Shu-Wen Lin and Jen-Jung Ku
Electronic Media Review, Volume Seven: 2021-2022
ABSTRACT
Conservation in Taiwan is a relatively young field and the first graduate program was founded in the late ‘90s. Museums slowly adopted the changes in their staff structure and only few are able to hire full-time conservators as their faculty members. State-run museums find themselves being challenged and pressured on all fronts, especially dealing with contemporary and time-based media. This paper will first introduce the development of contemporary and time-based media conservation and the approach to address these challenges in a state-run museum governed by local laws and regulations.
The authors of this paper will use the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) as a starting point to showcase how alumni networks, local partners, and government policies have played crucial roles in building a collaborative ecosystem. As the first modern and contemporary art museum, TFAM has built on the museum’s commitment to represent the landscape of contemporary art in Taiwan, establishing one of the largest modern and contemporary art collections. Even as a renowned museum, only one paper conservator is on staff in the Collection Department and it has been a common practice in most museums in Taiwan. Not only has the paper conservator, one of the co-authors of this paper, handled day-to-day responsibilities, but she needs to recognize conservation needs for a variety of objects in the collections. The nature of the work requires the conservator to have a broader understanding of other subjects and specialties.
From scroll painting to ephemeral media, she has been collaborating with a group of contractors and vendors as an attempt to bring training opportunities, different voices and perspectives, and a whole new set of expertise to the realm of public sector. Several contracts were employed for projects from food preservation, oil painting examination, and pest control to name a few. In late 2020, she also initiated a digital preservation project to tackle the complexity in conserving time-based media, and the co-author was invited as a visiting conservator to review the current workflows. In this project, they hosted a series of workshops, consulted computer and library science professors at local universities, and spoke with database experts as well as members at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution about constructing the first digital repository in Taiwan.
Together with the local community, several preservation strategies for incoming acquisitions are adopted and a baseline survey is being conducted for the first time in order to determine the collection’s scope and range. Through pan- and cross-institutional conversations, the authors carefully evaluate the potential resources in the hope of identifying the gap in both knowledge and practice. This paper aims to shed light on the limitations and possible workarounds in museum practices to care for contemporary and time-based media collections in Taiwan.
AUTHORS
Shu-Wen Lin
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada
Jen-Jung Ku
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan