Looking at Contemporary Curatorial Methods in Taiwan—Observations on Five NCAF-Funded Curators

Curating/Curator—From Anonymous to Key Player

In 1991, Hai-Ming Huang planned Temporality in Artworks at the Dimensions Art Center and labeled it as "theme study and exhibition plan". It was the first time that the roles of art critic and exhibitions planner were explicitly combined, and can be seen as a pioneering move for independent curators in Taiwan〔1〕. In 1992, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) invited Hai-Ming Huang to plan Dis/ Continuity: Religion, Shamanism and Nature under the theme of "Responsible Art Criticism Planning", making it the first exhibition planned by an art critic in a public art museum in Taiwan〔2〕. In 1994, the article "Who is the Researcher?" appeared in Lion Art. It was the first time that the English term "curator" appeared in a Chinese-language article, albeit translated as "researcher"〔3〕. In the same year, Tsai-Chin Ni took on the role of "organizer" for Environmental Art - The 6th Art Exhibition of Taipei County 1994. The following year, Hsin-Yueh Lin was appointed as "planner" of the same exhibition, and using the experience of the previous exhibition as a reference, he planned and implemented Resurgence on the Tansui River〔4〕in a more organized and methodical manner. By adjusting the structure of judges and the exhibition mechanism, these two editions of the Art Exhibition of Taipei County were trailblazing milestones for artists serving as exhibitions curators. In 1996, TFAM replaced the previous open call mechanism and instead invited local scholars to serve as planners for the six themes under the 1996 Taipei Biennial: The Quest for Identity〔5〕. In 1998, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) held the First International Chinese Art Curator Conference, which for the first time explicitly translated curator as "curator"〔6〕. In the same year, TFAM held its first international biennial, 1998 Taipei Biennial: Site of Desire, inviting Fumio Nanjo to serve as curator. In the press release, it described the transformation process of the Taipei Biennial in terms of its review mechanism and the shift from inviting domestic curators to foreign ones〔7〕. At this point, the term and the role of "curator" gained a clear position in the field of visual arts in Taiwan.

Following the emergence of the aforementioned term and its official recognition, how did Taiwan's local curatorship and its practice take shape in the minds and hands of these curators, as well as develop to the present day? The National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF) was established in 1996, simultaneous with the formation process stated above, and became an important funding body for Taiwan's arts and culture sector. In particular, NCAF funding was the main resource for individuals and small groups in comparison with that offered by the Ministry of Culture (then the Council for Cultural Affairs) 〔8〕. This paper is a theme study on the visual arts curating of NCAF. Therefore, the following is an attempt to understand the development of "curating/curator" in Taiwan after the term's official recognition through the time period, norms, and definitions of "curating/curator" in the text of the Grants Application Criteria adopted by NCAF.

When NCAF was first established, there was an "Exhibition" category under the regular grants for fine arts. In 2001, "curatorial" workers were listed for the first time in the second item, "Study Abroad and in Mainland China", under the "Study and Continuing Education" category of the regular grants for fine arts〔9〕. In 2003, the term "curator" appeared under the regular grants for fine arts and was included together with "Investigation and Research" in the priority considerations of "Preliminary Investigation of International Exhibition Planning"〔10〕. From these two adjustments, we can see that curatorial work was prioritized in the setting of research and investigation for international studies by NCAF and the expert council members it consulted at the time. In 2004, it was proposed that curators could apply for regular grants of fine arts under curatorial exhibitions, and that curators could not be participants in exhibitions〔11〕. In the same year, NCAF established the Curatorial Practice in Exhibitions Project and renamed it "Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts" (PGICVA) in 2008. PGICVA provided funding to "exhibition plans" until 2011. During this period, A Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts - Curatorial Training Program was set up in 2008. It can be seen that 2004 was an important turning point. In both the regular grant and PGICVA settings, "curator" has become an independent role that needs to be distinguished from "artist". PGICVA specifically requires curators to have experience of curatorial discursive exhibitions, and provides funding for longer periods and at higher amounts within the scope of the grants〔12〕.

In 2010, NCAF established the Curator's Incubator Program @ Honggah Museum. After three terms of implementation, it was renamed "Curator's Incubator Program @ Museums" (Incubator Program) after more partner venues were added in 2013, and has been thusly implemented since then. Through using a relatively small amount of funding to connect curators with professional venues and their resources, it provides curators with the experience of working directly with larger institutions, and is considered "the most reliable debuting stage for new curators"〔13〕. In 2012, "Exhibition Plan" under PGICVA was changed to "International Residential Research and Exhibition Exchange Project", and the grant program was divided into "Phase I" and "Phase II"; it has been implemented thusly since then. In the same year, the eligibility criteria for the "Exhibition" category in the fine arts regular grants were also revised to require curators to submit a curatorial research discourse〔14〕. At this point, the regular grants and PGICVA grants became aligned as both required curators to be able to provide a curatorial research discourse. In particular, since 2013, in addition to visual arts, the three major categories of music, dance, and traditional/contemporary theater under regular grants each also started to have a separate "curatorial" grant option, while the curatorial discourse requirement was also included in the review materials〔15〕. In 2016, PGICVA reinstated "Exhibition Plan" in addition to adding the "Phase I International Residential Research" and "Phase II Exhibition Exchange Project". In 2018, the "Fine Arts" category under regular grants was changed to the "Visual Arts" category, and the grants' application system was adjusted to include the "Exhibition Type" section, which can be selected by the applicant, including the options of "Solo Exhibition", "Group Exhibition", and "Curatorial Exhibition". It reflects the setup of exhibition formats by NCAF and also provides a judgment of whether the applicant is aware of curatorial concepts when it comes to exhibitions.

From 2001 to 2018, the position of "curating/curator" in the text of the grants application criteria for regular grants and curatorial project grants gradually became clearer, showing a shift in the role and definition of curating/curator by NCAF. The curator is not only an extension of "exhibition"-related production, but also has the task of "international research and connections", as well as being equipped with the ability to engage in "research and discourse". ARTWAVE—Taiwan International Arts Network established by NCAF in 2018, held the Curators' Intensive Taipei 19 - International Conference and Workshops (CIT19) in 2019. The second Asian Curatorial Forum was held in Delhi, India, in the same year, while Curatography, an international platform for curatorial writing, was established in 2020. From this, we can see that NCAF attaches great importance to "curating/curator". From the above, it becomes evident that the exhibition-related regular grants implemented for 25 years by NCAF, as well as curatorial-related projects and plans regarding other curatorial platforms from 2004 to the present, have definitely made a significant contribution and impact on the development of curating/curators in Taiwan.

From 1991 to 2021, the development of curating/curators is proven to be quite rapid based on the aforementioned adjustments made by NCAF. Through implementation, practice, discussion, resource support, and cultivation, curators have grown from anonymous individuals to today's key players over the past thirty years, and the definition of "curating/curator" has become relatively clear. Perhaps not many people ask what curating is anymore, yet simultaneously, there are more and more opportunities and demands for exhibitions and curators, leaving the definition of "curating/curator" in a different state of ambiguity〔16〕. In this era when curating has become a prominent academic discipline, do we need to and is it possible to become reacquainted with the concept of "curating/curator"?

From the content in previous paragraphs, we can understand that curating is different from pure theory, research, and art criticism. Curating needs to implement the ideas, research, concepts, and discourse, whether or not through an exhibition, its point of origin. It needs a vessel or platform to hold, display, and communicate what it wants to talk about. Since 1991, Taiwan's contemporary curatorial practice has been developed to certain extent, even though it started later than in Europe. Therefore, perhaps we can start to reacquaint ourselves with "curating/curator" in terms of "for what purpose", "what to do", and "how to do it". Is it possible to explore this issue from the long-term support and cultivation of curators by NCAF? This paper uses the curatorial projects of NCAF that have had a direct impact on the development of curatorial work in Taiwan as a basis, supplemented by regular grants as reference. Five curators with different directions, characteristics, and development in their curatorial approaches were selected for interview. Through understanding the curatorial contexts of these five curators, this paper attempts to elucidate their curatorial approaches, and hopes that the construction and arrangement of these approaches will open a way to understanding the contemporary curating/curators profile of Taiwan today.

Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng—the Politics of Exhibiting

Among PGICVA grantees of NCAF, Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng was probably one of the first curators in those early days who received NCAF's PGICVA funding and who continues to receive the grants even today〔17〕. After curating Invisible Cities at Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian 2004Art) in 2003, Cheng curated Transcendence - Ruins and Civilizations at Eslite Gallery in Taipei in 2004, and was the co-curator of 2004 Taipei Biennial: Do You Believe in Reality?. Since then, she has been deeply involved in Taiwan, developing her curatorial practice in a solid and clear manner. In 2006, Altered States, exhibited at TFAM, received funding from the second PGICVA in 2005. In 2008, she was a recipient of the one-time training funding from PGICVA and conducted "A Study on the Creation of Critical Political Art and Curatorial Practice". This study later led to the establishment of an online research database and the publication of Art and Society: Introducing Seven Contemporary Artists by TFAM.〔18〕Three of the artists in this study were also later involved in Re-envisioning Society (2010 PGICVA recipient). From 2003 to 2010, Cheng's curatorial concerns were explicitly political and social, and her projects over this period of time reveal interviews with artists as one of her key curatorial research methods.

In an interview for this paper, Cheng said, "I like to know how artists think about something. The way they think about something is also the key to their creation. It captivates me, discovering how artists interpret a phenomenon or state in this manner. Their ways can be very innovative. So, even if other people curate exhibitions at The Cube, I will still interview the artists myself mostly. It is thus that I usually have a clear understanding of how the artists I have worked with think about things." Cheng's in-depth understanding of artists' thoughts is not only achieved through interviews, but also through reading and analyzing their past works and related texts. This is related to her background in art history and art theory, as well as her experience in art writing before she started curatorial practice. Through these two processes, she gets to know artists' way of thinking and concerns, and finds a common interest after understanding their ideas, thus opening up their collaboration. To her, as long as this common interest is sustained, the process of collaboration is open to whatever results are produced. When the right time and resources are available, exhibitions or various interesting forms of public engagement can be organized. On this basis, when working with Taiwanese artists, Cheng usually hopes to exhibit new works, or a combination of old and new works. Such a curatorial approach of dialog, understanding, and joint development also allows Cheng to develop long-term relationships with artists.

In 2010, Cheng and her husband Jeph Lo—who used to work in the information industry and is also a music critic—co-founded The Cube. In addition to the aforementioned "long-term partnership with artists" as an important development direction, another major reason for the establishment of The Cube was that she found that from 2006 to 2010, she was always "looking for a venue". Cheng realized that without a platform for independent curatorial work, there would be a lack of a base for implementation—a space for ideas, discussions, encounters with people, and physical or spiritual production—and it would be difficult to produce works on a sustainable basis. With such a platform/base, a different temporality also appeared. Two years may be a long time for many people, but for a space like The Cube serving as a base for implementation, project duration often starts at a length of three years. A perfect example of this is the Taishin Arts Award-winning Altering Nativism: Sound Culture in Post-War Taiwan (Altering Nativism; 2012 PGICVA recipient). The research began in 2010 (the first time, the research was assembled for Sound Bar in the 2011 Venice Biennial Taiwan Pavilion), and the exhibition was brought together and showcased at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education and the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA). Cheng and Lo invited Tung-Hung Ho, a sociologist and music critic, to form the curatorial team, while Yang-Kun Fan, Wei Yu, Kuo-Chao Huang, and Jen-Hsien Chung were invited to become the co-curatorial team, with Sun-Quan Huang as the exhibition research consultant. Altering Nativism was a collaboration with experts and scholars from different fields to explore the development and positioning of Taiwan's sound culture. In this vast research project, the curatorial team had the important task of framing and interconnecting the structure of the exhibition, as well as translating research into a visual form and listening experience.

After the establishment of The Cube, Cheng's original research and concern for politics and society became formally linked with Lo's interest in "sound and sound culture". In addition to The Cube's experimental project Talking Drums Radio started in 2019, whether it was The Heard and Unheard—Soundscape Taiwan at the 2011 Venice Biennial Taiwan Pavilion, Altering Nativism of 2014, or Sound Meridians: Cultural Counter-Mapping through Sound: Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia (2018 PGICVA exhibition plan) of 2020, Cheng and her curatorial team always faced the challenge of transforming sound and its related elements into materials to be exhibited in space〔19〕. Take Altering Nativism for example: before the exhibition took shape, the curatorial team held many lectures, performances, and small exhibitions of documents and works, like a series of exercises on "how to present these pure sounds, objects, documents, and archives in a concrete visual production manner in the exhibition space", which then paved the way for an ambitiously-structured exhibition, Altering Nativism. For The Cube, the other important curatorial tasks of this long-term research were alternative research and exhibiting methodologies.

Altering Nativism: Sound Culture in Post-War Taiwan (2012 PGICVA-funded exhibition), curated by Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng, on display at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education

For Cheng, the exhibition in a physical space is still the core of the curatorial work, because the exhibit itself is highly political and is the most critical concern in curatorial practice, namely, the revisiting and reshaping of the visual/aural experience. Through the construction of space, the choice of display objects, the narrative, the quantity, the method of display, and the relationship between similar works, the political nature of the exhibit itself calls for the greatest attention in curatorial work. It is an organizational methodology that can hardly be replaced by other forms. Therefore, although she has been expanding the possibilities of contemporary curating in recent years, for her, the best way to present curating must still be through exhibitions, even if the definition of exhibition continues to be expanded. After all, the essence of an exhibition is to make research visible and experienceable, and to use the same method to construct dialog and discourse. An exhibition in a physical space, whether indoors or outdoors, has a sense of physicality. The construction of such perceptual experience and the development of perceptual capacity require continuous learning and practice, both for curators and audiences. For example, in the curatorial framework and discourse of Altering Nativism, the most important first work is a 47-minute recording of the sound of waves in Hualien, from the album Lang Laile: Qingting, Taiwan de hua (waves are coming: listen carefully, Taiwan is speaking) released by Crystal Records in 1997. Whether as the first all-natural, vocal-free recording to be released in Taiwan, or the "Taiwan is speaking" in the title of the album, it has an important cultural and political significance in the context of the exhibition. However, at that time, this exhibit was placed on the theme wall at the entrance of the exhibition. Except for a small sign explaining the work, only the audio was played, and there were no other visual elements. Therefore, for an audience who was not familiar with sound exhibitions back then, mostly visually oriented, few people heard or noticed this exhibit on their first viewing; a lot even overlooked this key piece.

According to Cheng, as a research-oriented independent curator, how to materialize the curatorial intent and the context she wants to construct into a sensory experience is the key focus. The most important element in this are the art pieces, because these artworks are themselves the objects of these sensory experiences. These works of art have to produce a mutually stimulating effect on each other, which is also the reason why curating is needed. The mutually stimulating effect, on the other hand, is the reason behind the need for physicalization. According to Cheng, the most important thing about contemporary art is that it can inspire new perceptions and learning processes, and these breakthroughs must occur in the exhibition. Therefore, it is important to understand the audience's experience, which should not only be studied by traditional museums; contemporary art should also learn to reconnect, organize, and observe viewing habits. This is in order to think about how the connection and experience between these works and the audience occurs on a given site. Such is also the mission of contemporary art. Thus, for Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng, to have these studies and discourses displayed and perceived anew, and to recognize the fact that exhibiting itself is political are the most difficult aspects of contemporary curating. These should be treated with the utmost caution, but at the same time, they are also what makes contemporary curating the most fascinating.

Chien-Hung Huang—the Role of Curating in Advancing Research

Halfway through the interview with Chien-Hung Huang, he laughed and said, "I have received so many grants; I should not be able to apply again!" In fact, since 2008, when he received PGICVA funding for POST.O: The Reverse of TOPOS (POST.O), Huang is the curator who has been awarded the most PGICVA after Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng〔20〕. After returning to Taiwan in 2005, Huang focused on teaching and art criticism. However, from 2008 onwards, he felt perplexed by the sluggish interaction between art criticism and the overall art ecosystem, so he began to contemplate the possibility of creating interactions and connections by curating exhibitions in order to establish different dialogs. POST.O was proposed at the time by Open Contemporary Art Center (OCAC)〔21〕and a curatorial team was formed in response to the anxiety over global issues brought about by the Taipei Biennial and other major exhibitions back then. For Huang, who was a first-time curator, the collaboration at that time was very much like an attempt at collecting artists. Through conversations with the artists, they discussed their connections to places and venues, and moved on to questions such as "how to think about the exhibition space" and "how an exhibition space is created". Then, they directly began to think about the relationship between the exhibition itself and its issues of interest.

