Preface Avant-Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s (hereafter referred to as Avant-Garde Liberation) is a series of "art documentation" videos by independent filmmaker Huang Mingchuan (b. 1955).[1] Over the span of a decade, Huang documented the creative states of fourteen contemporary artists[2] during the 1990s, a period in which Taiwan’s social ideologies and cultural landscapes underwent seismic shifts following the 1987 lifting of Martial Law, and through which, Huang captures how these artists maintained a critical posture within their work. The year 2002 marked a "simultaneous premiere" for Avant-Garde Liberation across both television and gallery exhibitions, a dual debut that not only signaled the inherent fluidity and openness of the screening sites for "art documentation" but also reflected the ambitions of Public Television Service (PTS) to integrate contemporary art into the broader sphere of mass media. Furthermore, while the series was broadcast on television under the categorization of "culture and arts documentary," the Taishin Arts Award identified Avant-Garde Liberation as a "visual art" work, eventually granting it the Grand Prize. Such an act of recognition served to expand the futurity of "art documentation" as a medium, while effectively challenging the naming frameworks that typically define documentary-as-genre. Having once "flashed" between the disparate realms of television and exhibition, Avant-Garde Liberation remains a work that straddles the boundary between the documentary film and the visual artwork. By investigating the fluid states of field and classification that define the series, this article explores Huang Mingchuan’s 1990s practice of "art documentation" video to offer a preliminary inquiry into the processes of naming and deterritorialization that characterize "art documentation" within the Taiwanese context.
A screenshot of the opening title sequence from the film series Avant Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s. The sequence concludes with the performance documentation of Lee Ming-sheng = Art 2 (1988), where artist Lee holds a television radiation magnifying lens in front of his face to enlarge his own head, satirizing the “megalomania” (big-headedness) of political figures. Image courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
Avant-Garde Liberation as More Than Genre “Documentary Film”
This work epitomizes the “openness” of post-Martial Law Taiwan, through which the author asserts a personal perspective that elevates a simple documentary film into a true work of art; consequently, it highlights the unique characteristics of the work and the very locus of the “avant-garde” in Taiwanese art. (Excerpt from the First Taishin Arts Award, “Visual Arts Award”—Grand Prize Juror’s Citation)
Completed in 2001 after a decade of filming, Avant-Garde Liberation, a series by independent director Huang Mingchuan documenting fourteen contemporary artists, was broadcast on PTS in 2002 under the title Avant-Garde Liberation: 1990s Avant-Garde Artists in Taiwan. Simultaneously, at the invitation of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Huang presented the exhibition Avant-Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s on the museum’s first floor, where the fourteen films were played on a loop through a configuration of fourteen television monitors and a darkroom projection[3]. The time of “simultaneous premiere” of Avant-Garde Liberation on television and within the gallery occurred in the early 2000s, which is less than five years after the founding of PTS (1998) and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (1998). These two entities can be understood as the cultural institutions/organizations that operated within the post-martial law era of Taiwan to gradually shape the public’s definition of “documentary film” by means of film selection, award granting, and the commissioning of documentary productions. In other words, for the public and artists of that era, particularly the “visual artists” who were being documented over a long-term duration for the first time in the 1990s, audiovisual “art documentation” represented a burgeoning language situated between factual reportage and creative practice. One can imagine that the methods of independent filmmaking, the molding of perspectives and the revelation of the long periods of solitude and endurance behind avant-garde creation disclosed by Avant-Garde Liberation must have felt unfamiliar and perplexing, yet simultaneously fresh and invigorating.
