Taiwan witnessed a drastic change in politics, culture, and art in 1980s. Artists at that time were eager to depict the new Taiwanese cultural identity, local scenes, and the changing au-thority with their diverse artistic practices and forms of art.
Between the 1980s and 1990s, photography art became a professional practice in Taiwan. With their diverse perspectives, a few of photographers and professionals started to respond to traditional values, address social issues, and experiment with avant-garde visual lan-guages in their own ways. In 1990s, the rapid development of digital technology made pho-tography a more affordable form of art. Photographic works have been partly transformed into three-dimensional art installations from still images, and therefore being elevated into a spatial, dynamic, and virtual form of art.
Specularity / Reflexivity: Contemporary Image Arts after 1980s puts photographic works created by Taiwanese artists after 1980s into context, while exploring new practices of con-temporary visual art. The exhibition aims to showcase the formation and transformation of contemporary visual art in Taiwan through the examination of trends during this long period of time.
In fact, when entering into the early 1980s, artists of the earlier generation created works of unique visual styles. By putting these works into different categories according to varied historical contexts, the exhibition reinterprets the visual narratives created by Taiwanese art-ists after 1980s and looks into different kinds of "landscapes" – natural-scape, cultural-scape, socio-scape, and body-scape. By and large, "Specularity / Reflexivity " presents lay-ered and diverse backgrounds of contemporary visual arts, dividing exhibiting works into creation (by lens) and presentation (of visuals) across a long period of time, with "Speculari-ty" and "Reflexivity" being the two major themes in this exhibition.