Although some foreign artists participated in POST.O, it still focused more on the topic of locality, which was very different from the global and international discussion and operating methods at that time. Huang said that Taiwan wanted to internationalize at the time, and he was very curious about it. Therefore, he engaged in exchange with Japan from 2009, which slowly provided him a way to understand the so-called internationalization. The 2011, New Directions: Trans-pleX Weaving Platform (Trans-pleX; 2010 PGICVA recipient), an exchange exhibition between Taiwan and Japan, was a collaboration with Japanese scholar Shigeo Goto. At that time, they worked on this project with their students and found that the individual dialogs and discussions between young and established artists contained great energy. Therefore, although it was an exhibition, in order to generate this energy, an important part of Trans-pleX were the workshops, and through this process, the artists could communicate and do planning. Therefore, although both exhibitions worked with young artists, Trans-pleX was very different from POST.O. POST.O invited artists from different places to gather together to produce an exhibition, while Trans-pleX hoped for cross-cultural communication and creativity to be built naturally among artists. At the time, the two scholars set a main goal through their research: it is very difficult for Asian traumas and cross-cultural impacts to all come together (com-), unlike the Western emphasis on complexes—inner psychological mechanisms at the spiritual level. Hence, they used Trans-pleX to depict the state of young Asian artists, continuously accumulating complexity while constantly crossing over and transcending.

In the experience of Trans-pleX, Huang began to think about the possibilities of Asia. 2013, in his arts residency in Korea, he experienced what Kuan-Hsing Chen said about using Asia as method to find different ways to solve problems through mutual observation. Using Korea, which has a similar historical progression as Taiwan, as a comparison, he found that the biggest difference between the two is that Korea, as a member of the United Nations, is actively involved in international affairs. However, Taiwan has long been non-institutionalized with regards to international imaginings. Although it is connected to the outside world, many of its affairs, such as organizing biennials or various events, are internal to Taiwan and not connected or linked to the outside world. After observing this discrepancy, Chien-Hung Huang proposed Nymphaea Pool: Re-naissance of Asias (referred to as Nymphaea Pool; 2013 phase I PGICVA recipient). Nymphaea, water lilies, stand individually and rise vertically from the water surface. There is no interaction between each blossom, but the mud underneath the flowers is shared. Using the Nymphaea Pool as a model, it is like Asia: foreign cultures, Chinese culture, and Buddhist culture, all are mixed together, like the mud underneath, and these are the resources of Asia, where all cultures are intertwined and each region grows out of it. Thus, he used this imagery to find the commonality of Asia. This commonality cannot be found through the formation of ASEAN or the United Nations, but must be unearthed from the different forms within the mud. It is from the research of Nymphaea Pool that the 2016 Discordant Harmony (2013 phase II PGICVA recipient) was developed.

Discordant Harmony returned to Taiwan for the third stop after Korea and Japan. Although it still continued to deal with the Cold War, Huang returned to thinking from a Taiwanese perspective and began to show concern about Taiwan's modernization process and reflected upon it from the context of cultural studies. At the same time, he was about to finish his book Fragments on Paracolonial. After accumulating several years of experience and observations, he wanted to find out what subjects Taiwan could delve deeper into in these cultural collaborations. The exhibition Trans-Justice: Para-Colonial@Technology in 2018 (2017 PGICVA-funded exhibition) came as a result. Huang stated: "Aristotle said that justice is a kind of balance, an appropriateness, not who is right and who is wrong, but a balance between two parties with different opinions. This is how I see the relationship between art and ethics. I don't like artists who put on a show for values. Jacques Rancière says that 80% of art is like this, because artists have their own beliefs, so when the whole art is talking about external issues, the creation will work for a specific ideology and value. This phenomenon is very serious in contemporary times, so I wanted to do Trans-Justice because I think that artists' creativity lies in the fact that they do not stand on the side of right or wrong, but make the subtlety of sensibility more real and more layered."

Starting from Discordant Harmony, Huang began to experiment with a method of overlapping keywords in his curatorial work, and applied it more explicitly in Trans-Justice. This method was divided into several stages. First, based on the curatorial pre-research, he would present the first version of the discourse, which contained his personal research, observations, and ideas, and use it to engage in discussions with the artists. Like a continuation of the dialog between POST.O and Trans-pleX, artists touched on different issues in the theme during the discussion and developed them into more delicate and sensitive proposals. After collecting all the artists' ideas, Huang would start to think about the different dimensions of the artists' proposals, and then find overlapping keywords from them. Next, he would use these keywords to write a second version of the discourse. This version of the discourse was very close to art criticism, with a large number of studies on artists and works, and the purpose of this version of the discourse was to consider the relationship between the works in the exhibition. Ultimately, after the materials and methods of the design, construction, and installation for the exhibition had been confirmed, he would then proceed to the final version of the discourse. In addition to the writings about the artists' works, he would also think about how the audience would see and associate with the relationship between the works in the exhibition space, as well as how they would read and imagine it. Through these keywords and the three-stage discourse writing method, Huang conducted research, dialog, and discourse writing operations, ultimately forming the route of the exhibition venue and the narrative. For him, the fun part of the process was that he had to think about the position and purpose of each discourse in the overall process of exhibition production, and what role the curatorial discourse plays.

Trans-Justice: Para-Colonial@Technology (2017 PGICVA-funded exhibition), curated by Chien-Hung Huang, on display at MoCA Taipei

For Huang, the curatorial process is thinking about how to understand contemporary art, which directly influences his perceived research methods. Before getting involved in curating, he read many academic research papers that most people do not have access to, yet after he started curating and engaging with the international community, he realized that these research papers were useless because they did not really go into the mechanisms and institutions, which are an important part of contemporary art. Therefore, his research method is to accumulate and make corrections based on the experience gained from the curatorial process, and to continue to explore the relationship between curating and research. For him, each exhibition is different in terms of orientation and composition. Although some curators use an identical model to put on different exhibitions, or go through the same channels and resources, since he wants to investigate the relationship between curating and research, he tries different states to see what the possibilities of exhibitions are. As long as there is a difference in the way a project is implemented, it will bring out different research methods. Through curatorial practice, Chien-Hung Huang is not only curating exhibitions, but also searching for a right point, moment, and position where research can play a pivotal role in the whole art ecosystem.

Pei-Kuei Tsai—Not Just Discussions, But Solving Problems

Among the five curators interviewed for this paper, Pei-Kuei Tsai is the one who has received the least PGICVA awards and regular grants in total〔22〕. However, a total of five curatorial projects have almost perfectly echoed Tsai's core curatorial concept of the "artist as a complete human being" from almost every aspect. These projects include the 2012 Non-Sleep in Non-Homes: Art Living in a Historical Hostel (referred to as Non-Sleep in Non-Homes; 2011 PGICVA recipient); the 2014 How to Cultivate an Artist - Techniques of Young Artists from Kaohsiung (referred to as How to Cultivate an Artist; 2014 regular grant recipient); Dream Classes Beyond Art, ongoing since 2016; and the 2017 Dream Team of Kaohsiung Awards and Its Four Challenges (referred to as Dream Team of Kaohsiung Awards) at KMFA; to the 2019 The Big Popping City: A Technical Guide to a Great City (referred to as The Big Popping City; 2018 PGICVA recipient).

Tsai was once an art teacher at Kaohsiung Municipal Kaohsiung Girls' Senior High School. During her teaching days, she planned many exhibitions, including of public art, hand-made books, and self-portrait variations. The approach and orientation at the time were a teacher working together with students on art projects. When she was curating Non-Sleep in Non-Homes in 2012, faced with her first exhibition-oriented project, she did not think seriously about what curating or being a curator was: rather like doing a project, she tried to open up artistic possibilities through an exhibition with a hands-on approach. From Tsai's core curatorial concept of the "artist as a complete human being", the key consideration of Non-Sleep in Non-Homes was that artists need support for daily life in order to survive. Besides the three routes of selling works, funding, and museums, what are other ways to support artists? Therefore, she attempted to experiment in a hostel to see if room fees could be turned into artists' incomes, and whether such a sustainable model of self-operating artworks could become another possibility.

This concept was challenged during the first PGICVA interview at NCAF, where a committee member asked why public funding should support a commercial hotel project. But for Tsai, Non-Sleep in Non-Homes was about the art industry, and this issue, which is related to the commercial side of issues, must be discussed through a commercial model. In the exhibition, each participating artist created a room, and the room itself was the artwork, created for a specific audience, whether it was a specific person, a certain group, or a certain personality. In this way, a specific audience would be attracted to book the room and experience the work, while a portion of the occupancy fee of the room would be returned to the artist as if it were a royalty. However, the reality was far from ideal because most of the rooms created by artists were extremely complex, expensive to produce, and difficult to maintain and clean. In addition, the ideal arrangement of hotel service staff serving as the frontline exhibition guides could not be achieved, so most rooms did not operate long enough and demolishment was preferred. Even the few rooms that were maintained for a longer period of time were not able to earn back their costs.

