Molding Island City: Resident Artist Exchange and Exhibition Project between Taiwan and Vietnam
This symposium is the extended event of “Molding Island City: Resident Artist Exchange and Exhibition Project between Taiwan and Vietnam” and this symposium is sponsored by the Grants for Cultural Exchanges and Collaborative Projects with Personnel from South Asia awarded by Ministry of Culture. The idea of “Molding Island City: Resident Artist Exchange and Exhibition Project between Taiwan and Vietnam” is originated from Vietnamese Bui Cong Khanh and Tainan Artist Shu-Kai Lin. They both attended “South Country, South of Country – Vietnamese & Taiwanese Artists Exchange Project” held by Odysseys Costa Rica, Tainan Howl Space and Vietnam Zroe Station. The two artists have considerably reached tacit understanding in creativity through this project. The upbringings of the two are similar: Bui Cong Khanh's father is a carpenter and Shu-Kai Lin’s is a mold foundry. Both of them all had witnessed the rise and fall of those industries. Tainan and Hoi An where Bui Cong Khanh resides are both the historical cities emitting the atmosphere of craft culture.
This residency and exhibition project use molds as the research theme. Through the interviews of mold industry workers, photography records, workshops, art creations and other forms, in addition to better understanding the mold culture and the life in Tainan, those changes and transitions also constantly affect artists on how they present their artworks and highlight the similarities and differences between Taiwan and Vietnam.
In addition to inviting Vietnamese Artist Bui Cong Khanh, this Taiwan-Vietnam exchange forum event also invites the managing director of Bamboo Curtain Studio and the director of Brilliant Time: Southeast Theme Bookstore. In addition to focusing on the characteristics of arts and cultural space in Vietnam, this project also wishes to use art creation to extend its influence on other specific communities. In this sense, we hope that the discussion starting from the geopolitical and sociocultural context of Taiwan and Vietnam can make the audience have the deeper and thorough understanding. In addition, we also collaborate with Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts to host the exhibition, “Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now Symposium”, inviting Yen-hsiang Fang, the curator of Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and Independent Curator Merv Espina from Philipinnes to have the cultural and artistic communication. Hsiang-wen Chen, a curator whose research focus has been the Indonesian contemporary art as well as has paid attention to the historical aspects of Taiwan and Southeast Asia since 2016, is invited to a symposium host. We wish that this event not only remaps the development of contemporary art in both places, but also create more possibilities during this special exchange and dialogue.