Poster for Avant Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s, showcased at the 1st Taishin Arts Award Special Exhibition in 2003 (Eslite Dunnan Store). Image courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
In 2003, Avant-Garde Liberation was honored with the Grand Prize in the “Visual Arts” category at the inaugural Taishin Arts Award, a distinction granted for reasons that were remarkably new at the time, which pointed toward the unique position that the work occupied between the realms of “documentary film” and “visual art.” The juror’s citation noted that Avant-Garde Liberation “elevates a simple documentary film into a true work of art,” suggesting that this transformative power was derived not only from the director’s personal perspective but also from the burgeoning energy of 1990s Taiwanese contemporary art, which was characterized by a proliferation of conceptual practices and shifting creative methodologies. What is particularly compelling is the question of which specific definitions of “documentary” Avant-Garde Liberation was perceived to have “transcended” that allowed it to be classified so definitively as a work of visual art. While the word count of the citation is limited and its phrasing somewhat broad, the award nonetheless articulated an evolutionary relationship—a “metamorphosis”—between the series and the documentary form. This interpretation invites a specific curiosity: could we understand this as an indication that, by the early 2000s, the contemporary art world in Taiwan had already cultivated a more interdisciplinary vision than the documentary film community? This resilience, likely born from the constant challenges posed by “mixed media” practices, perhaps fostered a greater readiness to embrace creators who utilized the moving image to carve out a refreshing audiovisual experience. This line of inquiry forms the first conceptual pillar of this article’s reflection on 1990s “art documentation.”
Secondly, twenty-five years after the debut of Avant-Garde Liberation, can we still regard it as an “artistic work that is more than a documentary film”? It is undeniable that “Art Documentary” has since become a conventionalized genre, and Huang Mingchuan himself now adopts the title of “Art Documentary Director” [4]. Under these conditions, classifying the series as an “art documentary” appears relatively appropriate. The problem, however, lies in how we might categorize and name the work today while still honoring the intrinsic connection that the first Taishin Arts Award identified between Avant-Garde Liberation and the trajectory of Taiwanese visual art.
A screenshot from the Hsu Cheng-jen episode of Avant-Garde Liberation. The image depicts Hsu Cheng-jen with his work A Meta-poetic Illusion (1997) at Paiji Villa, an abandoned, dilapidated building complex in Sanxia District. Image courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
Departing from the TV Station: The Grasp and Release of Documentary Tradition in Avant-Garde Liberation
The decision to nominate the “television series” rather than the “exhibition” (Editor’s note: referring to the nomination of Avant-Garde Liberation for the Taishin Arts Award) was intended to provoke critical counter-reflection: what is the true purpose of an exhibition? If the goal of an exhibition is to communicate an artist’s work to the widest possible audience in the most effective manner, then the direct display of original works may not be the primary concern; instead, depth and comprehensiveness are perhaps more vital. If exhibitions can be curated on the internet, why can they not be held through more popular channels? The format of “exhibiting” via television channels has long been explored by artists globally. It is our hope that Taiwanese audiovisual creators might, like Huang Mingchuan, secure direct channels of dissemination through mass media. (Excerpt from the First Taishin Arts Award—Nomination Citation)
The media technologies of the late 20th century profoundly influenced artistic production, while simultaneously challenging the established mechanisms of exhibitions and art festivals. As evidenced by the text above, the Taishin Award jury perceived that the existing methods and fields through which art was encountered and sensed were not only insufficient but arguably missed the mark. Within these brief sentences, the jury issued a public call to reconsider the very purpose of curating exhibitions, asserting that the urgency of cultivating artistic vision and shaping perspectives far outweighed the mere “display of original objects.” Consequently, platforms such as television and the internet were identified as essential supplements to traditional exhibition mechanisms. Based on this proposition, one of the more unique reasons for the nomination of Avant-Garde Liberation was the fact that the films were broadcast on a television station rather than being showcased within a modern or contemporary art museum. Such a declaration clearly reveals that the jury’s analytical gaze extended beyond physical display to consider the broader impact of mass media, thereby addressing Taiwanese curators and image-creators with a clear mandate: prioritize how art is disseminated and how it approaches its audience. In other words, rather than suggesting that the Taishin jury nominated Avant-Garde Liberation out of a simple recognition of the “art documentary” as a genre, it is more accurate to say that their concern for media-based images stemmed from a long-standing discourse in contemporary art, originating with the development of Conceptualism in the 1960s and 70s, regarding how “artistic perspective” might remain unfettered by materiality and temporality.
