Di yuan shi xue: bin wei shi jie de duo bian te zhi = Geopoetics : changing nature of threatened worlds

Abstract

"The history of human society has been rife with wars and conflicts. Wherever human beings exist, there are reallocation of resources, demarcation of territories, and vicissitudes of power. The legacies and traumatic memories of the two world wars in the 20th century continue to haunt us. During our preparation for the exhibition titled Geopoetics: Changing Nature of Threatened Worlds, the Russo-Ukrainian War was escalating, and, on top of that, the Israel-Hamas War broke out in October 2023, two months before the exhibition's opening. The world is not always in a state of peace. Through the media, we are inundated with as many images of remote battlegrounds as anti-war protests in many countries. Provoking people's emotional responses though, the scenes charged with tensions also cause our sensory fatigue and boredom. We may not be able to ponder calmly over the nature and root causes of these conflicts whilst we sympathize with the victims and condemn the perpetrators for their atrocities. How do we start from the individual to fix our gaze on the international entanglement in historical contexts and territories on the one hand, and to grasp the world's operation in the intricate web of development on the other? At the museum's invitation, the three curators--Patrick Flores, Kim Seong-Youn, and Hsieh Pei-Chun--jointly propose 'geopoetics' as the exhibition theme, which investigates the similarity between the geo-spatial distribution and the shaping by poetics. The curators further employ four subthemes, namely 'Signal', 'Worlds', 'Deep Time', and 'Present History', to present contemporary art's expression and exploration of issues concerning 'communication', 'mobility' , 'ecology', 'politics', and so forth. Flores argues that 'geopoetics', while lying beyond the dogmatic ideology of 'geopolitics', enables us to respond to the political, social, and economic interference in human society from the perspective of art. Kim expresses his concern and calls on human beings as a community of life to connect with one another, otherwise we will be unable to tackle contemporary turmoil and uneasiness. Hsieh contemplates whether we, who always confront history directly, can develop new thinking so as to transcend the rigid confines of geography and look into how the kaleidoscopic world is created with malleable natural elements. By virtue of the three curators' sense and sensibility, this exhibition will guide the visitors to grasp the contemporary world in a pluralistic fashion"-- Foreword from the director of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (page 6).