Differing from the living upkeep problems of artists, How to Cultivate an Artist in 2014 directly confronted the education and career obstacles of artists. At the time, 116 Art Center of National Kaohsiung Normal University (NKNU) needed a special opening exhibition. As a graduate from NKNU's College of Fine Arts and current professor at its Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Art, Tsai proposed an exhibition to revisit the history of NKNU's College of Fine Arts, to reflect on it, and to walk ahead from there. Unlike the exhibition Non-Sleep in Non-Homes, Tsai was very clear when it came to considering the problems of the exhibition of How to Cultivate an Artist: how to showcase the greatness of NKNU without making it into an alumni group exhibition, and how to present these sensitive issues without causing harm. The exhibition touched on the categorization of the art education system as a class-conscious talent cultivation in the fostering of artists. In terms of presentation, different exhibition spaces were used to reflect and present these class differences. At the time, the invited participants were divided into: award winners, those certified by art institutions, and artists in the white cube; artists striving to build a career, with some renown already; or the project-based and art critic types. The exhibition space and categories were realistic. It was the artists themselves who proposed the location of the exhibit and the works to be presented to reflect their personal status, and no one wished to change the categories at the time. For example, Chu-Wang Chou was asked by Tsai to exhibit his works that won the Taipei Art Awards and Kaohsiung Award, and those that sold well in galleries to show that he was "winning in life", which had a bit of a mocking overtone. Alternatively, Pao-Yen Ding was a student about to graduate at the time, and his works were displayed on the stairs of the converted art space in the teachers' dormitory, reflecting his upward mobility at the time.

After How to Cultivate an Artist, Dream Classes Beyond Art in 2016 program turned the focus to secondary education to continue the discussion and experimentation on art education, while Dream Team of Kaohsiung Awards in 2017 focused on the impact of art awards on the career development of artists to conduct research and exhibition. Just like for How to Cultivate an Artist, as an alumnus and also the professor, Tsai discussed the internal state reflexively; for Dream Team of Kaohsiung Awards, she also had a perfectly appropriate identity: she is a Kaohsiung native, lives in Kaohsiung, has submitted projects, has won awards, and has been a juror and observer. For this project that was transformed from an under-NT$100,000 research project into an exhibition, Tsai interviewed more than thirty artists who had won the Kaohsiung Award, asking them to reflect on what they thought the award meant to them in terms of growth, personal meaning, and practical significance. She observed the changes in their lives after winning the award in the hope of examining the impact of the Kaohsiung Award. However, this exhibition was just like How to Cultivate An Artist; there were some unpleasant states and realities that were difficult to discuss openly and honestly. However, for Tsai, these issues should be discussed, and must be discussed in a self-reflective way within the mechanism.

The Big Popping City in 2019 was born out of the 2014 Kaohsiung gas explosions. Tsai wanted to solve the city's unshakable problems, including infrastructure, economic structure, and factory pollution. The whole project used "The Big Popping City" as a brand, which included "Dream Classes Beyond Art" and "Grand Cultural Entrepreneur", compiled through the concept of knowledge economy and unified in the framework of a virtual city. "Dream Classes Beyond Art" was more about the knowledge side of knowledge economy, tasked with integrating environmental information and presenting it in a more interesting way, providing the audience with knowledge-based content that could be read for longer time. "Grand Cultural Entrepreneur" was more about the economic side of knowledge economy. In order to back the content and information of the virtual city at the time, a large number of artists had to be assigned to digest and present the information. Therefore, it was realized that if the project was to last, there had to be industry thinking, which led to the emergence of the cultural and creative industry aspect. For this reason, The Big Popping City was registered directly as an operating studio.

For Tsai, when it comes to social and environmental issues, what art can do is to slowly influence awareness from an educational standpoint before taking practical steps to make a difference, and this must be a long-term battle. For example, if they kept talking about air pollution and pipeline issues in The Big Popping City, the audience would get tired of it and become irritated, so they had to have multiple formats and methods to intersperse environmental information in order to make long-term changes. Therefore, it is necessary to develop different sections akin to newspapers, which have entertainment, social, economic, and political columns, in order to be able to package environmental issues for people to read. Yet because of this, the project could easily become diffused, and the budget would never be enough. Tsai said, "I'm all about solving problems, not just 'discussing' problems. It's not too much of a burden for me or the artists merely 'discussing' problems instead of trying to solve them, raising concerns from different angles, and then taking down the exhibition. But when you really want to solve a problem, like when Non-Sleep in Non-Homes wanted to be self-run or when How to Cultivate an Artist wanted to subvert the status quo of education, it becomes very difficult." From income, education, and awards, to the relationship between the knowledge economy and urban life, the issues that Tsai's curatorial projects touch on are all issues that have really happened in her environment, which make her feel strongly driven to address and change the status quo. Therefore, for her, curating an exhibition is not just a matter of laying out a problem, but trying to solve it. In Pei-Kuei Tsai's curatorial practice, there is the courage to directly face the problem.

The Big Popping City (2018 PGICVA-funded exhibition), curated by Pei-Kuei Tsai and exhibited at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts

Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai—Collaborating with Artists to Find Independent Curatorial Possibilities in the Process

In terms of NCAF curatorial-related projects and regular grants, Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai is the curator with the highest total count〔23〕. Since she returned to Taiwan in 2011 after completing her studies and in the eight ensuing years, she has received a total of nine grants from NCAF in her role as a curator, starting with Rebirth of Doom: Regional Knowledge Construction and Dialogues between Macau and Taiwan in 2013 (referred to as Rebirth of Doom; 2013 phase I PGICVA recipient). In particular, in addition to funding from PGICVA and regular grants, she has also received Incubator Program grants with the role of curator. In 2019, Lai became the director of the Chiayi Art Museum, and created a new vision for a local art museum in the public sector. On the one hand, Lai's experience as a project clerk at the National Palace Museum from 2003 to 2005 might have helped her in the line of duty at this public institution〔24〕. But interestingly, on the other hand, the important axes of Chiayi Art Museum's design planning today actually stem from the experience she accumulated during her eight years as an independent curator, gained continuously through the environment, collaborators, and project implementation, including her observations and questions on the city, as well as her concerns and experiments with art education. Therefore, if we were to examine how the curatorial-related funding of NCAF successfully cultivates independent curators, Lai would be an excellent case study.

In 2011, Lai returned to Taiwan and fell in love with Tainan when curating Ariel Kuo - Reading: Tainan at the time. She thus established Art Square Taiwan there. In this old city with its own temperament, through curating exhibitions, Lai began to think and ask questions about how urban spaces connect to historical patterns, culture, and life, as well as how historical spaces relate to contemporary life and culture is formed, in addition to how these spaces are used in the present day. Since 2012, Lai has been developing a series of Artist-in-Residence programmes based in Tainan, which has also become an important method in her curatorial practice. In 2013, with this approach as the main direction, Lai received phase I PGICVA funding to conduct a residential research in Macau for Rebirth of Doom. However, Rebirth of Doom: Regional Knowledge Construction and Dialogues between Macau and Taiwan failed in the phase II of its application and was only implemented after receiving a regular grant in 2015. Despite the difference in funding and resources,〔25〕the cross-country exchange between the two places was still carried out, albeit with changes to the practice, by making the exhibition more of an action rather than a white cube exhibition. The two phases of Rebirth of Doom were connected to the University of Macau and collaboration was established, so the targets of the artist-in-residence programs expanded from the general public to schools. Through dialog and brainstorming with students, they turned artistic creation into a working method. Together, the collaborations and practices changed with regards to strategies, steps, and openness, while the method also transformed into a series of workshops. Through this process and experience, with such experimental workshops gradually acting as platform and the possibility of practicing art and culture education at the core, Lai developed Project School in 2018, an art cultivation program in ten schools in 2019, when she was the co-curator of the 2019 Madou Sugar Industry Art Triennial; as well as the current art education program at the Chiayi Art Museum. The concern for the use of cultural space in a city was gradually shifted from the city itself and its different spatial forms to the focus in historical space through the Incubator Program in 2015, using the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (MoCA Taipei) as an exemplary site for the reuse of monuments. Not only did the research become more focused, but she also began to develop more interest in the application and transformation of Taiwan's museum space. This project could be linked to the relationship between the architecture of the Chiayi Art Museum and the city.

