By Hsiao-Ting, LI
“What if one day everyone says not to close it, but the space still has to be closed down anyway?”
Walking through the alleys and streets of Taipei, besides residences, shops, and towering office buildings, one occasionally sees many signs reading “arts space” or “art space.” For the general public who is unfamiliar with contemporary art, they might wonder what these spaces actually do. Do they showcase artists’ works? Sell arts and crafts products? Display home furnishings? Or conduct art classes? No matter what kind of activities are conducted within them, art spaces have become an integral part of Taipei as a city, such as Shin Len Yuan Art Space (hereafter referred to as SLY), located in Zhongshan District, Taipei, for more than 20 years. Neighboring massage parlors and lodging establishments, SLY Art Space sits in narrow alleys frequently passed by tourists and massage clients. With its expansive floor-to-ceiling glass windows, SLY presents different artistic creations every month, rotating like a timed slide projector. This art space—curious yet confusing—appears to operate quietly, but has experienced dramatic shifts and reforms in its spatial organization and operational systems throughout its more than two decades of existence.
In the 1990s, SLY was defined as an alternative space, which was initially established by some members who came from the alternative space called “Apartment 2.” “Apartment 2” was founded because at the time, the only places in the city where the public could engage with art and artists could create and exhibit were municipal art museums, memorial halls, museums, and other public venues. The exhibition schedules, open calls, and grant applications at these public institutions created a highly competitive situation for artists. Many young creators eager to showcase their work, seeking to create more exhibition opportunities for themselves and the broader art community, began adopting the international concept of ‘alternative spaces,’ making use of underutilized private spaces in the city or lobbying the government for additional exhibition venues. In 1997, artists Tang Huang-Chen, Wei Hsueh-O, and others discovered the potential of the “Taipei Brewery” located at the intersection of Bade Road and Zhongxiao East Road in Taipei to become an arts district. They founded the ‘Huashan Arts District Promotion Association’ to advocate with relevant government authorities for the use of this abandoned space as a venue for arts and cultural exhibitions and performances. In 1995, Margaret Shiu, founder of Bamboo Curtain Studio, together with several arts and cultural collaborators, transformed an abandoned private chicken coop located along the Tamsui River in New Taipei City (formerly Taipei County) into Taiwan’s first artist village, ‘Bamboo Curtain Studio’ Similar to the establishment of the art spaces mentioned above, SLY’s predecessor, Apartment 2, was also created by a group of like-minded artists who collectively funded basic expenses such as utilities and took turns holding exhibitions in an apartment located on Heping East Road in Taipei. Carrying forward the ideals of Apartment 2, SLY is built around ‘people’ as its core. To maintain balance among members in the management and operation of the space, it employs a ‘consensus-based system’ for decision-making, while administrative responsibilities are distributed through a ‘working group system,’ in which member artists voluntarily assume administrative duties and organize themselves into five groups: public relations, exhibitions, activities, documentation, and general affairs. This approach ensures that every external engagement and major decision within the space requires bringing together all members for discussion and deliberation, with decisions ultimately determined by majority vote. This artist group, operating like a club organization, continued to function under the management structure described above. After several relocations due to different factors, it finally settled in an alley in Zhongshan District, Taipei, in 2000. The space operates on two-year cycles, selecting artists to collaboratively manage the space. Apart from the fixed membership fees that artists pay each cycle, the space’s main income sources are subsidies from government agencies and foundations, which account for the majority of its revenue.
