Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Inside the White Cube is the finale of E Chen's creative projects on display space that investigates the "white cube" of museums after a series of exhibitions, including Wundermkammer (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2010), One Piece Room (Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, 2015), and Skinner Box (Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, 2016). The exhibition title originates from Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space published in 1976, in which the author, Brian O'Doherty, insightfully analyzes and criticizes the "white cube" space of display for its enclosed and embedded value system of the art galleries and art institutions in terms of their history, society, economy, aesthetics and ideology. In this inspiring classic, the author argues that the "white cube" of art galleries—their pure white walls, immaculate floor, artificial lighting, concealed power source, and homogeneous space—is not a "neutral" vessel/space for the display of artworks. Instead, they have evolved from the two-dimensional, representational and perspectival space of Western easel painting, and thus embodied ideologically charged aesthetic techniques. Through a standardization of white cube space as well as the process of decontextualization and sacralization, the white cubes isolate artworks from the external reality and convert them into "sacred objects," for which the absolute aesthetic beauty and its exchange/commercial/market value become unquestionable and yet interchangeable. The rebellion against the "white cube" can be traced back to Yves Klein's The Void (1958) and Arman's Full Up (1960). Both upstaged the exhibition space as the central issue of the exhibition. From the 1960s onward, the so-called "sculptures in expansive sites" in minimalism and land art turned their back on the confining white cubes of exhibition space and moved onto a more expansive alternative domain with the coinage and practice of “Ex-situ”. On the other hand, the "Institutional Critique" with a cheeky double-entendre nomer "In-situ" was teaming up with conceptual art to address artistic reality and offer criticism of the framework of exhibition system. Famous artists in the 1970s, such as Robert Barry, Hans Haacke, and Michael Asher, took steps further and boldly presented the contexture of art as exhibition content to counter the incorporation, reification and commercialization of art by art institutions. Threading the historic context and discussion of "reflection upon museums," Inside the White Cube can be viewed as a "meta-exhibition" or an “exhibition of/on exhibition” that centers on the exhibition per se. Adopting a formalist approach, the artist directly dissects and reorganizes aesthetic forms and structures of display space, including "exhibition walls," "frames of painting," and "plinths/podium/mounting," which have been used to support artworks, and by doing so, initiating a dialogue between the exhibition form and the intrinsic quality of exhibitions. Bearing the idea of "context as content" in mind, Inside the White Cube intervenes present "reality" (the exhibition site) and reinterpolates the relationship among artists, artworks, the public, and art institutions. E Chen does not intend to expose the political, commercial, and academic power systems operating in art institutions, for which since the 1980s the discourse of institutional critique has already formed the “institutional aesthetics”. Nor would he foreground art institutions as an enclosed system only to break it later, as the “relational aesthetics” developed in the 1990s has turned “social context” into “institutional content”. This reminds us of artist/art critic Ni Tsai Chin performance, Election Eruption, in which institutions are no longer loci from where controversy arises but its final

destination and answers to unasked questions. Acquiesced and even encouraged by institutions, artists expand on different types of art in exhibitions from an "artistic stance," while keeping a clear mind the need to perpetually restart yet again and “conspire” with the institutions. In a mutually dependent, at once exploiting and supporting, symbiotic relationship, artists question and dialectically examine institutions by "parodizing" the exhibition system, attempting to reach an equilibrium that will coevolve both either to thrive or dive. note：

1. Brian O' Doherty，《Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space》Publisher University of California Press, 1999.

2. See Mediaholic—Arts of Ni Tsai Chin. MOCA Taipei, 2010.