Avant-Garde Liberation: Huang Mingchuan’s Video Collection of the 1990s was exhibited on the first floor of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) from March to April 2002, as part of TFAM’s “Art Festival” exhibition series. Image courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
By a striking coincidence, while the jury’s affirmation of Avant-Garde Liberation highlighted the importance of “demonstrating an artistic perspective” as being more vital than the emphasis on “field and material authenticity” found in most exhibitions, it simultaneously acknowledged the “television tradition” of documentary in Taiwan—an era during which television remained the primary platform for both the production and screening of such works. Regarding Huang Mingchuan’s body of work, which now spans over thirty-five years, it is clear that while he chose to broadcast Avant-Garde Liberation on PTS, he did not remain tethered to this medium; instead, he proactively pioneered diverse documentary genres and production methodologies. After 2000, the documentaries produced by Huang did not strictly adhere to the “television documentary” system. Beyond self-distributing via VHS and DVD, he also developed new documentary content through collaborations with various arts and cultural institutions[5]. A prominent example is The Hundred Taiwan Poets Audio/Visual Project[6], a decade-long undertaking initiated in 1999.
By the time Avant-Garde Liberation was released in 2002, moving-image creation in Taiwan had already begun to shift from the “video installations” of the 1980s toward “video art”.This transition can be understood as a movement toward “single-channel” formats or, more broadly, as a significant turn toward “dematerialization.” In any case, since the concept of “moving-image creation” that centers on the meticulous aesthetic refinement of the lens had already established itself within the field of contemporary art, the identification of Avant-Garde Liberation as “visual art” implied that the visual arts community had recognized the work’s significance long before the documentary world did. . This recognition remained firmly rooted in a historical trajectory that evolved from Conceptual Art and video installation into the broader development of video art.
Exhibition brochure for Avant-Garde Liberation: Huang Mingchuan’s Video Collection of the 1990s. The brochure notes the daily projection schedule for the 14 videos. Image courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
Critique as Creation: Huang Mingchuan in Avant-Garde Liberation
Within the history of Taiwanese documentary film, Avant-Garde Liberation stands as the first collection of films in which a private documentarian autonomously recorded the creative trajectories of fourteen artists over a ten-year period. It exists as both a television documentary series and a body of moving-image work that was once presented within an exhibition context. The content of the films does not merely encompass the artists’ self-accounts of the joys and frustrations that are inherent in the creative process, which are supported by the precise orchestration of archival images and footage, but also extends to the observations of the artists’ friends, families, art critics, and curators. In terms of the diversity of creative media and the variances in the artists’ generations and genders, the fourteen subjects of Avant-Garde Liberation present a microcosm of the plurality and internal depth that defined Taiwanese contemporary art in the 1990s. More subtly, the artists’ presence and their representation on film themselves embody a moment in which a segment of creators began to demonstrate an openness and tolerance toward the “camera lens,” “art documentation,” and “audiovisual narrative.” The artists who appear in the films implicitly materialize a sense of trust and expectation that was directed toward the independent director, Huang Mingchuan, which reflects an attitude of being willing to “becoming the image” at the very inception of “art documentation.”
Screenshots from the Wang Te-yu episode of Avant-Garde Liberation. Top: Wang Te-yu running joyfully on No. 25 (1996) at the Eslite Gallery in Taipei. Bottom: Wang Te-yu reminding the audience of exhibition notices on-site during the showcase of No. 27 (1997) at IT Park. Image courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
Even today, we are confronted by a sense of perplexity when facing such imagery regarding the identity that Huang Mingchuan assumed at the time and the objectives that he was pursuing within the image, both of which enabled him to commit ten years of labor to the completion of Avant-Garde Liberation.
