Author Description

"This is not a Taiwan Pavilion" is the catalog of Taiwan's collateral event of the 55th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition (2013). From the press release: The Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan announces Esther Lu as curator and Chia-Wei Hsu, Bernd Behr, and Kateřina Šedá as featured artists who presented the collateral event titled This is not a Taiwan Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. States curator Esther Lu, “This project resonates with the context of the historical circumstances and current conditions of Taiwan’s participation in the International Art Exhibition in Venice. Parallel artistic and curatorial narratives will explore and engage with questions of subjectification to conceive of the Pavilion not only as an exhibition space, but also as a concept evolving on a temporal axis in order to illuminate the formation of cultural subjectivity.” The exhibition concept thus outgrows the boundaries of representation for a de facto or imagined pavilion. Departing from investigations and deconstructions of narrative, historiography, and identity, the curatorial remit foregrounds the agency of art alongside functions of imagination in a way that corresponds with the 2013 Venice Biennale theme of “The Encyclopedic Palace.” Commissioned curator Esther Lu (b. 1977) is a Taiwanese freelance curator based in Taipei. Lu studied literature and art history, and completed an MA at Goldsmiths College and curatorial studies in CuratorLab, Konstfack University. She is interested in exploring practices to mobilize connections and conversations inside and outside of institutions. Her conceptual experiments often address the agency of art and initiate alternative artistic productions in between social scenes in reality and platforms of art in order to investigate the critical role of art today.