Hospitalities and Rights of Ways
Notes on arts exchanges between Taiwan and its neighbors in the Asian region and beyond
Randel C. Urbano, Philippines | [email protected]
I.
We conjure the discussion of arts and cultural relations, exchange, and mobility alluding from a familiar signage in most of Taipei’s metropolitan intersections, and could be perhaps spread over all over the island state’s on-foot crossings:
1 – A common Taiwanese city pedestrian signage. Source: Teresa Jang / Pexels
In September 2024, I had the first-hand experience of learning practices of arts and cultural relations, exchange, and networking done in Taiwan through the 2024 TASA Annual Meeting of the 10-year old Taiwan Art Space Alliance (TASA) and the 2024 Asian Artists Exchange Program: Multilateral Bridging Workshop of the 7-year old Taiwan Asia Exchange Program (TAEF).
As a pedestrian, someone who is crossing spaces, places, and time in service of the arts and culture in the Philippines through my institutional and free agent works, I was able to have an ample vista of the agencies and agendas on how Taiwan’s historic, modern, and contemporary art programs and projects are put forward by their contributors, creators, collaborators, and circulators. This was through the mechanism or venue for different ethnic/community and state interventions borne to respond to Taiwan’s New Soundbound Policy, specifically for artistic and cultural connections, one of TAEF’s five pillar programs aptly called Cultural Exchange.
According to the Taiwan Ministry of Culture, the state is branded as a museum island composed of more than 300 formal art institutions and centers, including local cultural halls across several themes, including "history and humanity," "arts and crafts," "natural science and technology," "lifestyles and recreation," "complexity and miscellaneous,"[i]
and among others. Through also serendipitous discovery as I visited MOCA Taipei (as the part of my residency scheme was to look at the contexts and contents of several Taiwan museum production was relative to audience services and operations), I discovered that there was also a Taiwan Museum Association or Taiwan Alliance of Museums, the Yilan Museum Family, and a Taiwan Association of University Museums. These macro groupings of museums are relatively young (averaging as only created in the last 20 years) and through this we can infer that the island state has a very robust infrastructure for museum and arts professionalisation.
2 – A list offered to me by the very courteous museum shop attendant at the MOCA Taipei last September 10 since almost all galleries of MOCA Taipei except for one exhibit were closed for ingress of a new show. As my visit in Taiwan coincided with the country’s Moon / Mid-Autumn Festival, arts institutions and galleries in Taipei had different operational offers: Taipei Fine Arts Museum in the central Zhongshan District had four shows opened to the public. The National Palace Museum in the northern part of the city was open per usual for tourist.
As it is on the alleyways and intersections in the busy central districts of Taipei, an artist resident or fellow is able to have a better understanding of the arts and culture overview of the place when an appropriate infrastructure is already set in place. As a passerby within the Taiwan cultural landscape, the governmental infrastructure afforded to me during my stay as a TASA fellow is very apparent, efficient, and felt. I was able to think and feel about the geopolitics, history, and social material that are presented to me as a guest to the cities without having too much to worry about how and where to go, since bus and train operations go smoothly. Most locals are very aware of the right of way when crossing the street. Sure, there have been a few whom would have not followed and had cross a pedestrian lane when it the walking traffic sign was still red; but the general respect for pedestrians and commuters at least in Taipei was very palpable, compared to the ruthlessness and daunting reality of mismanaged transport systems in the National Capital Region of the Philippines.
This cultural atmosphere, something which is beyond the facilities of an arts program or project, is something that Taiwanese counterparts can maximise / are maximizing on to further their endeavours in creating relationships with fellows from overseas. It is with these simple yet highly demonstrable/demonstrated frameworks (roadside assistance, yielding, transport timetables in terms of arts exchange and cultural research, that is) engergise my privilege to observe, contemplate, and even effect practices in the arts professional field already at the core. To have access to proper spaces, to shelter, to food, or the reverence to contemporary versions of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – no matter how cliché it may sound – all go hand in hand with our health and endurance in crossing paths and trajectories in the service of our specific arts and cultural communities which we come from and which we come home to.
II.
A visitor, according to this English word’s Indo-European etymology, is someone also who inspects, examines, and sometimes also, afflicts/disrupts.[ii] The TAEF’s support for TASA as TASA’s became one of the co-organisers (with Taipei | Treasure Hill Artist Village under the Taipei Culture Foundation) of the internationally known 2024 Res Artis Conference, delegates amply some of TAEF’s energies for professional development, networking, and capacity building objectives by way of association with TASA. This osmotically affected the TASA Annual Meeting and was rounded out in the Multicultural Bridging Workshop.