In 2007, Huang Hai-ming (b. 1950), who was an art critic, curator, and a member of both the observation and final jury panels for the “Visual Arts” category of the inaugural Taishin Arts Award, while also acting as a consultant for Avant-Garde Liberation, wrote the following:
I often reflect on the fact that what Director Huang Mingchuan filmed was likely not limited to the aspects of which the artists themselves were conscious; rather, he sought to film a work that was larger and broader in scope, which revealed the cruel traces that a grand yet blind zeitgeist had etched into the land and its people through the intervention of the artists’ works and his own interpretation.
From a contemporary perspective, Huang Mingchuan is not merely a creator but also a critic who performed both roles simultaneously by utilizing the most effective tools that were at his disposal. As a veteran critic, I believe that his documentaries preserved a human quality that is increasingly obscured by superficial transnational cultural commodities, which include the struggle, the hardship, the conflict, and the potential of humanity, that the recorded works of the artists were merely a significant component of. (Huang Hai-ming, 2007: 18) [7]
Screenshots from the Huang Chin-ho episode of Avant-Garde Liberation. Top: Huang Chin-ho discussing his creative concepts in front of Fire (1991–1992). Bottom: A “Nepal” restaurant/KTV whose architectural styling closely resembles that in the work Fire. Image courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
Huang Hai-ming’s observations follow a clear context that is substantiated by Huang Mingchuan’s broader 1990s trajectory. In addition to his continued production of feature films such as Bodo (1993) and Flat Tyre (1998), Huang simultaneously undertook the autonomous filming of several documentary series that included Legendary Landscapes (2004) and Ten Years of Outdoor Installation Art (2006). It is evident that the diligent and sustained recording exhibited within Avant-Garde Liberation constructs a documentary form that is both “biographical” and “in-depth portrayal” in nature. However, when examining Huang’s comprehensive documentary works throughout the 1990s, one can perceive that the artists and their works within Avant-Garde Liberation underwent a transformation over that decade, which produced an audiovisual narrative that refracted the dynamic interplay between “art and society.” Within a single episode of less than 30 minutes, viewers occasionally witness starkly different expressions of an artist across various segments, which serves as a clear manifestation of the filmmaker’s composed resilience over many years. Consequently, what we observe in Avant-Garde Liberation is a dual gaze that combines intimate character studies with a focused recording of rapidly changing public spheres and cultural landscapes—a necessity born from the fact that artistic creation at the time frequently manifested in public squares and on the streets. These overlapping perspectives of the “near” and the “far” coalesce into what Huang described in the early 2000s as an era that was “full of adventure and re-reflection, a willingness to pioneer and create, and a dreaming of the future”[8], a zeitgeist which allegedly reached its “peak in 1997 and underwent a distinct change after 1999” (Huang Hai-ming, 2003). [9]
The essence of the “art documentary film” is inherently contradictory and transdisciplinary, which leads to the following section that will reference the theories of several scholars and Huang Mingchuan’s recent naming strategies for “Art Doc Film Festival” to further examine the representativeness and specificity of Avant-Garde Liberation as a defining work of “art documentation.”
Filmed over a span of 7 to 13 years starting in the 1990s, Legendary Landscapes (2004) by Huang Mingchuan and his team is an eight-episode documentary series. Through the landscapes of art and industry—including stone carvings, brick kilns, red bricks, monuments, installation art, and public art—the videos trace the trajectory of daily life in Taiwan, capturing the shifting collective aesthetics and the redefinition of public space following the lifting of martial law. Image source: “The Filmic Scope of Huang Mingchuan | Film Introduction” webpage, Arts Center, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU).
Art is Not an Adjective: The Naming and Liberation of Art DOC
After conducting a preliminary review of director Huang Mingchuan’s critiques, his status as a creator, and his focused concern regarding the overall “zeitgeist” of the 1990s, we return to the fundamental question of how we should define Avant-Garde Liberation. This inquiry, which remains difficult to capture with precision, is related not only to the unique methodologies and subject matter of the series but also to the inherent contradictions that reside within the term “art documentary film.” Art historian Steven Jacobs (b. 1967) notes that the non-fiction essence of the documentary causes the “art documentary film” to carry semantically contradictory references:
If a “documentary” is understood as a nonfictional film that documents some aspect of reality and attempts to present “life as it is” or show “life caught unaware,” art documentaries are a contradiction in terms as they focus primarily on the artificial.
