread diversely across the vast oceanic landforms of the Southern Hemisphere. With the coming of the Age of Exploration, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples were serially faced with large-scale colonial regimes and gradual arrivals of settler pioneers. First were the peoples on the western plains and hilly areas, the Plains Indigenous people who were designated ‘civilized Indigenous’ by colonial governments over the past three to four hundred years. Then, in the mid-to-late 19th century, under the impact of imperialist expansion, the Qing government initiated “opening up the mountains, pacifying the savages”. Using new technology from the Industrial Revolution, they began to enfold the Indigenous peoples living high up and deep in the mountains into a new wave of colonial rule, further extending into the Japanese colonial era and the Nationalist era after World War II. These Indigenous peoples, who were serially colonized, were thus brought into modernity.

Taiwan’s democratization process over the past 40 years was also the process of the Indigenous revitalization movement. From the time of the nativist movement, the development of Indigenous contemporary art has served as an aspect of ethnocultural revitalization, continually initiating the work of ‘returns’. As anthropologist James Clifford asserts, the présence indigène refers to global Indigenous peoples weaving back together their once-destroyed way of life from what remains of culture and tradition in a globalized and postcolonial context. In the words of Austronesian Tonga anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa, those in the présence indigène are forced to wander between cyclical tiime and linear time, because they have always lived in a sort of conch-shaped view of time, expressing their multiversal weaving through the présence indigène (Hau’ofa 2008). Because of this, new works by Indigenous artists incorporate reflection on the living situation of the moment, while also drawing from traditional mythology and ecological wisdom as a conceptual wellspring. Ever since the Indigenous Redesignation Movement in the 90s, with land back movements and the definition of related legal codes, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples have remained in the process of decolonization and revitalization. In this context, Indigenous people have faced stereotypes in urbanized environments, developing a self-effacing method of dealing with microaggressions, and the contemporary présence indigène is facing exactly this process of negotiation, melding into a modern Indigenous person. Their self-identification has become “becoming Indigenous”.

After such a long process of colonization and assimilation, the revitalization of the Plains Indigenous peoples also took off at the same time as the democratization movement, but faced even more arduous trials. The disappearance of language and cultural tradition, as well as the biases of government policies, has produced the accelerated erasure of the Plains Indigenous ethnic group. The stereotypes and discrimination they face is no less than those Indigenous groups that have been re-designated. They are constantly suspected: the lifestyles of these ‘civilized savages' who have become Han do not differ at all from mainstream culture. Why should they be re-designated as “savages”? Today, more and more artists, cognizant of their own Plains Indigenous blood or identifying with the historical destiny of Indigenous re-presentation, have begun to create works relating to Indigenous issues. These works do not necessarily take identity as their departure point; rather, many take methods such as fieldwork, historical investigation, or oral interviews with elders to develop their work. They break through the typical ethnic designations, geographical line-drawing, historical periodization, or linguistic family. These works emphasize the historical fact of “transgressing the Tu-niu Boundary”, and call the people of today to face the societal lost space that continues to exist.

3Body as Battleground - The Discipline of History

Contemporary art has always stood at the forefront of transdisciplinary art creation, transcending disciplinary boundaries of knowledge, and no longer taking singular art mediums as the foundation for creative practice. However, in the past, modern art emphasized “art for art’s sake”, valorizing the individuality of the artist and the independent status of art, thus preventing many elements from traditional cultures from being re-connected into contemporary creation. In recent years, it is rather in performing arts genres that works absorbing in large part (Indigenous and Han) traditional culture have appeared, reorienting themselves as a new artistic form. These performances that use bodily performance, such as oral language, singing, or rituals, transcend the logical hegemony of textual language. Thus, the body becomes the vessel for the preservation of cultural memory, allowing the conch-shaped temporal and cosmological views that were forced to disappear in the language of the colonizers (Hau’ofa 2008), to be preserved in performance as intangible cultural heritage.

