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“…Initiated by more than thirty Taiwanese contemporary art workers, the Taipei Contemporary Art Center Association issued a strong public call: Taipei needs an independent contemporary art center.”

“This center should be independently initiated and operated by contemporary art professionals, free from the influence and control of government policy and corporate interests. It should exist to safeguard the independence of contemporary art, while initiating discussion and writing on cultural policy. An art center is not merely an exhibition venue, but a public space created to consolidate consensus among contemporary art workers and to serve the shared interests of the art community. Therefore, a physical space is crucial—it enables close discussion and communication, allows diverse and divergent ideas to converge, and further produces concrete public policies beneficial to the development of the art community, extending influence and changing existing conditions.”
— Press Release of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center Association, 2009

Rewinding time, the period between 2009 and 2012 marked one of the most intense and emotionally charged moments in Taiwan’s art community’s responses to cultural policy and public affairs.
This period encompassed a series of key events: the premature removal of artist Jun Yang’s work A Contemporary Art Center, Taipei (Proposal)—originally presented in the 2008 Taipei Biennial—due to construction for the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo; the 2009 announcement by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) that the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale would shift from an open call to in-house curation by the museum’s exhibition department; Chen Chieh-jen’s declaration in 2010, during the opening speech of his exhibition at TFAM, that he would no longer exhibit there in the future; the same year’s release of urban renewal land by Jiantai Construction, leading to the emergence of the “Downtown Art District”; the 2011 performance action The Museum Is Flat initiated by Sun Yi-jou and Wu Mu-ching, exposing controversies around special exhibitions and outsourcing at TFAM; the Stelios incident during the exhibition Live Ammunition at the Museum of Contemporary Art; and the massive controversy surrounding the NTD 200 million subsidy for the centennial National Day performance Dreamers, which led to the establishment of the Preparatory Office for the Cultural First Year Foundation, facilitating the first public discussion of cultural policy between presidential candidates and the cultural sector.

In 2012, the Council for Cultural Affairs was upgraded to the Ministry of Culture. That same year, the Wenlin Yuan urban renewal dispute triggered artists’ concerns about the future of downtown art districts, while the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale once again sparked representational controversy due to the participation of foreign artists.

During this period, with TFAM as the epicenter, the art community’s long-accumulated dissatisfaction toward central cultural institutions and local governments—particularly their excessive alignment of cultural governance with economic development—finally erupted.
Art mobilizations during this time, whether proactive or reactive, actively connected artistic practice to broader social and political critique. Almost unintentionally, they constructed an atmosphere resembling a mass movement—one that clearly extended the Taipei Biennials of 2008 and 2010 in their engagement with social issues and institutional critique.

Temporary and Revolutionary

In this article, I approach TCAC from two interrelated yet distinct perspectives: TCAC as a legally registered association, and TCAC as an alternative space. The relationship between these two dimensions is primarily grounded in the association’s organizational structure, its operation of an alternative space, and the mission articulated in its founding manifesto. These aspects are often two sides of the same coin, while the emphasis of its production strategies ultimately determines its concrete form.

The differences between these dimensions become evident when comparing TCAC 1.0 (the Downtown period) with TCAC 2.0 (the Andong Street period), as well as TCAC 3.0 and 4.0 (the Dadaocheng period), culminating in TCAC as it stood in 2020.

Around 2010, governmental imagination of culture in Taiwan was largely governed by an economic output–oriented model. Museums were expected to become financially self-sustaining; large-scale exhibitions were expected to generate ticket revenue and political achievements. Urban renewal policies such as the Taipei City Government’s “Taipei Looks Good” floor-area-ratio exchange scheme exemplified this commodification of culture. Under such economically driven policies, the uneven allocation of state resources exerted immense pressure on the cultural ecosystem. When even Taipei’s most prominent art institution, TFAM, became a venue for commercial special-exhibition operators, resistance from the art community became inevitable.

The emergence of TCAC at that moment functioned much like the megaphone in its logo—amplifying a loud warning to the government about the dangers embedded in such policy thinking. At the same time, with Jiantai Construction opening its downtown urban renewal site to art groups, the Downtown Art District rapidly became a focal point for these voices. Composed primarily of members with backgrounds in visual art, TCAC nonetheless extended beyond its original circle to connect with social movements, theatre, sound art, architecture, and literature. Through the “Friday Bar” program, TCAC hosted numerous forums and events closely tied to current affairs, responding swiftly to concerns over cultural policy while addressing the tensions between artistic production and social mechanisms.