(Steven Jacobs, 2021) [10]
The conflict extends beyond the contradiction between non-fiction and fiction, as the increasing plurality of exhibiting sites is stimulating a diversification of the definition of “documentary” as a film genre itself. Since the 2010s, the platforms for releasing documentaries in Taiwan have become significantly more diverse, which now encompass theatrical releases, DVDs, streaming services, and recent art exhibitions. Today, the screening platforms for “documentary” include the long-standing PTS system and private DVD publications, as well as theatrical screenings such as director Singing Chen’s 2014 work The Walkers, streaming platforms like “Giloo,” which launched in 2017. Examples of the recent contemporary art galleries include director Huang Hsin-yao’s 2022 work A Silent Gaze, which was screened on a loop in the exhibition “Briny Wind Carrying Sand: Artist from the Saline Land”[11], and director Huang Mingchuan’s 1995 works Resurgence on the Tamsui River and 1995 Post-Industrial Arts Festival, which were similarly screened on a loop in the exhibition “Relational Field: The Cultural Landscape of New Taipei in the 1990s”[13] This shift places the problem of defining the “art documentary” within a much more complex layer of “Field”.
In 2025, the exhibition Relational Field: The Cultural Landscape of New Taipei in the 1990s (curated by Wang Pin-hua, New Taipei City Art Museum) invited Huang Mingchuan to participate. The exhibition showcased two documentaries filmed by Huang in 1995, commissioned by the then Taipei County Cultural Center: Resurgence on the Tamsui River and 1995 Post-Industrial Art Festival. Image source: New Taipei City Art Museum website.
However, the definitional ambiguity surrounding the “art documentary film” arguably persisted until 2014, when the establishment of the Chiayi City International Art Documentary Film Festival (2014) with Huang Mingchuan serving as Artistic Director. It began to facilitate more rigorous inquiry and exploration. Drawing upon the observations and questions posed by film scholar Sing Song-Yong (b. 1976) regarding the inaugural festival in 2014, it becomes evident that the “art documentary film” remained in a stage of being “yet-to-be-defined” within both academic and artistic discourses:
The proposal of the term “art documentary film” does not so much manifest conceptual accuracy or clarity as it highlights the ambiguity inherent in such a naming: how do art and documentary co-construct and coexist? If it does not merely signify an attributional relationship of category, subject, and content, we must further consider whether the “art documentary film” refers to the documentary as art, or rather, the thesis of how the documentary takes form as art. In other words, what exactly are the “art” and “documentary” to which we point? What kind of materializing and historicizing processes have allowed the two to exist symbiotically? Within our current context, what effective criteria and foundations do they provide for reflecting upon social reality? (Sing Song-Yong, 2014) [13]
Three years later, in 2017, the term “Documentary Film” (in Chinese jilupian) was removed from the title of the Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival, which resulted in the English name being changed from “Art Documentary Film Festival” to “Art Doc Film Festival.” In 2024, during an interview with 1 IMAGE ART, Huang Mingchuan mentioned that the 2017 adjustment of the festival’s name was intended to balance and open up the hierarchical relationship between “art” and “documentation”:
The name of the “Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival” was originally the “International Art Documentary Film Festival,” but the word “Documentary Film” (as implied in the Chinese character “pian”) was later removed. Interestingly, within the Chinese term “Art-Documentation” (yishu jilu), “art” and ” documentation” seem to be more equal [than the use of “Art Documentary Film” (Jilupian)]; “art” is not an adjective for “documentation.” For the English portion, I changed the “Documentary” in “Art Documentary Festival” to “DOC,” which is the syntax English speakers commonly use as an abbreviation for Documentary. ART is absolutely not an adjective. (Huang Mingchuan, 2024) [14]
From this brief explanation, we can observe that Huang Mingchuan, as a member of the first generation of independent directors in Taiwan who were trained outside the “television documentary system,” was still contemplating how to define the “art documentary film” through the act of naming as late as 2017. In my view, the substitution of “Documentary” with “DOC” does more than merely loosen the constraints regarding “film” formats; it also reconnects “art documentation” to the significance of “documentation,” and its contemporary art context of “documents”—which includes the documenta exhibition in Germany that originated during the Cold War, as well as the “Taiwan Avant-Garde Documenta”[15] that was co-organized by the National Cultural Association of Taiwan and Taishin Bank in the early 2000s. Interestingly, following the 2017 renaming, the Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival introduced a “Featured Director” section in 2019, which formally incorporated video artworks[16] and “performing arts shorts” into the sphere of “art documentation”. This year (2025), the festival has utilized special lectures to further discuss the possibility of integrating “television commercials” as case studies within the category of “art documentation” films [17][18]
In a 2024 interview with 1 IMAGE ART, Huang Mingchuan mentioned that the film festival’s name was revised in 2017 to balance and deconstruct the hierarchical (master-servant) relationship between “art” and “documentation.” Image source: 1 IMAGE ART YouTube channel.
