Double Square 双方藝廊

The “South+ Special Collection Gallery” is a project initiated by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) in 2019 to reconfigure and transform the museum into a new-type art museum, redefining KMFA to establish stronger connections with global art histories. The project involves re-evaluating KMFA’s collection to build a contextual framework for the museum’s regional and international art collection and research. Following the first and second permanent exhibitions featuring KMFA’s collection, titled South as a Place of Gathering and South as a Place of Changes, the third exhibition, Ocean in Us: Southern Visions of Women Artists, adopts a comparative approach to curatorially reimagine connections between the collections of museums to construct cross cultural perspectives.

This exhibition is a collaboration between KMFA, the National Gallery Singapore (the Gallery), and the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). It showcases women artists from Taiwan and Southeast Asia embodying diverse backgrounds in the “South” and inquire into various topics, including peripheral histories, gender, geographies, and art practices. The exhibition Features stories of diversity, resilience and social engagement connected to the cultural and historical contexts of countries, regions and places. The works display the perspectives of innovative women artists from Taiwan and the Southeast Asian region spanning the past three decades that have shaped contemporary art. They capture personal, familial, as well as transnational journeys that have served as sources of inspiration to this world, revealing the multifaceted and flourishing landscape of contemporary women's artistic expressions. Meanwhile, the exhibition’s title, Ocean in Us, symbolizes a community that transcends ethnic and cultural differences, as well as crossing national boundaries through the fluidity, migration and movements of ideas, peoples and cultures propelled by oceanic and archipelagic ways of thinking, living and understanding the world.

The exhibition’s Chinese title, “Pearls,” is inspired by the title of a work of documentary literature well-known to Taiwanese readers – Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation, which states, “The Pearls that Gods Left Behind.” In this curatorial context, “pearls” refers to the islands in the South Seas and serves as a metaphor and entry point for the thirty-nine women artists featured in this exhibition respectively from Taiwan as well as eight Southeast Asian countries and cultural regions. These artists, like glistening pearls born from the archipelagic in the Southern Ocean, critically engage with the world from the South. The English title, on the other hand, is inspired by Tongan poet and marine culture educator Epeli Hauʻofa, who introduced the concept of “Ocean in Us.” From the viewpoint of Oceanian culture, the concept advocates for subjective identities that transcend the divisions created by islands, tribes, or territorial boundaries to embrace an identity that is imagined by the confluence of oceanic currents without a singular centre. This exhibition makes visible oceanic mobility and cultural diversity emerging from inter-regional and global currents of contemporaneity.

Ocean in Us embodies an oceanic worldview that is embodied by the works of women artists showcased in this exhibition. From microcosmic observations of the inner world to intimate and private memories, to reflections on love, frustrations, and hopes in everyday life, they refract the world through their works and critically recovers overlooked histories of gender, non-human ecologies, migration and the importance of materiality in art. The exhibition foregrounds the works of the women artists from the collections of the three art museums, which demonstrates the urgent need for the world to move away from a human-centric perspective in the age of the Anthropocene by co-existing with the natural world rather than extracting from it, as well as to embrace reality and imagination, legends and dreams, the living world and the world beyond it. This exhibition is an invitation to understand how these women artists navigate through art and life’s challenges like islands in the ocean of life as they overcome waves and tides with resilience, imagination and openness.