The Taiwanese Avant-Garde, Curated by Huang Ya-Li
Another must-see while you’re at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is this survey of the Taiwanese avant-garde in the 1930s. Guest-curated by filmmaker Huang Ya-li, the show re-evaluates the shared cultural modernity of Taiwan and Japan. It expands on his acclaimed documentary Le Moulin (2015), which followed a collective of colonial-era poets writing surrealist verse in Japanese, by translating the film’s reflections and style into gallery space. Artworks, literature, cinema, music and theater coalesce, mapping various modes of intercultural exchange.
The exhibition brings together roughly 200 Taiwanese artworks, 100 contemporaneous Japanese pieces and over 500 archival documents sourced from major institutions like the Tainan Art Museum, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and beyond. You’ll see works by foundational modern Taiwanese figures like Chen Cheng-po, Huang Tu-shui and Lin Yu-shan alongside Japanese peers, offering a fresh and decentered vantage point on how Asian modernism was shaped through shared creative dialogue.
