Established in 1997, the Kaohsiung Award is one of the major events of arts and cultures in Taiwan, providing not only monetary rewards but also an encouraging platform for visual artists to fully demonstrate their exciting creativity. In the competition for the 24th Kaohsiung Award this year, totally 438 artists were attracted to participate. After the careful evaluations and discussions among 30 judges specialized in different fields, Li Yi-fan; Chien Yu-jen; and Shih Men-xin were selected and bestowed with the highest honor of the “2020 Kaohsiung Award”. In addition, the HCS Special Award for Calligraphy/Seal-engraving Works sponsored by the HCS Calligraphy Foundation was given to Wu Meng-shan while there were five winners of the “Excellent Work Award” and 15 winners of the “Honorable Mentions”.
In response to the trend of interdisciplinary art practice and the evolution of artistic creation methods, the Kaohsiung Award has gone through several reforms. It is the first of its kind to use the mechanism of “reviewing all the submitted works according to their categories in the initial selection and then reviewing the selected works of all the categories together in the final selection.” In 2007, it adopted the observer mechanism with the observer playing an indispensable role in both the initial and final selections by providing objective and dynamic inputs in the discussions and reviewing the works in light of the latest trends of contemporary art. With its constant self-improvement and self-challenge that manifests its innate characteristics of flexibility and openness, the Kaohsiung Award encourages artists to keep up with the times and embrace the diverse, mixed, flexible, holistic, and trailblazing spirit of contemporary art.
Among the three Kaohsiung Award winners this year, Li Yi-fan compiles in his video work, Important_message.mp4, a copious amount of real and fake information from the “content farm” on the internet. Mimicking the form of storytelling on internet video channels, the work explores issues about the brain, psychiatric disorders, and the internet through its narratives. In his Taiwanese Landscape Screen—Spirit of the Forest, Chien Yu-jen draws inspiration from the paintings by Gobara Koto, a Japanese painter who stayed in Taiwan during the Japanese rule period. Chien uses cement to reproduce amplified details of Koto’s paintings. The screens symbolize the large and tall walls in modern urban jungle, reflecting the fluidity and absurdity in the transition of material values of capitalist society. In his work, A, Shih Meng-xin not only discusses the connections between space and objects through the juxtaposition of daily items and the tools he often uses in artistic creation but also reveals how miscellaneous and homogeneous information is in contemporary life experiences. In addition, Wu Meng-shan, winner of the HCS Special Award for Calligraphy/Seal-engraving Works, finds inspiration from The Book of Changes for her Series of Figurism in the Book of Changes, which reflects her attempt to pursue a balance between classic and modern styles of calligraphy in her combination of the solid and antique seal script and the flowy cursive script. The winning works demonstrate the diversity and heteroglossia in Taiwan’s art development and the abundant creativity and innovative rhetoric of artistic creation among young-generation artists. In addition to extending our congratulations to all the winners this year, we look forward to seeing them continue to shine and succeed in their future development.