Making Space: Independent Artist Initiatives in Taiwan since 1988

As Taiwan transitioned from martial law, space became a new ground for artistic experimentation. On their own terms, artists reclaimed private apartments, vacant buildings and commercial premises to forge independent venues for radical exhibitions, curatorial experiments, community gatherings and new discourses. What had been called ‘extra-institutional artistic practice’ gradually expanded to reinvent independent art spaces themselves, with wide-ranging implications: from local river ecologies to public policy. Making Space: Independent Artist Initiatives in Taiwan since 1988 explores how Taiwan’s ‘avant-garde’ art transformed into what we now recognise as ‘contemporary art’, and where independent curatorial practice, led by artists, first took root.

[publisher's note]