Talking: Amy Cheng, Jeph Lo
While talking about India, other than curry, yoga and Bollywood, what else can we talk about? Or can we observe India’s culture as a reference system to our own to consider the relationship between the World and us differently?
Initialized in 2010’s Shanghai Biennale, West Heavens is an integrated cross-cultural exchange programme. It aims to untangle and compare the different paths of modernity taken by India and China, to facilitate high-level communication between the two countries' intellectual and art circles, and to promote interaction and cross-references between the two countries through social thoughts and contemporary art. West Heavens’ planners, Chang Song-Tzung, GAO Shiming and Kuan-Tsing Chen raised an important question: “Our imagination about the modernity and the future regards Western as an immovable reference system, and that imagination should be questioned. ……While we are looking at India, we are not saying that we are going to become India or Anti-Western, but trying to review our subjectivity and our history with a different reference system.”
Within this ongoing program, Amy Cheng, the curator of the Cube Space in Taipei went to Delhi with mainland artists LIU Wei and ZHENG Bo. They visited local artists, art institutions and scholars with the hope of getting know Delhi and India better. Through months digest, Amy Cheng is going to share the experience of the trip and some knowledge about West Heavens with friends in Taipei and a discussion after.