Memorable issues addressed during this period included the controversies surrounding special exhibitions at TFAM, the Live Ammunition incident at the Museum of Contemporary Art, international solidarity actions following Ai Weiwei’s arrest, and critical reflections on cultural policy emerging from the Forum Biennial. The pressure generated by these activities was such that museum directors and officials from the Council for Cultural Affairs were compelled to leave their offices and enter a dilapidated, temporary space awaiting urban renewal, where they faced the public and engaged in open debate. The scene resembled a miniature people’s assembly. For participants outside the art community’s core, it offered a tangible glimpse of the possibility of change.

Within just two years, TCAC not only responded to public policy issues but also enabled numerous creative practices from non-visual fields to take place within its space. Even though a fully articulated public discourse had yet to form, TCAC nonetheless began to fulfill—at least in part—the art community’s expectations of publicness promised at its founding.

However, compared with the art community’s eager anticipation of TCAC’s combative posture within the cultural–political arena, what concerned many more deeply was whether their rights under official cultural governance could actually be safeguarded. At the time, there was no clear consensus or strategic objective regarding whether a third-sector public institution—one that could traverse official agencies, corporations, and civil society—was necessary, nor on how political and economic forces should be mediated.

TCAC was, of course, well aware of culture’s role and function within capitalist and nationalist frameworks of cultural governance. It was never merely an economic or political adjustment problem. Yet when policy failures erupted faster than discourse could be formed, such moments also became the most effective opportunities for collective mobilization—opportunities that could not be missed.

The difference between temporary action and permanent transformation is precisely the difference between a party and a revolution. This distinction aptly characterizes TCAC after it absorbed the mobilizing energies of that moment.

An Unremarkable Present—Where Is the Future?

In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer once wrote:

“When a mass movement first arises, it invariably glorifies the present and denounces the past. Existing institutions and privileges are uniformly depicted as the decrepit and poisonous ‘past’ contaminating a pure ‘present.’ But to shake the fortress of the ‘past’ requires the utmost unity and unlimited self-sacrifice… Eventually, the ‘present’ itself comes to be regarded as impure, treated with the same contempt as the detested ‘past.’ At this point, ‘past’ and ‘present’ are cast together on one side, while the opposing front becomes the ‘future.’”

Without an unshakable belief in a desirable future, the devaluation of the present can never be thorough. At that time, TFAM was the most convenient target for the art community’s campaign against the “present.” Waiting for administrative blunders to explode on their own—whether the Flora Expo, the Biennial Office restructuring, or controversies around special exhibitions—was, compared to sacrificing oneself to hunt down a demon (as in the Hsieh Hsiao-yun incident), undoubtedly the more cost-effective choice.

The oft-quoted saying, “You don’t need to believe in God, but you must believe in the devil,” can, to some extent, be rephrased here: one may harbor doubts about the idea of a contemporary art center, but it is impossible to ignore the government and official institutions as clearly identifiable targets. It was under such conditions that the Taipei Contemporary Art Center Association (TCAC) attracted many different figures—those disillusioned with government cultural policy, those who had lost faith in audiences yet remained deeply confident in their own artistic creation, and those who regarded any activity involving capital exchange as inherently evil and ominous.

They longed for an opportunity for society and government to change. Even if a new way of life could not be achieved, the hope and sense of value gained through identification with this struggle were, at the very least, worth a final, forceful attempt. TCAC articulated what it framed as the shared interests of the art community: a public space capable of open debate and discussion of cultural policy, free from the influence of government, corporate capital, markets, and populism, and a future that could “change the status quo” on the basis of such publicness.

We all understand that the task of the modern state lies in politics. This often produces a separation between the state and civil society, the public sphere and the private sphere. The relationship between civil society and state politics is constructed through articulation and debate within the public sphere. In its founding ideals, TCAC understood the public sphere as a social space generated through communicative action—a site where rational debate over public issues could take place in a democratic society, and where participants were held in an equal and open relation to one another.

This logic assumes that truth becomes clearer through debate, thereby forming an active force within civil society capable of propelling political action. However, Taiwan’s conception of publicness is culturally distinct from that of the West. In Western contexts, the public sphere is built upon the private sphere; individuals struggle within the public realm to claim their rights. In Taiwan, judgments about struggle within the public sphere are instead directly linked to private interests. This long-standing perception has fostered suspicion within communities and has been fundamentally unfavorable to the growth of rational debate.

Following the biennial reorganization of its board and supervisors, TCAC 2.0 inherited the vitality of the art community’s active phase as well as its desire for thorough reform. Yet sustaining unity and self-sacrifice among members proved difficult. Methods for creating a new order gradually became compromised, while decisions aimed at survival increasingly borrowed from—and replicated—the mechanisms of the old order. In doing so, TCAC unknowingly established continuity with precisely the structures it had set out to criticize.

