The 19th Taishin Arts Award Announces its Three Laureates
The award ceremony of the 19th Taishin Arts Award this year, due to the pandemic in Taiwan and the multiple extensions of the level-3 alert, has been postponed once. On July 10, the in-person “award ceremony” is eventually replaced by the first-ever “livestream announcement of award laureates,” in which three laureates among fifteen finalists are announced. The laureates taking home the Visual Arts Award and the Performing Arts Award laureates are respectively awarded a NT$ 1 million monetary prize, and the Grand Prize laureate is awarded a NT$ 1.5 million monetary prize, bringing the prize money to a total of NT$ 3.5 million.
The Grand Prize: Ming-Hwa Yeh, The House Behind the Wall – Wang Da Hong House Theatre X Ming Hwa Yeh (NT$ 1.5 million monetary prize)
The Visual Arts Award: CHANG Ting-Tong, CHENG Hsien-Yu and Dino, Taipei Robot Man 2.0: Infodemic (NT$ 1 million monetary prize)
The Performing Arts Award: Wu-Kang Chen X Jérôme Bel, Dances for Wu-Kang Chen—2020 Taipei Arts Festival (NT$ 1 million monetary prize)
The Taishin Arts Award organized by the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture has supported the creation of contemporary visual arts, performing arts and interdisciplinary arts throughout the years and enters its nineteenth year this year. Taking a retrospective look on the first half of the year 2020, many events and activities were halted due to the impact of the pandemic before numerous exhibition and performance projects were swiftly revived and presented during the second half of the year. The award’s nomination work, however, has remained ceaseless. From more than a hundred nominees, fifteen finalists have been named before three award laureates are to be selected. Affected by the pandemic, the final selection jury of this edition is once again formed by Taiwanese jurors. With theater director LI Huan-Hsiung serving as the chair, the final selection jury includes poet and theater director-playwright Hung Hung, art historian CHEN Kuang-Yi, artist KAO Jun-Honn, curator and art critic LU Pei-Yi, the artistic director of the Digital Art Foundation WANG Po-Wei, and the CEO of the International Organisation of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians (OISTAT) WEI Wan-Jung.
The Visual Arts Award is presented to Taipei Robot Man 2.0: Infodemic by CHANG Ting-Tong, CHENG Hsien-Yu and Dino, which was showcased at both TheCube Project Space and Longquan Market. Utilizing the white box space and the real wet market, the work uses digital technologies to reuse online trolls and fake news as creative materials to power mechanical installations and create sound performances, reflecting the social landscape amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Performing Arts Award is presented to Dances for Wu-Kang Chen, debuted in the 2020 Taipei Arts Festival. Creatively conceived by French artist Jérôme Bel, who assigns topics to each segment of the work, Taiwanese dancer-choreographer Wu-Kang Chen serves as the director and solo performer of the piece.
Selected from fifteen finalists, the Grand Prize is presented to Ming-Hwa Yeh, who was invited by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum to tailor-make The House Behind the Wall for Wang Da Hong House Theatre. Yeh converts the life journey of architect WANG Da-Hong into a performance in three episodes, interlacing dance, traditional theater, performance and video to revisit and retrace Wang’s career as an architect and his everyday life.
The well-known dancer-choreographer couple Wu-Kang Chen and Ming-Hwa Yeh first made the list of the finalists with their respective productions and eventually brought home the Performing Arts Award and the Grand Prize, writing the ever-first and indeed a joyous record in the nineteen-year history of the Taishin Arts Award.
In his speech, the chair of the final selection jury, theater director LI Huan-Hsiung describes the artists as “humble and confident, assiduous but rich, subaltern yet surpassing, disadvantaged but courageous,” and expresses that he feels honored to be a member of such a community. To conclude the ceremony, the Executive Director of the Foundation, Yali Cheng says that “the year of 2021 is a greater challenge for us all, but it is our belief that any and every situation we experience has its merit. Art demonstrates a greater power when encountering restraints and difficulties.”