In these works, the performer’s body becomes a ‘living archive’, just as performance scholar Diana Taylor points at: each performance is a method of passing along and preserving knowledge, whether in different performance modes such as gestures, actions, singing, dancing, and music, ‘embodied memory’ provides an approach to keeping records different from textual archives, keeping the intangible cultural heritage forgotten by textual record in the experiential succession of the body (Taylor 2003). On the other hand, emphasizing the performativity produced by orality and action has a ‘theatre-like’ effect, shifting visual art from paying attention to the material qualities of a space, to a concern for the temporal dimension. Time also is affected by the complex situations of society, in particular during the historical memory of the postcolonial period. Because of this, performance links together the privacy of individual time, becoming a mutual indicator for the publics of the museum space.

With the body as a battlefield, from the ‘techniques of the body’ of anthropologist Marcel Mauss, to the ‘discipline’ of sociologist Michel Foucault, modern technologies of discipline surveil the body through spaces, making the body the site of production for political meaning. The use of contemporary technologies of digital surveillance, once again place the body at the center of biopolitics. The diverse tracks of Taiwan’s colonial history are also reflected in the technical training of the dancing body. From modern dance during the Japanese colonial period, styled after German expressionist styles, to the coming of the Nationalist regime to Taiwan, Taiwanese people experienced the Chinese ethnic dance revitalization movement during the Chinese Cultural Renaissance. From the 80s onwards, the lifting of martial law opened up the diverse paths of contemporary Taiwan today; from the post-martial law, to the post-Cold War, to the age of active globalization, these shaped the unique corporeality of Taiwanese people. From exercise regimens for the citizenry, to military marches, modern dance, and Butoh, the development of different bodily techniques underscore a set of corresponding ideologies, and these different bodily trainings and societal situations hint at the multiple traces of Taiwan's colonial histories, as well as at the culturo-political practice of national ‘subjectivity’, which are tied intimately to bodily technologies. These become a reference for contemporary choreographers to explore memory inscribed upon the body.

Performance scholar Judith Butler’s theory of “performativity” and dance scholar Susan L. Foster’s theory of “choreography” provides us inroads to consider performance: the former believes that ‘performativity’ comes through repeated execution of meaning-making systems (Butler 1990), while the latter proposes “choerography” forms cultural symbols through poses and actions, resetting the relationship between personal identification and society (Foster 1998). For Foster, dance conveys a possibility not akin to an “organ-less body” (Deleuze 1995). This concept is mre deeply explored in performance scholar André Lepecki’s comparative discussion of “choreopolice” and “choreopolitics”. If “choreopolice” represents the top-down systems of surveillance that aim to control the body, then “choreopolitics” explains that through choreography, the dancer has the power to transform the space originally specified into a site with political and critical consciousness (Lepecki 2013). Because of this, the body possesses a restrained objectivity, while also a subjective agency that is capable of creating and preserving meaning. This conundrum that seems mutually exclusive while co-existent, hints that the body is not so easily defined, and in the bodily and performance works of this exhibition, we can see similar qualities of complex choreography.

Our imagination of the body and agency, seems able to correspond to the second ‘performative turn’ in the contemporary museum. According to Lepecki, different from the first ‘performative turn’ in the 60s — performances by Fluxus and in the context of performance art reimagined dance from the periphery of visual art — the second performative turn in the contemporary age radically reimagines visual art through the dancer’s own steps and experiments in dance and choreography (Lepecki 2012 & 2017). In this iteration of the Taiwan Biennial, not only is the performer’s own history of bodily training demonstrated, but this alludes to other performances in art history as well, dialoguing with the past in the present of every performance while criticizing the colonial system on the Taiwanese body, proposing the possibility of the body as resistance and connection. And if the body can be sen as a repository for culture and memory, then performing a bodily history of “daily life”, summons the bodily memory of an entire generation of Taiwanese — not only the dancer’s, but the collective memory of being a Taiwanese — this becomes an crucial reference to reconsider Taiwanese history.