Shattered sanctity (2015 Curator's Incubator Program @ Museums-funded exhibition), curated by Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai, on display at TAF Innovation Base

Since her first project in 2011, Lai has showed a clear understanding of the role of a curator and curatorial awareness. Most of the Taiwanese artists she has worked with are close to her age, and many of them are her long-term collaborators. Since she has been abroad for many years, all of her friendships with Taiwanese artists have formed through exhibition collaboration. For example, Hsiang Ni started to collaborate with her because of Rebirth of Doom, and because her curatorial approach and Ni's creative thinking, concerns, and practice are very similar. Also, Ni's creative work is process-oriented and does not aim to complete something as goal, which are reasons for their frequent collaboration. In the process and stages of collaboration, as the curator, Lai will first propose a concern, invite artists to join, and through residency and workshops, enter into the process of creation with the artists on site. Next, she will create an open understanding through physical sensations and interests, and generate more discussion. It might include three months of intensive discussions and a year of development to shape the final form of the exhibition together, which will ultimately present shared way of thinking, facing, and feeling about issues and the world by the curator and artists.

In terms of subjects, one of Lai's curatorial concerns is the existing urban space, and the other is how the path of art curating can serve as a possibility for occurrence and expression. However, in terms of the platforms and formats that carry and convey curatorial concepts, as a curator who has done so many exhibitions, she also believes that exhibition is indeed one final way to showcase contemporary curatorship, but even without it, there are still many possibilities for curatorial practice. In the same way, an exhibition is not the end goal for an artist's creation; for instance, the artist's book can also present an artist's creation. There are many curatorial approaches and reflections that can be created in the process that are not aimed at the final exhibition. However, because currently most value judgments are made through the final exhibition, the workshops, dialogs, administration, and communication in the execution process are not visible. For a curator who values the process, these outputs are as important as the exhibition, so one has to find ways to produce additional records, such as publications or films, simultaneously, which leads to overwork. In Lai's opinion, why not focus properly on one of these paths, or even expand it into a curator's special curatorial method? Judging by a final exhibition often makes it difficult for curators to think about the details of the process.

In 2017, with the support of the Tainan City Overseas Artist-in-Residence Program - Art Exchange Program of the Amt der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung, Lai went to Graz, Austria for a three-month exchange and began to make certain observations about Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, in 2017, she applied for phase I PGICVA funding with Amongst the Silence and again went to Germany, Austria, and Poland for more in-depth research. She researched the similarities between the history of these three countries and the liberation of Taiwan from the confinement of the past in the 1980s. Through her works, she looked at how these histories became voices and concepts for transmission and reflection. At this stage, Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai also found some challenges. According to her observations, most of the Taiwanese curators of her generation come from independent curatorial and alternative space backgrounds, and are very local. Therefore, it is very difficult to link resources and integrate exhibitions with other countries. Unlike the previous generation, which had the channel of biennials, the international exchanges and connections of this generation are often a solitary struggle, like some type of low-end global economic movement, where the way to do international exchange is via a suitcase, always looking for the lowest cost possible. Additionally, sometimes, the subsidized independent curator is still a blank sheet of paper to these foreign institutions, with not enough negotiating resources on hand and only a small amount of money for the exchange, not to mention the limited extent of what can be done. Therefore, assuming that curators can strengthen their unique curatorial approaches in their thinking and practice, and that there are more possibilities for funding, whether it be for exhibitions, publications, podcasts, or collaborations with different international institutions and organizations, independent curators must not only aim for the final exhibition as goal, but also have more skills that can be seen and valued.

Nobuo Takamori—Exploration, Creation, and Delicate Connection

Like Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai, Nobuo Takamori began curating in 2011 and established the curatorial team Outsiders Factory (referred to as Outsiders). Takamori's curatorial experience is quite impressive, with about 20 exhibitions if we do not include those that have yet to be completed〔26〕. Yet the number of grants received from NCAF is much lower in proportion〔27〕. This seems to reflect Takamori's flexibility in the use of resources and in his approach to work as a curator. He does not focus on relying on NCAF grants, but takes advantage of the resources and conditions available for each curatorial opportunity. As a result, he has been able to work with a variety of institutions in different countries and cultures for a long time, and is able to adjust and change when facing the different habits of each institution, adapting to the methods of each institution and slowly figuring out an appropriate way to carry out each project.

Takamori's first real contact with curating was when he went to Mexico in 2011 to curate Post-Actitud - El arte contemporáneo de jóvenes artistas de Taiwán (referred to as Post-Actitud; 2011 regular grant exhibition and international exchange). At that time, Takamori did not know much about curating, and his concept of exhibitions was limited to the scale of alternative spaces. When he went to Mexico for the on-site survey, he found that although the budget provided by the museum was small, only about NT$200,000, the space was of the scale of a museum. Therefore, he realized that he needed a team, so he asked a few friends who were interested in arts and cultural event planning to form Outsiders and applied for a separate grant in Taiwan. At that time, in addition to NCAF, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also approached, adding up to about NT$800,000 in funding. When the exhibition was completed and the team had been formed and had some ideas, Outsiders continued to work together until the last project in 2016, +8 Time Zone: The Research Project for Oral Histories & Community Art in Three Towns of Archipelago Southeast Asia (referred to as +8 Time Zone).

In addition to kickstarting the team's curatorial practice, Post-Actitud also made Takamori aware of his own interest in curating, especially his sensitivity to space and display, and he began to think about possibilities for international exchanges in contemporary art. In terms of spatial display, he focuses on the spatial experience in an exhibition venue, and this may be related to the fact that he has relished going to art museums to see contemporary art exhibitions since he was in high school. He does not like to have too much contact with people, but enjoys the audience experience of visiting the exhibition venue to see things by himself. Therefore, Takamori considers himself to be a more classical, white cube curator than other members of Outsiders. On the other hand, he believes that the expression of the exhibition space allows the audience more room for imagination and less direct narrative in comparison with a performance or a film. When watching a performance or a film, few people are brave enough to leave halfway through the show, but would rather see the whole thing from the beginning to the end. However, when a film is shown in a museum, the audience has a choice. This fascinates him because each viewer's experience of the same exhibition will be different from the others. The tension between the curator, the artist, and the viewer is a kind of questioning and responding. How to give each other more space, so that the audience can figure out or see the work in their habitual way, has become an important concern in his curatorial work. On the other hand, in the international exchange of contemporary art, since his first experience was with Mexico—not a common target of Taiwanese contemporary art, Takamori began to think about how international exchange could have more and broader possibilities. Therefore, instead of thinking in terms of contemporary art, his considerations are based on the context of Taiwan's social needs. He proposed the Philippines and Vietnam as targets, two countries with which Taiwan had close social exchanges at the time and which had their own urgency and significance. During this period, Takamori also set Mongolia as a target, but the ice-breaking period took a long time until it finally came to fruition in 2018. In his eyes, there are different tasks in each stage of international exchanges, and he thinks he is good at breaking the ice and enjoys the adventure process, but is less interested in maintaining the exchange after it becomes normalized.

From his Post-Actitud experience, Nobuo Takamori found that sending artists to different countries for an exhibition was problematic and unsuitable for his practice in the ice-breaking stage. In 2012, he collaborated with Vietnamese curator Nguyen Nhu Huy on South Country, South of Country–Vietnamese & Taiwanese Artists Exchange Project (2012 regular grant-funded exhibition and international exchange). Since they had to send one artist on exchange every month, he found that a sense of competition would arise between both sides when choosing artists, which would generate strategies according to the other's location and cultural characteristics. For example, he knew that there was more serious male chauvinism in Vietnam, so he deliberately chose more female artists, but at the same time, both sides would also co-create. Therefore, from this residency approach, he discovered the research method of on-site survey, and gradually realized that in international exchanges, the actual exchange experience is more important than the exhibition. As a result, when he subsequently developed the +8 Time Zone project in 2016, he did not require participants to produce specific results, but only to go on exchange, from which the participants naturally developed their own projects.

