Taiwanese architect HSIEH Ying-Chun and his Atelier-3 will present in the Liverpool Biennial 2012 exhibition The Unexpected Guest. In addition, three young artists from Taiwan, CHEN Chia-Jen, CHIU Cheng-Hung, and HSU Chia-Wei, have been invited to join in the collateral exhibition City States.
Lorenzo Fusi, the curator of the Liverpool Biennial 2012, was deeply impressed by HSIEH’s previous work Cities of the People when he visited Taiwan in April of this year. This prompted Mr. Fusi to invite HSIEH to take part in the biennial exhibition The Unexpected Guests. HSIEH has played a key role in rebuilding housing for Taiwan’s tribal communities since the typhoon disaster in 2009. His Liverpool Biennial 2012 project, Re-Live, will expand on the same ideas represented in Cities of the People, exploring the possibility for the victims of natural disaster by adding humanistic values to give new meaning of home.
Taiwanese curator LEE Chia-Ling has been carefully selected by the Biennial organizing committee for the curatorial project Metro-Wonderland: Taiwanese Artists and Urban Morphology displayed at their independent programme City States. The three young Taiwanese artists participating in this exhibition are CHEN Chia-Jen, CHIU Cheng-Hung, and HSU Chia-Wei. Their works focus on the contemporary phenomena of global urbanization. Through photography, video, and installations, they reflect upon their experience of living and working in cities.
Inaugurated in 2000, the Liverpool Biennial has proved to be full of vitality and professionalism. The young Liverpool Biennial soon became one of the major international art festivals—along with the French Biennale de Lyon, the Venice Biennale, the Brazilian Biennial of Sao Paolo and the Documenta in Kassel. One of the Liverpool Biennial’s outstanding features is “the artists’ intervention in the city.” Artists participating in the Biennial build an intimate relationship between art and the city by creating artworks which induce a positive dialogue with the city of Liverpool in terms of her history and space.