With proper yet still independent modes of program management and logistics, my participation in both TASA- and TAEF-led programs I think made me realise of the flexibility and openness of opportunities as I had only around 14 days to participate as a visiting professional. It will always be never enough to be able to cover the vastness of possible intentions and interactions, even if I already have specified my objectives to looking at how audiences are being received by Taiwanese arts spaces and institutions in daily operations. As a visitor – part-tourist, part-adventurer, part-researcher – I only have perspectives and fronts that are available and presented to me, a ‘national or nation-state, or even, organisational, ‘faciality’, per notions forwarded by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari in the 80s. There will always be a present front, a filter, a veil that is present to the visitor and will ever be nonchalant for the local. To have been a ‘pedestrian’ and not have been a more engaged ‘resident’, I think and hope that I will be able to ‘afflict’ or ‘disrupt’ even further if given the chance again to come back to Taiwan for future collaborations. This is relative to the TAEF Multicultural Bridging Workshop discussions which I think had a very good, intense energy as we all thrive to speculate and predict how cultural relations in the arts should be: Why and how do we measure the meaningfulness of our visits and interactions?
In 2018-2021, the living room (Al-Madhafah) by proponent architect Sandi Hilal with Yasmeen Mahmoud and Ibrahim Muhammad Haj Abdullah as a long-term arts project under the program called Decolonizing Architecure Art Research (DAAR) which started in Palestine:
Situated between the domestic and public spheres, Al-Madhafah—Arabic for a living room dedicated to hospitality—has the potential to redefine the roles of guest and host, imbuing the act of hospitality with new socio-political significance. It seeks to mobilize the condition of “permanent temporariness” as both an architectural and political concept, challenging the binaries of inclusion and exclusion, public and private, guest and host. Al-Madhafah empowers temporary residents to host and participate without feeling obligated to sever their ties to their homelands.[iii]
This project utilises hospitality as its main curatorial agenda as a direct social intervention for Syrian refugees in the city of Boden in Sweden. As most cultural diplomacy or relations agendas that maximise and leverage on the advantages of “openness”, “authenticity”, or “transparency” to create mutual benefit (although I am a believer in these things too), hospitality in the modality of the living room project of DAAR can be seen as a thorough and thoughtful process of integration through the metaphor of an ante-space. The idea was derived from the first chamber of a(n Islamic) home, a living room space where guests are welcomed. This room can be imagined as a transition space from the public to the private, where respect is gained through self-check and customs. This is oddly congruent (and is a very softer version) of what an immigration gate feels: In any immigration counter, the panopticism and surveillance do not enable an exchange and the moment of encounter is distilled to the most basic form of human profiling a ‘transiting guest’ both by the place of origin and the place of destination.
In my experience of the TASA meeting, the idiolect of the TASA and TAEF idiolect of residency as a representative or dominant parole to the language of the Taiwanese contemporary arts scene was very hospitable. Coming from the Southeast Asian country with its geopolitical boundaries closest to Taiwan, I was able to enjoy a familiarity that might have skipped several ‘living rooms scenes’ or filtering: right-hand driving of vehicles; electric outlets that are international type A and B; rice-based meals which are not too spicy; the sun and rain; and the Taitung coastline which was like my childhood town but in inverse orientation of mountain range and sea. I had assumptions that I could have easily assimilated, despite the limit of only two weeks and language barrier.
However, as it is with any other type of transplantation, and a temporary one to say, there have been and always be some things that needs time for grafting, for fermentation, for curing. As English is the mode of instruction of the program of the TAEF and TASA, it have would also been more productive perhaps to contemplate on creating or augmenting the program dedicated to artists and cultural professionals with a language orientation, at least for proper introductions and wayfinders for a visitor like me to use as I move around cities. With four major languages blasted on the railway systems, it was encouraging to infer that the Taiwanese set-up for inclusivity is already there. But of course, language learning takes time and is also a proportioned interest of any invited guest to the arts program.
As it might be understood from the Al-Madhafah mechanism mentioned, a certain space and time for accommodations already started for me as soon as I was contacted by the TASA team in late June 2024 when they invited me to join the TASA Annual Meeting. Given that that preparations and logistics time from June to September 2024 were very tight, I hope that the future invitations of TASA would have a slower pace for new proponents / invitees to introduce themselves or to be introduced to the agenda of TASA and TAEF, even if it would be presented or done online. This way, fellows and residents from other countries will have a much smoother buffer prior to attending the meetings on site in Taiwan.
III.
