| dc.description.abstract | IT Park, founded in 1988 and formally opened its door in 1990, is a representation of alternative space in Taiwan in the 1990’s. During 27 years of its activities, many today renowned artists began their career by holding their first exhibitions here, some of them gained later an international reputation, others occupied important positions in Taiwanese academic education. It is commonly recognized that IT Park as alternative space has played an important role in the development of Taiwanese modern and contemporary art. However, researches regarding Taiwanese alternative space often took space as physical units and put focus on artists’ style, adopting the term of alternative to infer a sense of competition in artistic arena, and how authorities attempted to domesticate rebelling spaces by allocation of governmental aids, few considered artist as a unit with his or her own autonomy, and put focus on interactions between artists, museum, art gallery, other art institutions and alternative spaces. Among Taiwanese alternative spaces as space contributing to the construction of artistic networks, IT Park is by far the most noteworthy one. This study aims to explore the agency of artists in alternative spaces by conducting a case study of IT Park, its exhibitions, members linked to this space and their development.
The research will first examine the origin and political imaginations projected toward alternative space in Taiwan before the founding of IT Park, and review the definition of alternative space in Taiwan’s modern art context. Secondly, this study considers IT Park as a production of space in art system, with exhibitions and artists’ exchanges, to reconstruct the historical traces of IT Park, then to analyze its influences on the system of Taiwanese art institutions, on the basis of spatial function brought by IT Park to its dwellers. Finally, this research explores development and the questionable marginality regarding alternative space as a counterforce and reaction to mainstreaming art system at different times.
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