Looking at Takamori's personal sharing on Facebook of his 2018 International African Contemporary Art Joint Research Project (2018 phase I PGICVA recipient), we can see that when he conducted his on-site research and exchanges, he did not seem to have a certain direction that had to be followed, but rather engaged in a sort of experiencing and spontaneity. Such a state allows for a great deal of personal experience and adventure in the research on the one hand, and echoes the aforementioned flexibility in his work on the other. For Takamori, this approach to research, which is very different from the usual rigorous methodology, corresponds with the experiential state of exhibition presentation itself. For him, each work carries the artist's ideas, experiences, and aesthetic expressions, and even the smallest exhibition is a spontaneous experience. Especially when planning a group exhibition, there are many scales and differences, including artists' backgrounds and media. Therefore, sometimes when doing pre-research, it is necessary for him to use this kind of spontaneous method in order to keep himself in this state and help himself be more diversified when making contact with artists and selecting subjects.

Since Takamori has curated a large number of exhibitions, he used the analogy of a writer when he was asked to talk about projects that were particularly meaningful to him during the interview: "For a writer, what means the most to oneself is probably a short piece, not the masterpiece that everyone sees." Unfamiliar Nostalgia in 2013 was his first independent curatorial exhibition. In this small exhibition, which was exhibited at Ecole Café on Qingtian Street and at the workstation of Longtan Literary Park, he invited several people who majored in fine arts but did not continue to practice art afterwards, and who have the same mixed-culture background as him. The project The Japanese Diaspora in Postwar Taiwan: Narrative Construction of the Social and Historical Experiences of a Silent Minority, which he worked on as a research assistant at Academia Sinica from 2010 to 2011, can be called the triggering point of this exhibition. But another more important part is that, before this exhibition, he felt that the relationship between the exhibition and the curator was not so close. The curator was like a third person, looking at things neutrally, like a philosopher. However, Unfamiliar Nostalgia was not only a discussion of his personal ethnic identity, but also an exhibition that he developed in collaboration with the artists, which made him start to think about the possibility of curators working on topics that are personally related to their own life experiences. It was from this exhibition that he set a rule for himself to work on at least one exhibition a year. If he were a writer, the exhibition is his work, the way he thinks and expresses himself. It can be a long novel or a short poem, but the point is never to stop. Another important small exhibition was I Don't Belong in 2015. Takamori realized that all the participating artists were women only after the exhibition was made. It was not a deliberate choice, because the theme was for the artists to respond to larger social and political issues based on their own status, and it so happened that all the works he found appropriate at the time were by female artists, which was an important experience for him.

For Takamori, curating is like writing: it can be developed between different genres. The difference between a small exhibition and a large one is a question of literary form. Exhibitions come in different scales. A small exhibition can strengthen the personal dimension. Meanwhile, the larger the exhibition, the more works included in the physical reality; thus, it may not be possible to present the emotional part of the individual, and a more rational framework has to be used to assemble the works. On the other hand, he said that in terms of reality, there is a tug of war between different conditions and relational chains in each exhibition, and the larger the exhibition, the more resources there are. This means that many different perspectives will be used to examine it, so if it is too personal, it may not be easily accepted.

In addition to the personal experiences of exploration, icebreakers, and sensibility, The Secret South was an experimental exhibition of TFAM's collection in 2020, which integrated the flexibility and circumspection of Nobuo Takamori's research and work. The research related to The Secret South began in 2013, when he started to contemplate the shortcomings of artistic exchanges in Southeast Asia, which had already become a prominent academic discipline. He felt that there was a lack of art historical context in addition to the already excellent contemporary art exchanges. Before and after 2015, there was a zeitgeist of constructing Asian art history across the whole of Asia, but Taiwan was facing this spirit somewhat from the outside. However, he believes that we need to construct a context for the history of art exchanges between Taiwan and Asia in order to let related personnel and institutions of other countries recognize that Taiwan's art history research has its own significance, which would also facilitate contact with other countries' art history. Likewise, not dealing solely with the connections between contemporary art, the 2021 Asian Art Biennial will also continue the attitude of The Secret South, exploring Asian science fiction texts from the 1970s onwards and imaginings of the future. It is expected that the earliest works will date back to the 1930s, again delicately linking Taiwan and Asia through another context.

Exploring Contemporary Curatorial Methods in Taiwan

What are contemporary curatorial methods? In the book The Culture of Curating and The Curating of Culture(s) published by the Irish curator, artist, and writer Paul O'Neill in 2012, he mentioned that the late 1960s heralded in the rise of independent curators, including the 1969 Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works - Concepts - Processes - Situations - Information) and several other exhibitions curated by Harald Szeemann, which mostly had a specific production and process-oriented form. Furthermore, based on the major publications in exhibition and curatorial studies, it is possible to see how curatorial research and awareness in Europe and North America shifted from exhibition to curating. In 1976, the artist-critic Brian O'Doherty published Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. In 1996, Canadian art historian Reesa Greenberg, scholar Bruce W. Ferguson, and British art historian-curator Sandy Nairne co-edited an anthology of writings titled Thinking about Exhibitions. In 1998, Michael Brenson published The Curator's Moment, an essay on the growing influence of independent curators on the development of avant-garde art exhibitions around the world. In 1998, cultural and artistic researcher Mary Anne Staniszewski published The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Zurich University of the Arts extended the reflections on the 1998 curatorial forum into an online archive, the Curating Degree Zero Archive, and a digital and physical journal, On Curating, which continues to be published to date. In 2007, Steven Rand and Heather Kouris co-edited Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating. In 2008, art historian Bruce Altshuler published Salon to Biennial - Exhibitions that Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863-1959, where the contents show that the first exhibition in which the role of curator appears was Monet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910, and the role of organizer and curator appeared one after another in the documents compiled in the book. Among the 24 exhibitions studied, spanning nearly a century, a total of 10 exhibitions included the role of a curator, and most of them were artists, critics, or directors of institutions. Also in 2008, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist published A Brief History of Curating, using interview as the method. In 2012, Australian art historian and critic Terry Smith published Thinking Contemporary Curating. Bruce Altshuler then published Biennials and Beyond - Exhibitions that Made Art History: 1962-2002 in 2013, which was a selection of 25 exhibitions from 1962 to 2002, and each exhibition had a curator—most of them were professionals dedicated to curating exhibitions and exhibition production. In 2014, curator Jens Hoffmann selected 50 important contemporary art exhibitions under nine themes from the three decades after the late 1980s and authored Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, where the curators or art directors of all of the exhibitions are clearly listed. In 2015, Terry Smith published Talking Contemporary Curating, which also takes the same interview approach as Hans Ulrich Obrist, with people as protagonists〔28〕.

From the aforementioned publications, it can be seen that not only did exhibitions with curators gradually become mainstream, but even published research changed to curating/curator as the object of study, which makes me think that there must be differences between contemporary curating and exhibition planning. Perhaps, curating to many people is about proposing a theme, inviting artists or works, and then putting on an exhibition. Nevertheless, I believe that contemporary curating is more than that; after all, the above process could just be exhibition making. After Harald Szeemann, known as the "Father of Independent Curating", left the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, he called himself an "Ausstellungsmacher" (Independent Exhibition Maker). But it was his groundbreaking approach in 1969 that shaped the work of the curator as we know it today. In this vein, curatorship has been in development for more than 40 years. What makes the contemporary curator different from the exhibition maker? Perhaps it all lies in the curatorial method. Perhaps "curatorial method" is not a very precise term, just as the Chinese term for "curator" (策展人; a direct translation would be "exhibition planner") does not accurately describe the role. The curatorial methods put forth in this paper are an attempt to explore the curatorial perception of a contemporary curator, the experimentation and development of curatorial forms, the ways of collaborating with artists and producing exhibitions, and the uniqueness of their curatorship in terms of research and practice. A curatorial approach cannot be developed through theory alone, but must be formed through practice, and is specific to each curator. Therefore, there is no specific model or standard for a curatorial method, but rather it varies with each curator's own curatorial practice.

Based thereon, this paper does not use exhibition observation and criticism or textual analysis as the main research method, but considers curating as a kind of practice as the basis. Through the curators' discussion of their curatorial ideas, methods, contexts, and connections, we can compile the curatorial methods of these curators, and attempt to further explore the possibility of viewing the contemporary curatorial landscape in Taiwan. This approach is similar to that of Hans Ulrich Obrist in A Brief History of Curating, and Terry Smith's Talking Contemporary Curating. By using people as the object of study, we can develop a path to understand contemporary curation. In Surviving on Time: Curatorial Report from Asia published jointly by NCAF and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts of Taipei National University of the Arts, Canadian curator Haema Sivanesan, consultant for collection development at the Bengal Foundation, spoke of her interest in how innovation and change in curatorial practice can be developed in Asia when talking about the Asian Curatorial Forum. She believes that "in ways that are often not possible in the West, and the ways in which Asian curators are able to re-define certain ideas in curatorial practice [...] as I feel you have exciting opportunities to do things differently and by doing so, define modes of practice which are relevant to your unique contexts."〔29〕It is with this intention that this paper attempts to identify contemporary curatorial practices in Taiwan through interviews and observations of these five curators who have received curatorial grants from NCAF.

