The origin of Taiwan’s contemporary video art, if we put it in the context of European and American contemporary art, can be traced back to the 1950s when the German artist Wolf Vostell and the Korean American artist Nam June Paik – under the influence of Fluxus, started to use experimental images and sounds as the materials of their artistic practice. In the August of 1984, the very first video art exhibition “The French Video and Visual Art Exhibition” took place at Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Essentially speaking, the form of video art greatly depends on the technique. As the technological support of video art or photography is further improved, the expression and the application of the form can be far more extensive. Video art, as a form of arts, serves more than the documentation of images but reveals more messages when the concept of “time” is included. Moreover, the montage-like technique separates images from time or switches these two elements, presenting a unique visual atmosphere in the images. In addition to the form of the video work itself, sometimes it is installed with the space or a whole installation. The video artworks created by Taiwanese artists are full of variety and multiplicity, while the uniqueness of form itself indeed expresses its own artistic vocabulary.
OUTLINE
The first stage of the video art database focuses on single-channel video artworks and we will extend it to multi-channel video artworks in the next stage. The works included in the database are mostly single-medium works which adopt “video” as one, or the only one, expressive style and use the image as the main content. As for video installations or interactive video installations, since “video” is just one of the elements which cannot completely express the full concept of the works, we do not include these two categories in the first stage. As for animation video, since it is represented in single-channel or multi-channel form with “animation” as its expressive style to demonstrate the content, we will include this category after evaluating each work’s author, the work itself, and the artistry expressed within. Video documentation only uses video as a form to document. If it has nothing to do with the subject of the artistic concept, we will not include it in the database.