Do awards exist only to acknowledge the display of a professional creative achievement, or do they also strive to build a platform able to connect Taiwanese artists with the international scene? Each year, various public and private art awards are given out in Taiwan. Regardless of which artists won a prize or not, what about the evaluation criteria, background, preferences, and the introduction of overseas judges? Who are these judges? What’s even to be evaluated?  Along with the fact that artworks are subjected to standard screening specifications, these competition limitations due to the evaluation mechanisms, and whether or not they actually show the design concept within an artist’s work have repeatedly proven to be controversial issues in the positioning and existence of these awards.

The curatorial theme of the “Post-Victory: Fine Arts Awards” consists of excluding subjective and objective positions from the process of the competition.  It focuses on following up on the development or transformation of creative potential in the experimentation and concepts of Taiwanese artists after they have participated in a representative art competition.  The artists participating in “Post-Victory: Fine Arts Award” will put on display two works: a pre-award and a post-award work. At their exhibition sites, there will also be reproductions of the original prize-winning artworks. How do you have artists stand out even after winning an award, and enable them to enter into market oriented art systems, such as galleries, auction companies, etc.,?  Also, how can they cooperate with one another to further develop an artist’s creative career?

While examining all kinds of fine arts awards as guidance, and helping with the process of building the artist's creation conditions, I picked the “Taipei Arts Awards” as the public art contest with the longest history inside the ecosystem of Taiwan art events, making it the textual setting of “Post-Victory: Fine Arts Award”. The purpose of this move is to review the “Taipei Arts Awards”, which in the art world is the exhibition contest most highly praised by Taiwanese artists.  It is a true gathering of the creative life goals and achievements of artists.

In 2012 Yang Tzu-Hung was selected by the Taipei Arts Awards for his “Daily Worries” series works.  For a long time, he observed the interventional relationship between human perception and spatial measurement. The sense of crisis created in the intentionally fake everyday phenomena of “Daily Worries” subtly supports this kind of awareness, slowly infiltrating the human sensorial experience and renewing the reactionary experiences of the people already accustomed to banality. He even deliberately used just a few words to describe the meaning behind the creations because he didn’t want the audience to directly read a text.  In this way, he coerced people to brainstorm as if under stressful impracticality. But, when entering the exhibition site, the body is measured, feeling oneself generally manipulated by  everyday actions. Compared to the illusion of events created in “Daily Worries”, the new, post-award work, “Mopping the Floor” was also inspired by a physical memory - recalling that as a child many cleaning jobs were sometimes assigned to him as labor duties. By forcing the cleaning process, memories and anxieties in life are pointed out.

Also inspired by everyday repetitions, Chang Po-Chieh was selected by the Taipei Arts Awards in 2014. He quoted the term, “Grand Tour”, a prevailing post-Renaissance educational travel activity, as a reference to the survey on living conditions and behaviors carried out by the artwork, “Map Poetry”. He used current reliance on the ‘Google Maps Search’ technology tool, distinguishing it from the grand tours of the past, which took several months or even years. Maps Search can provide fast-moving information, rethinking the duration of a travel, the high challenging routes, as well as the depth of the interactions among human societies, measuring the distance between space and time. The new work, “Our Poetry”, further deepens the absurdity of the conflict in digital lives. Chang Po-Chieh transformed the informative concept provided by “Misbelieve” and “Misuse”.  He restructured the data behind the technological tool, and turned the real life evidence of the hints hidden inside big data into a sort of playful and absurd reality by writing them.

A fake, unexploded gas barrel, or a stressful consciousness of physical labor - these mark the unstable symbols and volatility of the emblematic memories of Yang Tzu-Hung’s creations and reconstructions. Chang Po-Chieh has instead aimed at the contradictions of life. He used a research tool to break the apparent equality of time, space, and the globalization tool of cultural boundaries. From the body and life’s consumption aspect, their creations all reassemble or dismember the originally symbolic experience of realism. The “Post-Victory: Fine Arts Awards” will carry out the exhibition work for a period of four consecutive years. Each year, it will regularly select two artists who participated in the Taipei Arts Awards, contextually setting out one by one the painting, photography, and installation categories, as well as the concept of creating different kinds of exhibition projects based on the category of  artworks. It will serve as a commercial system for alternative art, putting forward the systematic research oriented curatorial concept. In an attempt to create an award which may or not serve as a symbol of privilege, the “Post-Victory: Fine Arts Awards” creates a dialogue with the audience, as well as reexamines award mechanisms to assist to the operations of Taiwan’s art ecosystem.