4Love and Death of Sentient Beings - The Return of Animism

The 2022 Taiwan Art Biennial will present how contemporary artists respond to the above problems and concepts. Art works each hold their own, diverse cosmological views as support, conducting a cosmopolitics of the era. Differing from the atheism, binarism, anthropocentrism, progressivism, and linear temporality of militant modernity, this kind of cosmology is no longer the only command that this exhibition and these artists will follow. This is because Love and Death of Sentient Beings is an exhibition of multiple cosmologies.

The modernization of Taiwan brought a modern education that worships scientific rationality; the global ‘demysticification’ promoted by the Enlightenment of the West became an important marker of the modern realm, including art. For a long time, under the beliefs of demystification within colonial modernity, while modern art searched for the roots of local culture, it could only circle around the preservation, succession and development of cultural modes. The widespread implementation of the demystification order in modern art did not only occur in Asia, where folk religions were alike, but also existed all around the world, including in Europe, the widely-known place of origin for modernity. This led to the spirits that truly existed in folk cultures (including Indigenous cultures), continuing to live in the variegation of modern art, if only as a shell, under the shadow of modernizing demystification.

However, wherever global modernity reaches, not only has a comprehensive demystification of quotidian society not occurred, but various spirits once derogated as superstitions and pagan customs, thrive rather resiliently in the world alongside the continual evolution of technology and media. These deities may not necessarily be monotheistic gods that take a single form, but can also be diverse guardians spread across different lands, animistic spirits that exist in all things. In the process of demystifying or vulgarizing modernity, hybrid spiritual and animistic beliefs continue to flourish in modern society, such as the Tudigong on Taiwanese roadsides, or statues of Mother Mary in the alleyways of Europe, the co-existence of deities and modern technology can be seen everywhere. The work that falls to deities is also divvied out to systems of demystification, or made to work in parallel with this system — from medicine, wellness, education, life planning, business and industry, and further to the technics of national governance (such as security and surveillance), have formed the intellectual foundation for animism, trans-species, and pan-spirituality, displaying the multiplicitous faces of modernity.

Viewing animism as superstition or pagan custom is in fact a method of designating the Other produced by colonial modernity. It is one of the excuses used by colonial rule to justify itself, and the concept of ‘animism’ (or ‘pan-spirituality’) itself has a spotted, oft-disparaged genealogy, from one of the founding fathers of anthropology, Edward Tyler, to the creator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, as well as innumerable modern scholars. This forced Belgian philosopher and historian of science Isabelle Stengers, who attempted to ‘recover animism’, to reject giving this term a definition, because definitions and naming presuppose the authority given by specific knowledge systems (for her, Science with a capital ’S’). Stenger believed that recovering animism requires viewing the methods of hypothesis and empiricism within the workflow of lowercase ’s’ science as the establishment of a ‘partner’ relationship with the research object, and to reiterate the process of doubt and verification in a complex relationship. This rigorous process is a “very special…and further very selective art” (Stengers 2011: 184). The animism she recovered can be used to designate contemporary processual philosophy under the influence of traditional animism, and can also be placed under pan-spiritual beliefs in specialized areas such as the Tudigong or ancestral spirits. New Animism is exactly what replaces the complex, innumerably interwoven relationships between people and all things to the center of modernity. It can become a school of philosophy, exploring the world of multiversal technologies, or the earth Gaea, and can also be placed upon the spirits of small scale, in various corners, that are connected to all sentient beings.

As such, recovering animism also allows the spirit of art to replant its roots in already-modernized folk culture. And when animism returns to art, this means that creation has become a process of the artist linking with the ancestral spirits or other spirits. The technicality, materiality, processuality, or performativity of the work itself can all truly recover the meanings of ritual and spiritual power, allowing the form and content of contemporary art, can respond anew to the concept of ‘spirit’ in folk culture. This in light of the natural, social, and spiritual ecological chain influenced by modern technology, is of utmost importance, and is exactly the true meaning of the exhibition title “What is Not Sentient?” and the corresponding “What Being is Not Sentient?”