As long as I conceive longing for the world, I'm on the road; … I know that the people I meet every day on the street or by the market place have hearts as colorful as all the scenic spots in the world. I... duplicate all the cities in the city where I live, and I travel all over the world in my world.[iv]
Hualien’s contemporary poet Chen Li as a teacher took to prose what might be an attempt or a task of an artist resident or an intercultural researcher bound by the multiplicities of purposes which can be gathered from the inception, delivery, and management of an arts residency or cultural exchange program. An arts mobility or exchange will always have a variety of unique reactions from its participants which conversely feeds on the evidencing of the objectives set by the mobility or exchange program. The paradox of international or cross-cultural exchange through cultural and arts work I think is that there are many perspectives on which the right way might be, or whose have the right rights of way. In a field of thought and practice that ultimately resists standardisation and hierarchy, the arts world(s) nonetheless need/s a certain structure or sanity for cooperation and synergy. As cultural worker Janet Pillai raised in her presentation at the second day of the TASA Annual Meeting, essentially, art is survival. And one of the aspirations is through cultural exchange.
Based from my experience, the TASA Annual Meeting and Professional Exchange Program rely on the strength of less hierarchic logistics, compared at least with assumed ways of working in comparable programs in East or Southeast Asia such as the Cultural Partnership Initiative led annually too by the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE), or the annual Arts for Good program of the Singapore International Foundation (SIF) which ceased programming in 2023. With both TAEF and TASA together working for future programs, we are required to contemplate as any program, no matter the size, is bound to remit reports to its funders and stakeholders: How do we measure the quality of experiences in these exchanges?
IV.
From August to October 2024, my home institution in the Philippines, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, worked with the organisation STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery of Singapore’s national visual arts cluster, and the Embassy of Singapore in Manila for the presentation of Chances of Contact: Prints from the Philippines and Singapore. Patrick Flores, arts professor at the University of the Philippines and currently the Deputy Director for Curatorial and Research at the National Gallery Singapore led the exhibition. He stated this in an interview relative to regional cultural exchanges for contemporary art:
Art is a creative force that inspires people to be curious about what other people are doing elsewhere or what new forms are going around. It brings people together in a way that state institutions sometimes fail to do. Diplomacy is tied to governments but the diplomatic impulse is a relational impulse and underlies much of artistic and curatorial work. So I am looking at diplomacy as an energy that distributes across every effort to reach out and create ties.[v]
In the TAEF-supported Annual Meeting of the Taiwan Arts Space Alliance (TASA) Annual Meeting, selected participants are able to enact visitorship and exchange organically or systematically with art villages, artist-run spaces, and auxiliary organisations (that is, auxiliary in the perspective of the ecosystem of Taiwanese arts residencies). To foster a more diverse group of participants in its cultural exchange programs, the TAEF continues to strengthen partnerships with the Taiwan Arts Space Alliance TASA and other artist and cultural professional networks, both directly and indirectly. It may be perhaps good to propose to expand collaborations with other national groupings like the Taiwan Museum Alliance —which might be known for its strong regional ties in cultural, scientific, and academic exchanges through other larger alliances such as the International Council of Museums or its global sub-committees—presents a promising path forward. However, a key challenge remains: There were visa concerns for some of the cohort, particularly for us participants who are from lower-income countries. Streamlining the visa process is essential to overcoming this barrier, as emphasised in the TAEF-led Multicultural Bridging Workshop. Simplifying visa procedures would not only ease participation but also encourage greater involvement in Taiwan’s international arts exchange initiatives.
[i] “Museums: Who We Are” in Museum Island of the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan homepage. Date accessed: 23 September 2024.
[ii] "Visit" in Etymonline. Date accessed 26 September 2024.
[iii] Introduction living room in DECOLONIZING ARCHITECTURE ART RESEARCH (DAAR), undated. Accessed 15 October 2024.
[iv] Quotation from Chen Li’s prose in The Traveler in Intimate Letters to the World: Introduction to Chen Li’s Poetry by Chang Fen-Ling, 2014. Date accessed: 15 October 2024.
[v] On ‘Chances of Contact’ and observations on curatorial work in Southeast Asia in S.E.A. Focus, 2024. Date accessed: 25 September 2024.
About the Author
Randel C. URBANO is a museum and cultural relations professional working for around 20 years, based in Manila, Philippines. Randel’s main interests are supporting art programs and projects in the interest of forming dialogues between artists-creators and the public through institutional and independent platforms.
The 2024 Asian Artists Exchange Program: Multilateral Bridging Workshop, themed "Building Taiwan’s Cultural Connections through Global Art Exchange," focused on the role of civilian organizations as platforms for promoting sustainable transnational exchanges. Discussions examined how these platforms can effectively foster global collaboration and assessed the tangible impact of international cultural exchanges in terms of influence and sustainability.