Through the grant information provided by NCAF and a preliminary understanding of the recipients' personal experiences, this study was based on the number of grants received (Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng and Chien-Hung Huang are the two most awarded grant recipients, Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai is the most awarded recipient of both types of grants combined, and Nobuo Takamori presents a high discrepancy between his curatorial experience and the number of grants received); and the differences in work regions (Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai and Pei-Kuei Tsai focus their activities in southern Taiwan, while the other three are all based in Taipei). Five curators were selected as the subjects of this study. Through the interviews, it first becomes clear that, with the exception of Pei-Kuei Tsai, the other four curators have a high percentage of international exchanges and connections in their curatorial projects. Three of the curators mentioned during the interviews that international exchange and linkage exhibitions are indeed in need of NCAF funding because of their relatively large budget requirements. In the initial setup of the curatorial grants, NCAF also did set the main focus on overseas projects.〔30〕In particular, the PGICVA mechanism was adjusted into a two-phase grant in 2012, and only one case in a phase I PGICVA was not primarily based on an overseas location〔31〕. In 2016, when simple exhibition plan funding (no longer in two phases) was reintroduced, nearly half of the projects have been curatorial projects across countries〔32〕, which shows that NCAF attaches great importance to international exchanges and connections in curating. This emphasis and support is also directly related to curators' concern about their topics of research. Through artworks, artifacts, and their display, especially through sound and sound culture as the axis, Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng's concern for politics and society builds a network of connections and dialog between Taiwan's political, social, and cultural issues and those of other countries. Chien-Hung Huang's curatorial topics clearly show the development of Taiwan's long-term interest in Asian geopolitics. The development of Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai's curatorial work begins from the city and stretches out to the study of architecture and history, connecting other cities and countries with similar backgrounds. Nobuo Takamori, on the other hand, attempts to establish the importance of Taiwan in the Asian network by exploring the relationship between art history and cultural, political, historical, and social development. It is clear from this commonality that Taiwan has an important and inescapable position due to its unique historical, political, and geographical situation—not only in terms of geopolitics, but also the unique dilemma that includes recognition, transitional justice, and generational differences. Meanwhile, Taiwan's contemporary curatorial practice continues to reflect and discuss this state of affairs through international exchanges and connections.

Most of the issues that a curator is interested in have a developmental context. To me, this part is very much like the core of an artist's practice, which might not remain unchanged throughout their life, or may have several different axes intertwined at the same time, but certainly has its own core context. There are few sudden, dot-like developments, which is a huge difference between curating and exhibition making. However, even in the case of execution and practice, another important part of curatorship that is different from exhibition production is the experimentation with and creation of working methods. As Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai said at the end of her interview, curating should not only aim for the exhibition in the physical space as ultimate goal, but also use other methods such as publications, online platforms, and even events as the vessels of curatorial practice. This can raise the importance of the curatorial process and allow contemporary curating to develop more different methods and styles. For example, Pei-Kuei Tsai's highly creative curatorial projects almost always sprout from specific venues, subjects, and events, relying heavily on the spirit of experimentation and the development of interactive processes with artists, and putting the issues that the curator wishes to discuss directly into the venue and allowing them to occur and be examined anew. Alternatively, as in the case of Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng, although the physical exhibition is still the ultimate means of presentation and she is highly aware of the importance of display, she continues to think about how curating exhibitions can overcome the challenge of juxtaposing non-art objects, such as abstract sound and archival documents, with artworks and creating a dialog between them, finally achieving an exhibition that has a sense of physicality and constructs a viewing experience in a physical space. Chien-Hung Huang uses the writing of curatorial statements as a curatorial method, continuously rewriting, pondering on, and confronting the relationship between the research and theoretical aspects of curatorial discourse, along with the physical exhibition and its audience in the curatorial process. Or, in the case of Nobuo Takamori, he connects the spontaneity of on-site fieldwork and experience with the exhibition presentation and viewing experience. The perceptions and approaches in the curatorial process make curating a continuous and cumulative process of reflection and practice. The curator's approach to curating and exhibition making is developed from their curatorial thinking as a result of the accumulation of each curatorial experience—another difference between curating and exhibition making. These gestures that are unique to each curator will continue to be reflected upon, change, and evolve, not just be executed and completed.

An important and indispensable part of the curator's work is collaboration with the artist, even if it is done through the selection of pre-existing works. The curator's research and understanding of every piece and artist can be seen as a collaborative process of getting to know the artist and object exhibited. However, in contemporary curating, there are many deeper, more distinct, and more reciprocal ways of collaborating with artists. No matter whether it is the exhibition Unfamiliar Nostalgia, which Nobuo Takamori said was the most meaningful to him, by discussing and creating the exhibition with several creators of similar background; or the final exhibition that presented the joint experience and achievements of the curator and the artist in Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai's experience of shared residency, meetings, discussions, and development with the artists. Chien-Hung Huang also developed a similar approach to Lai's, using workshops to facilitate discussions between artists and taking this as the main development process of curatorship. Chien-Hung Huang's way of continuous dialog, discussions, and adjustment with artists through words and texts in the curatorial process is also similar to Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng's curatorial method of interview and research. Pei-Kuei Tsai, on the other hand, constantly expands the scale of curatorial projects in the curatorial process in response to artists' living conditions and needs. From these different methods of collaboration with artists, we can see that an important part of contemporary curating are the dialog and collaboration with artists, especially the rise of mutual influence and development in a position of reciprocity. Curating is no longer just a linear development of the curator setting the theme, selecting the artists or works, and planning and executing the exhibition. In today's increasingly sophisticated curatorial division of labor, the planning and technical and practical aspects of an exhibition are often handled by a separate professional or unit to form an exhibition team, while many of the communication and liaison tasks of the process are also handled by professional administrative staff. Therefore, for a contemporary curator, concept and content are the most important parts of the curatorial process that cannot be left to others, and this is closely related to the collaboration with artists. However, this does not mean that the curator does not need to care about other aspects. After all, if the final model and platform of curatorial presentation, such as an exhibition in a physical space, is related to the message that the curator aims to convey, communicate, interact with, and create through various subtleties, such as palette, atmosphere, spatial sense, viewing method, work relationship, and even visual design, the curator then must communicate with each partner in the exhibition team, as in the dialog with the artists in collaboration, in order to accurately convey the curatorial concept. As a result, different curators may differ in terms of space, artifacts, and narrative style because each of them has a different concern, thus giving rise to their own unique features.

If There is a Contemporary Curatorial Method in Taiwan

Starting from the Taipei Biennial in 1998, when Fumio Nanjo was invited to act as curator, Taiwan officially joined the global biennial boom and made curators, not only artists, the actors of the exchanges and dialog between Taiwan and the international community. Today, curators can be found not only in art museums and galleries, but also in large and small urban and local art festivals and events, where they act as promoters, leaders, and integrators. If Taiwan, which is in the midst of a curatorial boom, had its own contemporary curatorial method, what would it be? Perhaps it would be the research of issues that have grown out of the unique history, politics, and culture of this land. Through curation, creators, participants, and audiences are invited to continue to visit, examine, and reflect on Taiwan together. Perhaps it is the creative and experimental approach to curatorial work that constantly challenges the curators themselves, the artists, and all existing models of display, viewing, transmission, and communication. Or maybe it is the gesture of becoming partners with artists in their practice, in order to explore the possibilities of mutual support, mutual inspiration, and co-creation.

However, can these curatorial approaches be recognized as Taiwan's contemporary curatorial method? Are there any differences or similarities with other regions in Asia or with the contemporary curatorial practices in Europe and North America that have had a profound impact on the global curatorial ecosystem? The answer cannot be given simply by compiling the practices and contexts of five contemporary curators, and perhaps even if more cases are collected, the answer might still not be available. However, for me, this paper is a starting point. We know that "curating" in its Chinese translation is not a precise term, but it may be too late to find a replacement for this term that everyone is used to. Curating is becoming clearer but also increasingly blurred. Is it possible to gradually outline the contour of contemporary curating in Taiwan through a method like this paper's, depicting how its inquisitive spirit, experimental attempts, creative character, and collaborative attitude have slowly changed into a professional role different from that of exhibition making? A curator is no longer a caregiver, service provider, or resource allocator, but a trailblazer who asks questions, thinks, discusses, and creates. It is hoped that this paper will be the beginning of an attempt to acquaint ourselves with the curatorial approaches, perspectives, and consciousness of contemporary curators in Taiwan through interviews and by exploring their curatorial practices, in order to open up a pathway to understand the meaning of contemporary curating in Taiwan and the contemporary curatorial landscape that belongs to Taiwan.

