Reconstructing Worlds: Gender and Body in Contemporary Art
Curator: Ming Turner
Artists: Gao Yuan, Cheng Hsiu-Ju, Li Kuei-Pi, Wang Chi-Sui, Chen Yen-Yi
The women’s art movement in Taiwan began to take shape in the 1980s and developed gradually throughout the 1990s. During this period, not only did museums and galleries in Taiwan organize exhibitions dedicated to female artists, but the liberalization of the media also brought a significant rise in reports and publications on women’s art, collectively driving the growth of contemporary female art practices in Taiwan.
Reconstructing Worlds: Gender and Body in Contemporary Art presents works by five contemporary female artists whose life experiences are closely connected to Tainan. The exhibition features a diverse range of media — including video installations, fiber art, mixed media, painting, photography, and site-specific works — guiding viewers to reflect on multiple dimensions of the body: the maternal body, the socially gendered body, the digital body and voice, the body’s surface as a bearer of cultural symbols, and the body engaged in labor that symbolizes Indigenous cultural meanings. Through viewers’ own movements and participation within the exhibition space, the works further explore the intersections between the linear and the void, and the material and the immaterial, prompting reflection on how our bodies relate to society, culture, ethnicity, and the interwoven realities of the physical and the virtual.