Reflecting on the Significance of 1990s Art Documentation through Avant-Garde Liberation
Returning to the contents of Avant-Garde Liberation, the series reveals the unique position of “art documentation” in the 1990s—which was neither an image-based work centered solely on the artist as subject nor an issue-oriented documentary, but rather a documentary form that allowed artistic creation to “speak for itself” through the medium of film. These films lack an omniscient narrator, consisting instead of an overlap from the voices of the recorded subjects and interviewees who address the viewer directly, thereby forming a unique plurality of “narrators” that construct a discursive documentary framework. In terms of its significance to art-historical records, the value of Avant-Garde Liberation lies not in a detailed account of how an artist’s personal development might be patched into a period history, but in how the visual work allows the interiority of the creator to be perceived. It preserves and circulates the zeitgeist constituted by 1990s contemporary art, continually entering diverse screening environments to unfold varied archival messages.
Years later, Huang Mingchuan utilized the Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival as a methodology to transform “art documentation” from a filming action into a festival platform, which employs a diverse selection of screened content to destabilize the real-time definition of “art documentation” within the current era. The festival confronts not only the aesthetic boundaries of the “art documentary film” but also the question of how “documentation” can become a method for understanding contemporary art history—rethinking the relationship between viewing and documenting at the intersection of images and history. From Avant-Garde Liberation to the more diversified practices of “art documentation” today, these video works remind us that documentation should function as a continuous dialogue between the past and the present. Within this undefined and ongoing state, the “art documentation” video from the 1990s retains the potential to reveal different layers of cognition and interpretation, opening a gateway to our understanding of both art and history. —[SCR]
/Translated by Danson Wong
[1] An independent director whose filmography includes the feature films The Man from Island West(1989), Bodo(1993), and Flat Tyre(1998). In 1990, he published Independent Filmmaking in Taiwan: The Man from Island West, which contained his “Independent Filmmaking Manifesto,” and subsequently began producing documentaries on contemporary artists, literature, cultural landscapes, and state-organized art festivals in the early 1990s. 
[2] The fourteen artists include: Wang Wen-chih, Wang Te-yu, Lee Ming-sheng, Hsu Yu-jen, Wu Mali, Hou Chun-ming, Wu Tien-chang, Hsu Cheng-jen, Kuo Chuan-chiu, Shy Gong, Huang Chih-yang, Huang Chin-ho, Peng Hung-chih, and Lo Sen-hao.
[3] The exhibition Avant-Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s ran from March 8 to April 28, 2002. Each of the fourteen televisions played one film, while the projection rotated through all fourteen. The PTS program Avant-Garde Liberation consisted of fourteen episodes, aired every Friday from 11:30 PM to midnight. While the program and exhibition titles differed slightly, the 2003 DVD release by PTS adopted the exhibition title.
[4] See: “Transcript of Huang Mingchuan’s Audio Recording,” New Taipei City Arts Magazine, Issue 8 (2020).
