A FEEL FOR THE REAL

'DO YOU BELIEVE in reality? That's a silly question,' says one of the revellers at the opening of the fourth Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM).

For curators Barbara Vanderlinden, from Belgium, and Amy Cheng Huei-hua, from Taiwan, the question - which doubles as the art festival's theme - is an attempt to question what is real and not real, in a world saturated by images force-fed to the public by the mass media. By selecting a large number of documentary films and non-fiction for this major fine-arts show, Vanderlinden and Cheng hope to question the 'real-ness' of the images people see on television and in movies.

TFAM directors began selecting curators only six months before the opening, which Vanderlinden says is 'an enormous challenge' to any curator. 'I don't think any of my colleagues have done a show at such short notice,' she says. 'So you are somewhat constricted in your ambitions.'

This may account for the hiccups on opening night, such as an empty space where Yang Fudong's latest work, Dai Hao and Man Te, later took pride of place. On the other hand, the tight timetable forced curators to select a highly specific theme and narrow the geographic scope of the show, limiting the works to documentary forms, initially focusing on Southeast Asia.

'For the research, we explored Southeast Asia in a much more expansive way,' says Vanderlinden. 'To explore Asian culture and the Asian landscape, it was helpful to go there, and not to start with the usual suspects: China, Japan, Korea. After our visit, the exhibition radically oriented itself to documentality, to ways of witnessing. In Southeast Asia we came across an amazing amount of documentary approaches to witnessing the arrival of capitalism and its effects on culture.'

Participating artists include Pratchaya Phinthong and Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand, and Heri D'Ono from Indonesia. D'Ono's performance piece The Legend of Mount Merapi involves projecting computer-manipulated images on to a puppet stage. It is meant to offer a lesson about how to breathe new life into a traditional art form.

But not every work at the biennial heralds the new. Artist and architect Sze Tsung Leong presents the rise of China's great cities in photographs of towering residential blocks. Yoko Ono offers another predictable piece in the form of her ubiquitous Wish Tree, which seems to sprout up at most major art events these days.

While international names such as Ono win the majority of floor space, the biennial's curators are mindful of the event's importance in Taiwan.

'The idea is to ensure that this exhibition has strong feet in positioning itself in the Asian, Taiwanese context, while also carrying a clear dialogue with other cultures,' says Vanderlinden.

The curators asked Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen to select 16 of the island's documentary films shown in floating 'camera boxes' that mainland architect Zhang Yonghe designed for the lobby. With footage of local workers' rights marches and protests against forced evictions in Taiwan, these documentaries serve to locate the visitor to the biennial squarely in a local context before they emerge into the international galleries.

The theme of Lin Jing-jie's documentary, Taipei, Looking Up? (2004), perhaps captures best the contradictions of Taiwan in the age of globalisation. By contrasting the gaudy magnificence of Taipei 101, now the world's tallest skyscraper, with the plight of a female lift operator working on the monster project, the film highlights the promise and peril of modern Taiwan, which is at once caught between affluence and subsistence, war and peace, internationalism and traditionalism.

Chen's own film, The Factory, has a similar message. Chen traces the lives of garment factory workers who found themselves unemployed in the early 1990s after Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world and Taiwanese factories moved jobs to the mainland's south.

'You see, factories and work can move,' says the director. 'We think that men can move, but they are really limited by politics and the economy. With globalisation, this problem becomes even more severe and it's a problem repeating itself everywhere.'

Chen says the images of protest captured in many of the documentaries he selected would never be shown on the mainland. And this comparison between the mainland and Taiwan reminds viewers of the freedoms that artists on the island might take for granted.

During a recent lecture at the TFAM, art scholar Joan Lebold Cohen of Harvard University commented on the differences between the Taiwanese and mainland artistic milieux. She says that despite the world's current infatuation with mainland artists, Taiwanese artists maintain an advantage in their ability to address political issues and social taboos.

'The work of Taiwanese artists that is created under a freer political system will not be as filled with anger and repression as mainland art, and therefore may not capture the imagination in the same way,' she says. 'But Taiwan has the advantage in that despite its small size, it is amazingly individual and varied. You go to southern Taiwan and you have an entirely different world and artistic community.' Nevertheless, Chen admits the realities of the current art market and the mainland buzz.

'If you see some westerners at an international show, they will initially be curious in your work because they think you are mainland Chinese,' he says. 'But as soon as they discover you are Taiwanese, they have no interest.'

Perhaps the Taiwanese art community is not trying to attract attention in the same way. Apart from a short presentation of old rock ballads by Australian mockumentary troupe the Kingpins, the biennial lacks the gratuitous pomp of similar art fetes elsewhere. In the relative quiet lies an opportunity for viewers to think critically about the ideas proposed by the artists and the rationale of the curators' selection. The Taipei Biennial therefore serves more as educator than entertainer, a role TFAM staff seem happy to fill.

TFAM chief curator Chang Fang-wei emphasises the museum's educational role by drawing attention to a new study centre in which visitors can explore Matisse and Picasso's paintings. A similarly didactic show focuses on the work of Taiwanese artists in the 1990s.

But the biennial reaches far beyond the confines of the museum, and opening weekend was alive with art events around town. It also showcased another of Taipei's major art enclaves, the Treasure Hill Co-living Fringeville Project.

Treasure Hill is a small, sparsely inhabited neighbourhood dotted with dilapidated structures that the government released for artists' use as photo-studio space and housing for artists in residence such as current occupants, photographers Yeh Wei-li and Liu Ho-jang.

Outside TFAM, Hua Shan Cultural and Creative Industry Centre sponsored the second Weatherbrain Sound-Visual Art Festival, featuring multimedia musical performances and films. Other events included lectures on Taiwanese performance art at the Taipei MoMA, the international Migration Music Festival featuring bohemian acts from all over the world, and innumerable exhibition openings at small galleries around town.

Susan Kendzulak, an American-born art critic and artist whose exhibit Crisis Hotline features in the biennial, has lived in Taipei for eight years and says this packed cultural calendar has now become the norm.

'I can see a drastic difference from when I moved here originally,' she says. 'The arts schedule has become more heterogeneous and the community more involved.'

Taipei Biennial 2004, Tue-Sun 9.30am-5.30pm, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 181 Zhong Shan North Rd, Section 3, Taipei. Tel: [886 2] 2595 7656, www.taipeibiennial.org. Ends Jan 23