The defining feature of this institutionalization phase was the inward concentration of power and the sealing of earlier mobilizing energies within a formalized organizational structure. Just as social movements often crystallize into watchdog institutions or new political parties, and religious movements give rise to organized religious enterprises, institutionalization can be understood as the freezing of collective action into fixed forms in the name of sustainable operation and development.

Your Public Is Not My Public

With its invitation-only membership system, rather than one open to application, TCAC was structurally destined to remain a minoritarian formation. Its understanding of “publicness” was positioned clearly at the opposite end of populist democracy. Refined artistic production did not necessarily need to establish a direct relationship with everyday civic life. This conception, in fact, mirrored the hierarchical division of labor inherent in the cultural industry itself. Under the government’s enthusiasm for cultural and creative industries, TCAC effectively abandoned these cultural consumers as its imagined audience, sealing itself into the role of an elite group of cultural narrators.

This carries a double implication. On the one hand, it reflects an inability to counter the decline of a mass-based public sphere within capitalist society. On the other, it signals a reoccupation—within a collapsing public sphere—of a centralized position of authority, amounting to a re-feudalization of the public domain.

After TCAC concluded its Downtown period, TCAC 2.0 made a decisive commitment to operating a physical space, thereby solidifying the contradictions inherent in its institutionalization—if not locking them into a dead end altogether. How social interests are allowed to participate reflects the openness of political opportunity structures. A platform that once rallied around the idea of an open discursive arena could not, after full institutionalization, avoid the very problems so often attributed to institutions.

First, in the name of efficiency and management, TCAC 2.0 formally acknowledged that its proclaimed system of democratic decision-making was unable to sustain institutional operation. It thus adopted a working-group (core member) decision model, followed later by the director system of TCAC 3.0. Yet was this not precisely the same administrative logic as the bureaucratic structures TCAC criticized at its founding?

Second, the operational difficulties faced after institutionalization revealed a deeper structural absence: the lack of an economic intermediary between the state and civil society. This pushed TCAC back from being a public voice as a registered association into the familiar position of an alternative space awaiting institutional nourishment. Despite loudly rejecting the role of an executor of official will, and despite declaring opposition to market mechanisms, TCAC was rarely absent from policy-oriented public funding programs—including projects under official Southbound Policy initiatives such as the Emerald Project and Latin America Project. Nor was it absent from the so-called “evil commercial art world,” appearing within Taiwan’s art-market spectacles such as Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas and Art Taipei.

After institutionalization, TCAC’s problems returned to the familiar terrain of resource allocation, no different from those faced by ordinary individuals or organizations. The broader public issues that once united diverse communities were replaced by internal competition over limited resources. TCAC thus lost not only its position as a counterforce to the state apparatus within the public sphere, but also the support of those who had once sustained it during the TCAC 1.0 period.

Third, the increasingly salonized conception of space that emerged in TCAC 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 no longer functioned as a site of struggle mediating between political and economic forces. It became merely an “art space” for the display of individual knowledge and taste. Space, after all, is both a terrain of cultural resistance and an object of cultural governance—a site where power relations are disrupted and reconfigured. Once attention shifted toward operating a physical art space, TCAC effectively relinquished the very position that once made it distinct.

Fourth—and most critically—your public is not my public. TCAC consistently misrecognized what it shared with the art community as a stable form of publicness, when in fact it was a product of historical circumstance. At that moment, we stood together because we shared a common enemy. Like two overlapping circles, the public we shared was only the narrow intersection between them. Once that foundation disappeared, the opportunistic positioning long adopted by the art community within cultural strategy became fully visible.

When the demon that once unified collective hostility faded, and the object of hatred dissolved, the active phase of a mass movement came to an end. From that point on, the institutionalized alternative space became both a tool of vested interests and a looped recording replayed by the disillusioned.

Fuck Art, Inside the Party

TCAC’s party culture—perhaps its most widely recognized feature—was, in its ideal form, meant to generate cultural discourse in opposition to the state and the market through the continuous articulation of the private sphere. To a certain extent, this carried an anarchistic, utopian romanticism. In the heightened excitement of the party, participants embedded within social structures temporarily loosened the restraints of order through collective intoxication, allowing structures to neither ossify nor erupt excessively, but instead to pause and breathe.

