In this work, Taipei Fine Arts Museum will repackage its products in the line of a fashion beauty contest and serve those who congregate a refund, if visitors are not satisfied.
Editor : I first saw Mali Wu's work at the Venice Biennale in
1995 where she presented Library.
Library consists of rows of glass books arranged in a formal order
on metal shelves. Inside each glass book neatly and exactingly titled in
gold lettering are tiny fragments of pulped paper from the book itself.
This piece intrigued me because of its formalist presentation , its
deconstructive impluse and its concrete realisation of an irreverent
feminist attitude to canons of (male) academic knowledge. Has this
knowledge of the classics really been reduced to dust ? Is it rotting
through neglect or because it is no longer relevant to today's needs? I
wanted to know more about this artist's work and when nearly two years
later we established contact through email, she kindly sent me some of her
writings and photos of her work. What follows in the next few pages are
excerpts from
Mali Wu's writing, images of her work and writing about her in the
last few years. Linda Jaivin's analysis discusses an earlier version of
Library in
Gnawing Texts,
Reaming Words.
Mali Wu was born in 1957 in Taipei, Taiwan. She graduated in 1979 from Tamkang University with a degree in German language and culture. She then went to Vienna, and shifted her focus to art. From 1982 to 1986 she studied with Professor Guether Uecker at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, after which she returned to Taiwan. Since then she has worked as an artist, lecturer and adviser to an arts publisher (Yuan-Liou) and critic, writing for Taiwanese art magazines like Artist and Lion Monthly.
In recent years my creations fall into two styles : objects &
installations. My perception of the 'object' is merely as a life-size toy.
As to the other, I express great interest in 'installations' using various
media, which implicitly describe the possibility of multiple intersections
to seek a sophisticated significance with a space. A growing concern over
society is also reflected in my work as an attempt to depict a close link
between 'self' on a small scale and 'the community' on a large scale. Only
in the process of seeking freedom and defining my own self did it enable
me to deconstruct the human bondage imposed by the external world
"To live in Taiwan today means to inhabit a fragmented and segmented world, where traditional cultures live alongside new Western ways of life and where identity is continuously put to a text and can be lost in an infinite accumulation of behavioural modes becoming an instance of new energy capable of creating interconnectedness, a reality where the elements of the past conjugate and converge with the evolved facts of the present"
Mali Wu - Notes from the 1996 work TAIPEI FINE ARTS MOTEL
A conceptual way of occupying the Taipei Fine Arts Museum
'People's desire is always on my mind'
In this work, Taipei Fine Arts Museum will repackage its products in the
line of a fashion beauty contest and serve those who congregate a refund,
if visitors are not satisfied.
The presentation involved distributing yellow business cards as invites
with fuchsia Chinese characters which read :
Registration with government NT$20 per visit.
Exclusive celebrity club
on Chung-shan N. Rd.
Good choice for fun seekers.
Taipei Fine Arts Motel.
Revamped and reopen/
million dollar interior deco/
Innovative games & outstanding performance.
100% satisfaction guaranteed
Call hot line: (02) 5957656
Special offer:
from July 13 to October 13, 1996
The Moral of this piece concerned doing some good by bringing the public into the Museum and illustrating its public function
The Spin:'Hypocrisy in the closet'
Copyright © : Mali Wu & N.Paradoxa,1997
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5, 1997
Artist's
Statement