For the 53rdVenice Biennale, Taiwan artist Yang Mao-lin, with the backing of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, will exhibit more than 30 three-dimensional sculpture and flat pieces in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo’s Sala San Tomaso under the theme “Temple of Sublime Beauty: Made in Taiwan,” transforming that corner of the nearly 600 year-old church into a shrine to contemporary animeand manga.This exhibition is also the culmination of Yang’s creative process of deification and temple creation these past years.
Objects of Yang’s deification include popular subculture characters from kids cartoons and comic books and other sources, like the Japanese characters Ultraman, Mazinger-Z, Godzilla and the Western characters Peter Pan, the mermaid and Snow White. The deification process largely involves taking a two-dimensional cartoon or comic book image and reproducing it in three-dimensional sculpture form. He further makes use of old school “Made in Taiwan” markers, intentionally combining the local Taiwanese elements with those of a foreign culture, creating new toys, idols and totems that are an interesting hybrid of various cultures using available materials and the concept of free linkage inspired by hypertext.
For this exhibition, Yang expands on his deification pursuits of recent years to a sort of blueprint for the construction of a temple. Yang has scattered deified, iconographic cartoon and comic book characters throughout the site of the exhibit, a centuries-old chapel, from the portico to the interior, ceiling to floorboards, windows and walls, the artist’s placement of the works is largely leisurely, symmetrical and in accordance with the layout of the space that creates a sort of logic of power and theology that blurs the line between East and West and transcends religious differences here as the age of globalization dawns.
In aesthetics, the concepts “exalted” and “elegant” are generally perennially at odds. Yang’s shrine to animeand mangaat his “temporary pavilion” in Venice, however, seems intent on fusing those two concepts. That, perhaps, could be viewed as a microcosm of Taiwan’s diverse, island cultural ecology, alluding to a sort of enormously powerful “post-modern” force that Taiwan has actually long possessed.
Although Yang’s “Temple of Sublime Beauty: Made in Taiwan” solo exhibition in Venice makes use of the contemporary pop culture lexicon, on a spiritual level it can actually be seen as a nexus of his body of creative work these past years – pondering Taiwan’s history, piecing together Taiwan totems, composing images of Taiwan – an extension of that work, a new lease on creative life in response to contemporary cultural phenomenon and the globalized linguistic environment.
J.J. Shih (Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei)
