Post-revolutionary China was a time of testing boundaries of official tolerance and experimentation with the newly accessible Western art ideas. The first art exhibitions were held and groups formed, as artists started to realise they were not, as Mao said, just the hair on the skin of socialism. Resistance to the old political order and a deliberate courting of Western buyers with post-Mao imagery has to give way to finding an original voice.
The Tate Modern opened in May 2000 to great fanfare and applause. The refurbished power station on the Thames now houses the international post-1900 art of the Tate collection. The public has rushed to visit with huge crowds enjoying the experience, but putting pressure on the facility. Critics have questioned the way the work has been arranged by theme rather than by school, chronology or geography.
This article looks at the recent history of cultural exchange between Australia and Taiwan and briefly examines the background of the shifts occuring within the Taiwanese art scene from an Australian context. Furthermore it examines some of the continuities and changes in the late 1990s with a particular emphasis on the works by artists Wu Tien-Chang and Wu Mali included in the Second and Third Asia-Pacific Triennial.