The Hantoo Artist Symposium at the Taipei Representative Office in partnership with Bluerider ART
While Frieze London’s white tents hummed with the global art market’s usual spectacle, a quieter yet more charged gathering took place at the nearby Taipei Representative Office. Rising in Fire spotlights the Hantoo Art Group: thirteen artists who have collectively shaped the trajectory of contemporary art in Taiwan since the late 1990s. Illustrating both combustion and renewal, the Hantoo landscape embodies Taiwan’s longstanding negotiation of identity and autonomy – political, cultural, and aesthetic – across a terrain where art has always been a mirror for survival.
Founded in 1998, the Hantoo Art Group emerged from a generation defined by instability. Taiwan’s martial law had only recently been lifted and democracy was young; the island’s international status remained fraught. Against this backdrop, Hantoo’s members, including Wu Tien-Chang, Yang Mao-Lin, Lien Chien-Hsing, and Deng Wen-Cheng, sought to create a new visual language for a society reinventing itself.
Rather than mimic Western modernism or local traditionalism, they built a hybrid idiom drawn from folk ritual, pop culture, digital media, and myth. The group’s name, Hantoo, literally meaning “island soil”, captures this rootedness and a commitment to cultivating the textures of local experience, even as they engage with global conversations. Two decades on, Rising in Fire re-examines their collective legacy through a series of works that traverse nostalgia, irony, and metamorphosis. The exhibition was less a retrospective than a living archive, a reminder that Taiwan’s art history continues to evolve.
The symposium unfolded as a dialogue between personal memory and collective consciousness. Wu Tien-Chang’s digitally enhanced portraits, bathed in a lurid neon glow, re-enacted the theatrical absurdities of Taiwan’s pop and political iconography. And many of his figures, simultaneously grotesque and tender, recall the staged glamour of 1950s studio photography, only to reveal the unease beneath nostalgia. Nearby, Yang Mao-Lin’s painted hybrids of saints, beasts, and cartoon avatars transformed the island’s biodiversity into allegory. The creatures appear at once mythic and mutant, embodiments of a plural identity.
Lien Chien-Hsing’s dreamlike landscapes drift between realism and reverie: whales glide through mountain ranges, temples float across the sea. His imagery suggests a world where the subconscious still speaks in the language of ecology, a realm unflattened by industrial modernity. In contrast, Deng Wen-Cheng’s embroidered jute canvases depict Taiwanese street food, such as oyster omelettes, shaved ice, and glutinous rice. Turning the domestic into the monumental, they stitch the textures of daily life to render the sensory as sacred, asserting that heritage resides as much in taste and touch as in political rhetoric.
Hosting the exhibition at the Taipei Representative Office was a deliberate act of cultural diplomacy. Taiwan’s presence in global institutions often hovers in ambiguity, being politically contested and symbolically charged. Through art, the island communicates its story without the filter of statecraft. Within the broader context of Frieze Week, Rising in Fire offered a subtler form of resistance: collective narrative over individual branding, and continuity over novelty. It reminded audiences that art history is not only written in auction records but also in acts of persistence.
This diplomatic setting underscored an important paradox: while the Hantoo artists resist commodification, their visibility abroad also functions as cultural soft power, asserting presence through creativity rather than confrontation. In the contemporary art world, where attention spans are short and collectives rarely endure, Hantoo’s survival itself feels radical. Over nearly three decades, its members have maintained an open structure, fluid enough to accommodate diverse practices, and coherent enough to sustain shared values.
Their guiding ethos challenges the idea that progress must mean rupture. Instead, Rising in Fire proposes continuity as rebellion: that to keep creating within one’s own cultural rhythm, can be the most subversive gesture of all. The exhibition’s curation emphasised this tension. Works did not compete for dominance but conversed across media such as painting with video or embroidery with photography, suggesting an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy. The installation felt less like a linear chronology than a constellation: a network of gestures, memories, and myths orbiting the same island.
For Taiwan, Rising in Fire marks more than a milestone in art history. It symbolises a maturing self-definition, one that resists binary framings of East and West, or tradition and innovation. Instead, they articulate a cosmopolitanism grounded in locality, something scholar Chris Berry once termed “trans-local modernity”. Hantoo embodies this – art that is globally conversant yet unmistakably situated, capable of translating the island’s plural identities without dissolving them. In a period when geopolitical tensions often reduce Taiwan to headlines, exhibitions like this reclaim narrative complexity.
It’s a reminder that culture, not conflict, can be an enduring export. In its layered poetics – of soil, myth, food, memory, and resistance – Hantoo’s collective vision offers a model for cultural resilience. Against the homogenising currents of the global art economy, it insists that survival is not the absence of change, but the art of transforming without burning away one’s roots.
