akive

May12-July15, 2012



Curated by Victoria Lu, Future Pass features a total of 180 exhibit works by 130 artists/teams. The exhibition focusses on the theme of Animamix, illustrating the curator's interpretation of the variety of the artists' styles and the development of contemporary art in the 21st century. Organized around the dualities of East / West, Past / Future, Yin / Yang, Universe / Individual and Virtual / Real, this exhibition looks into the processes in which Asian contemporary arts, having been inspired by traditional art forms while at the same time significantly influenced by contemporary cultural forms such as anime or other forms of popular culture and intertwined with the social, political, economic, and cultural milieus in which the artwork is produced, develop new visual styles and languages that characterize the visual experience of our present century. It also demonstrates how the boundaries between the seemingly polarized pairs of concepts such as the Yin and the Yang or the feminine and the masculine have been transgressed in our time marked by increasing overlap of virtual and physical realities.

"Future Pass" explores the current trend of Asian contemporary art and anticipates its future development from a global perspective. The curator identifies four major features of contemporary Animamix: 1.) the pursuit of idealized youthful beauty; 2.) narrative images; 3.) splendid visual experiences and 4.) interdisciplinary production. These characteristics can be seen to suggest the increasingly diverse and hybrid nature of contemporary arts today, as contemporary artists – global citizens in today's world of visual arts with sources of information and cultural enrichment spreading throughout the world– articulate their experience of dispersal and fragmentation using methods of collage, mimicry, repurposing and so forth. These novel and exciting forms of visual display illustrate the complexity of cultural diversity in this digital era marked by globalization and inclusion. Through the splendid visual feast, the curator hopes to explore the new aesthetics from a contemporary Asian point of view.

Digital computing has revolutionized our modes of perception. With the rise of digital culture, the aesthetic taste and modes of communication of a whole youthful generation are now shaped by digital images of vastly different and innovative visual styles which are rich in allegory, metaphors and humor. From all areas of everyday practice, we are now witnessing the arrival of a new aesthetic of virtuality. It is time to declare, “Contemporary art is going cloud.”


http://www.ntmofa.gov.tw, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.