The development of Performance Art can be traced back to the transformation and expansion of art forms and concepts in the mid-twentieth century in the West. On the one hand, through the body as a "material" / "media" to initiate dialogue with various socio-cultural issues (ethnicity, gender, class, etc.), and on the other hand, it also began to resist the aesthetics and the commercial art market dominated by formalism. Due to different cultural contexts and problems, this kind of art has also come up with a variety of names: Action Art, Happening, Body Art, and Live Art. Today, due to the advancement of Internet and digital technology, “body” and “Live” as the focus of performance art have formed a more complicated dialectic, thus continuing to push on the concept of “contemporary performance.”
It has been fifteen years since the ArTrend Performance Group was founded by YEH Tzu-Chi in 2003. Based in the south of Taiwan, this is an art group that promotes the development of performance art as their aspiration. It follows the innovative development of Asian performance art in the 1990s into a unique position, or to promote international exchanges by initiating large-scale performance art festivals, or through organizing small exhibitions and workshops, in order to connect with the local arts and cultural unit by training and promotion as an aspiration. The enthusiasm and energy are highly visible.
This exhibition titled “Journey and Guide” signifies the research and display of the ArTrend Performance Group for the past fifteen years through the concept of “travel notes of city guide". If these activities organised by ArTrend are imagined as travel notes about a certain place, then the chapters are written by the artist through "performance art”. Unlike the introduction of a city or scenic spots published by the official, the reading of travel notes contains a variety of subjective feelings, descriptions of details, captures, and memories and comments in response to the place through texts, photos, and videos. In other words, the reading of travel notes can bring about people's imagination, body’s feeling and depiction of multiple levels and changes towards a "place".
The first phase of the “Journey and Guide" hopes to present to the audience the meaning and development of the understanding of "performance art". At the same time, we are also able to view the historical development of a particular urban art, to the extent of planting a certain kind of lost seed in the heart of the readers which entice them to visit, search and recollect.
