The Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) is pleased to present Trading Futures, an international group exhibition with works by Asian artists Heman Chong, Chou Yu-cheng, Minja Gu, Hu Xiangqian, Kao Jun-honn, Lee Kit, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Koki Tanaka, Charwei Tsai, and Xu Tan that investigate and reflect on questions of artmaking, production and value. Co-curated by Meiya Cheng and guest curator Pauline J. Yao, Trading Futures takes place on the eve of TCAC’s relocation and marks the conclusion of the artist-and-curator led art center’s two-year pilot phase.

Trading Futures is a gathering of conceptual interrogations, gestures and processes that look into the ways in which art and artistic experimentation intersect with hypothetical systems of labor, value, consumption, and desire. Recent global events have put economic phenomena at the forefront of our consciousness, provoking a reexamination of the production-based sphere of art and the art system’s inherent relationships to vectors of exchange and desire. As developments in contemporary art increasingly lean towards a set of social actions, gestures or participatory processes that transform the need for finished products and art objects; collectors and donors are faced with a challenge to embrace the indeterminate on-site practices, open-ended exchanges, and collaborative strategies that comprise today’s artistic field. Nowhere is this more evident than in Asia where the brute forces of capitalism emphasize art’s transactional side and favor the production of outcomes that are often materially spectacular in nature. Inviting ten artists from around Asia to spearhead new projects, Trading Futures takes a different tack, presenting a range of modest responses that speculate on alternate forms of exchange, narratives of labor and disappearance, proposals for the future, and language-based investigations. Willfully adopting multiple roles ranging from storyteller to interviewer, laborer, employer, consumer, and designer, these artists and the exhibition as a whole seeks to enact new ways that value can be created and distributed through experimental means.

While the commentaries found within Trading Futures are not intended to address the specific condition of TCAC’s hiatus, they do carry particular implications for the current artistic environment of Taiwan. Recent political actions in Taipei surrounding cultural policy funding have sparked heated debates that are impacting the way culture is being defined, disseminated, and produced; and by association, what role artists are to play in the ongoing process of economic redevelopment reshaping Taiwan’s urban and social fabric. Squarely situated within the economic condition of TCAC itself, Trading Futures does intend to offer commentaries on the myriad struggles facing artists and institutions today as well highlight the ongoing search for new modes of production and reception.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Asia where the brute forces of capitalism emphasize art’s transactional side and favor the production of outcomes that are often materially spectacular in nature. Inviting ten artists from around Asia to spearhead new projects, Trading Futures takes a different tack, presenting a range of modest responses that speculate on alternate forms of exchange, narratives of labor and disappearance, proposals for the future, and language-based investigations. Willfully adopting multiple roles ranging from storyteller to interviewer, laborer, employer, consumer, and designer, these artists and the exhibition as a whole seeks to enact new ways that value can be created and distributed through experimental means.