At the peak of mild intoxication, those previously positioned at the margins—secondary, peripheral figures—were momentarily condensed into a community. These gatherings not only sustained emotional bonds but also produced social networks resembling neighborhood associations. TCAC’s parties demonstrated that likability and social circulation are themselves a form of power. Yet this inevitably recalls a friend’s remark to me: “The way people arrive is also the way they will eventually leave.” A party can only intensify the senses temporarily. Sobriety is inevitable. The only question is whether one chooses to keep extending the afterparty indefinitely.

The reason TCAC 1.0, grounded in consensus-based decision-making as its democratic procedure, was able to earn such firm support and identification lay precisely in the fact that consensus decision-making does not require unanimous agreement. How conclusions were ultimately reached was less important than the discussions themselves—processes through which conclusions were continuously produced and re-produced. This was no longer something the institutionalized TCAC, after leaving the Downtown period, was capable of providing.

No matter how energetically it performed, TCAC could not overcome its own institutionalized form. The party remained merely a party. The association itself ultimately became a formality. Public participation was erased, replaced by a closed, one-way discourse. Power once drawn from the public sphere was folded inward and condensed into the rhetoric and performance of its farewell party.

We cannot ignore the slogans TCAC proclaimed at its founding. Yet we also cannot find, in its closing publications, any substantial reflection or self-examination by those original initiators who once propelled the institution forward.

Looking back at TCAC with regret, I do not believe that loudly proclaiming “professionalism” can serve as a legitimate basis for art’s independence from civil society—regardless of whether that civil society is defined as a mass consumer culture or as an art community itself. Nor do I believe that the marginalization of the art community within civil society is solely the result of government or capital markets, such that the state and taxpayers should be responsible for funding an “independent” art center as compensation.

Institutional operation is not merely a matter of social exchange and discourse among a few curators and artists. It requires careful consideration of administrative structures and organizational management. Is this not, in itself, also a form of “professionalism”?

Systems cannot be neatly divided into inside and outside. Institutional critique is not a form of capital possessed by an external critic standing apart from the system. It is a process of critical analysis that unfolds the problems of mechanisms while simultaneously proposing paths for transformation. Such critique inevitably encounters the risks of co-optation and ossification. The crucial question remains whether its practice—whether operating within specific mechanisms or adopting guerrilla strategies—actually enables the criticized mechanisms to be altered, rather than merely staging self-cleansing gestures or binary opposition.

Case Closed

Art institutions do not exist outside social systems. To operate an art institution is, in itself, a continuous process of producing and recalibrating political and economic positions within a dense and entangled structure. Its mission and vision ultimately serve as the final criteria by which decisions are measured.

Reflecting on TCAC’s critical turning points, it becomes clear that before the art community had truly consolidated itself or established a shared public discourse, the rapidly centralized vision of a “Taipei Contemporary Art Center” remained structurally unstable. Faced with a choice between first building mechanisms for community communication capable of challenging cultural governance, or moving directly toward an institutionalized art center, TCAC chose the latter. As a result, the political and economic struggles embedded in the cultural battleground could only be deferred.

Once institutionalized operations became a reality, TCAC encountered struggles familiar to most institutions. When decisions driven by survival necessity began to dictate each subsequent step, the option of functioning as an association exerting pressure on official power effectively disappeared. TCAC thus lost its comparative advantage.

As an alternative space, TCAC’s artistic production deserves applause. It undeniably injected energy into contemporary art and broadened horizons, even as institutionalized operation revealed profound powerlessness under economic pressure. However, as an association tasked with producing concrete public policies capable of changing the status quo for the benefit of the art community, TCAC ultimately leaves one with a sense of regret.

What we need is not a centralized representative, nor merely another alternative space. What we require instead is a sustained practice of rational critique capable of producing qualitative change through cumulative effort. Whether this practice takes the form of an art center bearing the name “Taipei,” a museum, an alternative space, or an institution or collective outside Taipei altogether, it remains something worth continued resistance and creation.

The democratization of institutions should concern itself with how participation is continuously expanded, rendered transparent, and governed by openly negotiated rules. If the TCAC case offers any experience to the public sphere of art, this is the observation I can provide as a nominal member who contributed little in concrete terms.

Now that the party is over, perhaps it is time to abandon the imperial fantasy that every initiated project or space must last forever, and instead allow experimentation to truly remain experimental. Perhaps, when we speak of institutions, we might begin to value arts administrators equipped with rational analytical capacities, rather than relying solely on curators or art stars who possess discursive authority but lack operational competence. Perhaps the formation of the public sphere will no longer be triggered only by waves of collective outrage within the art community, but instead emerge through long-term efforts—across institutions, organizations, and individuals—to create spaces of communication both inside and outside existing mechanisms.

If Taiwan’s future still requires an art center, one can only hope that it will take precisely this form.