[5] Additionally, Huang Mingchuan published Legendary Landscapes in 2004 and Ten Years of Outdoor Installation Art in 2005, both of which were compilations of his 1990s art documentation. Subsequently, from 2006 onward, Huang turned toward producing one-hour documentaries such as Beyond the Art of Technology by Huang Mingchuan and A Pungent Patriot: Dean-E Mei, while continuing to collaborate on commissioned films with institutions such as the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. Thus, after conceiving the literary documentary project for a hundred poets in 1999 and releasing his 1990s art documentaries between 2002 and 2005, he focused more intently on developing new formats and genres distinct from traditional television documentaries. See: Huang Mingchuan (2015), “The Moment and the Dream,” Art Accrediting, No. 64, p. 28, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts.
[6] The Hundred Taiwan Poets Audio/Visual Project (1999–2009; first released in 2000) recorded the oral histories, phonetic rhythms, and expressions of one hundred modern poets.
[7] Excerpt from: Huang Hai-ming, 2007, “Reflections on Reading Avant-Garde Liberation,” Taishin arts review (Visual Arts) (All Music Magazine Co., Ltd.).
[8] Statement by Huang Mingchuan. Excerpt from: Shih Rui-jen, 2003, “A Social Document of ‘Avant-Garde Liberation’ and an Art Film for ‘High and Low’ Appreciation,” Avant-Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s DVD Booklet (Public Television Service Foundation).
[9] Statement by Huang Mingchuan. Excerpt from: Huang Hai-ming, 2003, “Returning to That Rapidly Vanishing Great Era—Preface to the Publishing of Huang Mingchuan’s ‘Avant-Garde Liberation’ Series,” Avant-Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s DVD Booklet (Public Television Service Foundation).
[10] Jacobs, S. (2021). A concise history and theory of documentaries on the visual arts. In J. Malitsky (Ed.), A Companion to Documentary Film History (pp. 291–310). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
[11] The exhibition “Briny Wind Carrying Sand: Artist from the Saline Land” (June 24, 2025 – October 26, 2025) was held at the Tainan Art Museum.
[12] The exhibition “Relational Field: The Cultural Landscape of New Taipei in the 1990s” (August 16, 2025 – December 21, 2025) was held at the New Taipei City Art Museum.
[13] Sing Song-Yong (March 23, 2014). “How is it Possible for an Art Documentary to Have No Aesthetics? — Notes on the 2014 Chiayi City International Art Documentary Film Festival.” Funscreen (451). At the time of writing, Sing was an Associate Professor in the Doctoral Program in Art Creation and Theory at the Tainan National University of the Arts.
[14] 1 IMAGE ART (March 9, 2024). “Art and Recording | Artistic Director Huang Ming-chuan of the Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival”. YouTube.
[15] “Co2—The First Taiwan Avant-Garde Documenta,” co-organized by the National Cultural Association of Taiwan and Taishin Bank, held from November 23, 2002, to January 12, 2003.
[16] Video art works had already participated in the Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival by 2018, featuring artists such as Hsu Chia-wei and Liao Chi-yu. The “Featured Director” section was added in 2019, and the Taiwanese contemporary artists who have been invited over the years include Su Hui-yu (2019), Tsui Kuang-yu (2020), Chen Yung-hsien (2023), and Kao Jun-honn (2024).
[17] Referring to the 2021 Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival, which incorporated short films edited from Riverbed Theatre’s performances between 2005 and 2019 into the “performing arts shorts” section of the festival.
[18] The lecture “The Artistry of Television Commercials,” held on March 29, 2025, explored how advertisements function as innovative vehicles for visual and narrative expression, featuring a dialogue between directors Chen Hung-i and Lo Ging-zim.
*This article was sponsored by the “Phenomenal Writing—Visual Arts Criticism Project” of the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Winsing Arts Foundation in 2024.
**Header Imag: The cover of Avant Garde Liberation: The Huang Mingchuan Image Collection of the 1990s. (2003). Courtesy of Huang Mingchuan.