Notes

1: Pu, Bo-Yu. (2015) "The Initial Triggering Effect of Curatorial Consciousness in Taiwan". Lu, Pei-Yi (Ed.). Contemporary Art Curating In Taiwan 1992-2012, pp. 138-150.
2: Huang, Hai-Ming. (1992). "Dis/ Continuity of Tradition - Reflections on the First Special Exhibition of an Art Museum Planned by an Art Critic". Lion Art, no. 259, pp. 45-47.
3: Lu, Pei-Yi. (2015). "On the Road: Contemporary Art Curatorship in Taiwan from the 1990s to the Present”. Lu, Pei-Yi (Ed.). Contemporary Art Curating In Taiwan 1992-2012, pp. 20-41.
4: Peng, Chia-Ling. (2005). A preliminary study on types of independent curators' community practice in Taiwan, pp. 16-23.
5: Lin, Ping. (2004). "Curator's Halo - The Long and Winding Road of Curatorial Business in Taiwan". The Artist, no. 352, pp. 288-233.
6: Same as Note 3.
7: Press release of the 1998 Taipei Biennial: Site of Desire: https://www.taipeibiennial.org/TB1996-2014/pdfView/7690/1998%E5%8F%B0%E5%8C%97%E9%9B%99%E5%B9%B4%E5%B1%95%EF%BC%9A%E6%AC%B2%E6%9C%9B%E5%A0%B4%E5%9F%9F (Retrieved on June 14, 2021)
8: Liu, I-Chun, Principal Investigator. Chu, Cheng-Ming; Wang, Li-Jung, Co-Investigators. Lin, Mun-Lee, Project Consultant. Lin, Chiao-Yun; Liu, Yu-Chen; Hsieh, Chia-Ling, Research Assistants. (October 2009). Cultural and Arts Grant Policies and Implementation in Taiwan, Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, Executive Yuan, p. 2.
9: "Study and Continuing Education Items. (2) Study Abroad and in Mainland China: 2. Eligible Applicants: Those whose work consists of professional artistic creation, curating, and art criticism". The National Culture and Arts Foundation - 2001 Grants Application Criteria.
10:"Grant Considerations: 6. Curator's professional advancement and exchange programs to expand their international horizons are also a focus of encouragement." "Funding Categories - Exhibition: 1. Applications for individual exhibitions can be made by individuals or groups, while applications for group exhibitions can be made by curators or groups, with the aforementioned curators acting as project executors and groups as organizers. Investigation and Research: Priority will be given to research projects on contemporary art, collection of historical materials, and preliminary investigation of international exhibition planning." The National Culture and Arts Foundation - 2003 Grants Application Criteria.
11: "Funding Categories - Exhibition: 1. Applications for group exhibitions must be made by a group, and the aforementioned group should act as organizer. For curatorial exhibitions, applications may be submitted by the curator, provided that the curator is the executor of the project and is not an exhibition participant." The National Culture and Arts Foundation - 2004 Grants Application Criteria.
12: In 2004, the grant announcement stated that curators "must have experience having curated at least three or more discursive exhibitions", with funding capped at NT$1.5 million per project. Since then, the grant has seen annual adjustments, and since 2012, it has been capped at NT$4 million per project. According to the information provided by NCAF, the highest amount of funding given to an exhibition project under the regular grants after 2004 was for Post-Actitud - El arte contemporáneo de jóvenes artistas de Taiwán in Mexico, which was also selected for an international exchange project grant and received NT$500,000 in funding. Regular grants began to require a letter of consent or contract for the exhibition venue to be included in the application since 1999; therefore, most applications had to be completed within one year. In comparison, the implementation period for project grants was set at one and a half years in 2004, and has since been adjusted to a current maximum of three years, making it less likely to be restricted by the timing of site-related applications and collaborations.
13: Chang, Yu-Yin. (November 19, 2019). "Curatorial Themes - Incubator Program To Curators, We Care About Your Future: NCAF's New Funding Strategy, from 'Curatorial Training' to 'Expanding Taiwan Pavilions'". ARTouch: https://artouch.com/views/content-11871.html (June 15, 2021)
14: "Curators of curatorial exhibitions must submit a curatorial statement, to be handed in by the curator or the group.". The National Culture and Arts Foundation - 2012 Grants Application Criteria.
15: Prior to 2012 (inclusive), music, dance, and traditional and contemporary theater all had the "Exhibition" category. In 2013, "Exhibition" was changed to "Curation", including two sub-categories: (1) Curatorial Exhibition and (2) Exhibition (including display of theater arts). National Culture and Arts Foundation - 2013 Grants Application Criteria.
16: Wu, Mu-Ching. (September 18, 2020). "'TFAM Curatorial Project Admits Error!" Curator Lee Lin's 'Administrative Execution' Confused with Curatorial Work? The Mess Left Behind after the Controversy over the Term "Curatorial Execution'". ArtTouch: https://artouch.com/views/review/content-13183.html (Retrieved on June 14, 2021)
17: All grant statistics in this paper are based on curatorial-related projects and curatorial-related data of the PGICVA and regular grants provided by NCAF from 2004 onwards, not on the applicants themselves but on the projects of listed curators. Moreover, the first and second phases of PGICVA are counted separately. In the case of Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng, the grants include application for space at The Cube and projects for which Cheng was listed as curator, with a total of seven PGICVA awards (six projects) and one regular grant.
18: Art and Society: http://praxis.tw/ (2021/06/15)
19: In fact, even Talking Drums Radio has a very precise design of the radio studio space, which is also a visual representation of the auditory space.
20: In total, he was awarded PGICVA funding six times (five projects) and a regular grant once.
21: The members and division of labor were as follows: Curatorial Team / Huang, Chien-Hung; Fang, Yen-Hsiang; Lee, Jo-Mei; Chen, Chi-Pan; Liu, Chien-Wei; Fan, Hsiao-Lan; Hsu, Chia-Wei; Wang, Shao-Gang; Chang, Hsin-Ning; Wu, Fang-Chih; Hsu, Chien-Yu; Chief Visual Coordinator / Chen, Ching-Yuan; Logo Design / Huang, Tzu-Heng; Tour Design / Wu, Hsue-Yi; Lightbox Painting / Huang, Pin-Han; Lightbox Photography / Hsu, Chia-Roun; Ad Comics/ Wu, Fang-Chih; Design / Chang, En-Man; Chiu, Jun-Chieh; Chou, Yu-Cheng.
22: Two PGICVA awards (two projects) and one regular grant. During the interview, Pei-Kuei Tsai mentioned that she had two unsuccessful grant applications. Below, we will see that Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai also mentioned having one unsuccessful application.
23: Three PGICVA awards (two projects), one Incubator Program grant, and five regular grants.
24: In the interview, Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai said: "The experience at the National Palace Museum from 2003 to 2005 allowed me to build up a network of people and I also saw a pattern. Because it was the highest-level national institution, the people I worked with were all of the highest caliber, which allowed me to see what it means to have visibility and to implement matters according to a high-standard strategy. But at the same time, I also saw how huge the obstacles and political restrictions are, which embody the highest level of constraint in public service."
25: At that time, she received a regular grant of NT$300,000.
26: The interview with Nobuo Takamori took place on May 26, 2021, and this article was completed in the end of October 2021.
27: Two PGICVA awards (same project) and three regular grants.
28: For reference, please refer to the first part of the author's book The reflective thinking of  a curatorial practice - Knead and Gain: Chun-Ming Hou's 'Body Images' interview project.
29: Ko, Nien-Pu, Interviewer. (2018). "The Narratives & Collecting of Bangladeshi Art: Conversation with Haema Sivanesan", p. 134. 〔29〕: The Asian Curatorial Forum was held in February 2017 at the Shiplakala Academy in Bangladesh, co-organized by the Bengal Foundation, the Britto Arts Trust, NCAF, and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei University of the Arts.
30: See Note 9.
31: 2016 project grant, phase I residential research, Chen Yi-Chun's project Exploring the Past and New Life of Taiwanese Image focused on Hsinchu.
32: Among "Exhibition Plans" under PGICVA from 2016 to 2019, seven projects received funding and three of them included international artists.