Taiwan Academy in Los Angeles is pleased to announce the collaborative exhibition Narratives of Exchange / Exchange of Narratives, on view at Instituto Alumnos from November 8 through December 23, 2018. In collaboration with Alumnos, this exhibition brings together Taiwanese and Mexico based artists. Also, the exhibition is the first to develop bilateral art and cultural exchange with the aim of building a long-term dialogue between artists in the Latin America and Taiwan.
‘Is material more valuable than ideas?’ ‘Is society more important than culture?’ Narratives of Exchange places emphasis on elaborating our understanding of power by predicting its distribution within different networks. Curated by Jo Ying Peng, director of Vernacular Institute, this exhibition focuses on how contemporariness reinvents its own language through exchange and how it illustrates the aesthetics of calculation, and depicts a broad landscape of economics in its fundamental definition. The artists’ works employ layered forms of value-in-exchange with a social-political criticality. In looking at how art is made, ideas of production emerge as a crucial theme. This sets up a context that juxtaposes the (un)measurable value, (im)material, labor, time, desire, power, wealth and sheds light on the tangible meaning of exchange.
Narratives of Exchange / Exchange of Narratives features 7 pieces of work by 3 Taiwanese artists and 4 Mexico based artists, including Madoka Furuhashi, Hou I-Ting(Taiwan), Huang Po-Chih(Taiwan), Valentina Jager, MOTOS NINJA (Nicolas Poggi, Ricardo R. Rojas and Ana G. Zambrano), Chantal Peñalosa, and Yu Cheng-Ta(Taiwan). The works by these participating artists show similarities in their creative contents. They share concerns about postcolonial history and how it is defined, as well as the meaning of material, value, labor and exchange under the development of civilization. In terms of Taiwanese artists specifically, Hou I-Ting’s Assemblage of flawlessness features factory assembly lines as a form of collective work, which also refers to a form of art production. Huang Po-Chih’s Five Hundred Lemon Trees incorporates donation, production and consumption into its narrative context via wine brewery with local farmers. Yu Cheng-Ta’s “Tell Me What You Want” explores how different relationships and processes become tangled up in reality, social networks, and diverse desires in street life. .
Through the cross-cultural conversation, this exhibition proposes a shift in how and what is seen as the currency of collections, from material to symbolic value. This questioning is enacted in the works through performance, video, installation and text.
Taiwan Academy in Los Angeles is a cultural institution affiliated with the Ministry of Culture in Taiwan, with an aim of promoting Taiwanese arts and culture and facilitating cultural exchanges in the west coast of North America, Mexico and Latin America. Through the exhibition Narratives of Exchange / Exchange of Narratives, Taiwan Academy in Los Angeles hopes to further foster a long-term bilateral collaboration among Taiwan and Latin American countries.
Press Preview: November 8, 11am
Opening: November 8, 7pm
On view November 8 - December 23. Wednesday to Saturday 11am - 5pm
Paseo del Pedregal 610, Colonia Jardines del Pedregal, CDMX
Family Day: November 17, 1 pm
Related Events: Nov 16, Nov 24, Nov 29, Dec 8, and Dec 14
Curator Guide at 1pm
Workshop at 3pm