After all, managing a space involves more than just the “people” element. Daily utilities, rent, and maintenance costs, communication and coordination with public agencies, networking and collaboration with other arts and cultural institutions both domestically and internationally, applications for various grants and competitions—all these administrative matters need to be handled by these part-time artistic creators on top of their creative work and everyday life. Consequently, SLY’s members realized that continuing to operate and manage SLY through the original ‘consensus’ and ‘working group’ approaches would cause delays in external liaison due to the complex decision-making procedures, thereby affecting the organization’s external communication efficiency. Moreover, members also began to desire to apply for subsidies from local governments or central agencies under SLY’s name. Therefore, to establish better external communication channels and achieve independent operational methods, SLY embarked on its first organizational reform. In 2003, SLY registered with the Taipei City Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs as a way to stabilize the space’s operations and began functioning as a non-profit organization. While SLY appeared to have evolved from an artist collective into a formal organization, its internal decision-making processes and organizational structure remained unchanged. In 2008, after the historically significant group exhibition “Eternal Adventureland: The Shin Leh Yuan Art Space 10th Anniversary Exhibition,” SLY’s internal organization experienced changes once again. Many core members who had been responsible for long-term operations successively left SLY for various reasons. Lacking experience and systematic administrative procedures, SLY faced difficulties in both internal management and external liaison, making it impossible to make decisions efficiently. Many decisions, including basic ones such as whether to renovate the restroom or purchase equipment for the space, were postponed due to the overall institutional dysfunction. To remedy this situation, following extensive member discussions and coordination, SLY introduced an executive director system to its decision-making structure in 2010. Unlike conventional organizational structures and systems, SLY’s members, seeking to preserve the consensus system they had initially established, defined the executive director position as: internally, someone who could immediately address simple and urgent organizational matters and decisions; externally, someone who would establish brand image and seek external resources.
Whatever organizational structure SLY employs in its operations, when considering the operational aspects of an art space, financial situation is an unavoidable topic alongside organization and human resources. As mentioned earlier, SLY’s regular income sources include membership fees paid by each member per cycle (every two years), with the rest of the income coming from subsidies applied for from various government departments and foundations. Drawing on income from membership fees and grants, SLY managed to hire a dedicated full-time administrative assistant starting in 2008 to handle all aspects of space management and coordinate both internal and external organizational matters. As the arts and cultural landscape evolves, while government agencies and foundations continuously provide more varied grant opportunities, the simultaneous increase in exhibition venues and cultural organizations has made grant competition fiercer, thereby implicitly raising the bar for successful funding applications. In 2008, the average GDP per capita was NT$18,081, but by now, the forecasted average GDP per capita for 2022 is NT$35,244. Personnel salaries and living expenses have risen alongside economic development. These changes in the overall environment have had a significant impact on SLY, which relies on grants for over half of its annual income. Even when confronted with such challenges, SLY has yet to generate an effective business model for increasing profits and continues to operate using grants as its primary income source. Given this situation, some members with a sense of crisis feel that the organization should either increase membership fees or undergo complete transformation. Since most SLY members are teachers rather than full-time artists, they tend to be conservative about membership fee burdens. Nevertheless, various proposals have emerged: transforming into a gallery focused on marketing SLY member artists, using artwork sales as a primary or secondary revenue source; some members have also proposed adopting a shareholder system like VT Art Salon, where instead of paying biennial membership fees, members willing to become shareholders would make substantial one-time investments to support SLY’s operations, with all shareholders sharing profits and losses. Ultimately, however, none of the aforementioned proposals received agreement and support from the majority of SLY’s members. As a result, SLY continues to operate with a consensus-based decision-making system, while administratively, the executive director determines whether to employ full-time or part-time administrative personnel depending on the yearly financial circumstances.
In 2018, SLY member Chang Ya-Ping resumed the executive director position after having served in 2010. Confronted with an internal organizational atmosphere unlike before, financial predicaments, closures of peer art spaces, completion of staged objectives, and the cultural industry’s expectations of SLY, despite her emotional attachment, Ya-Ping began contemplating the possibility of ending the physical space. Although she had such considerations, looking at the storage room behind the space crammed with paper art archives and the digital data stored on the shared computer, closing the physical space would not be as straightforward as simply not renewing the lease and liquidating the registered organization. At the same time, Bamboo Curtain Studio was also organizing farewell events, while a trend was emerging among galleries, venues, and art spaces to establish digital art archive databases. Consequently, in the days that followed, executive director Ya-Ping toured various spaces, including Bamboo Curtain Studio, LightBox Photo Library, ET@T, Li Mei-Shu Memorial Gallery, and others, beginning to collect initial thoughts on how to wrap up the organization.
For SLY, which centers on people, the most common industry inquiry concerns ‘public accessibility.’ Given that the space continuously features exhibitions by member artists and project-based programs are largely executed and curated by members, SLY demonstrates less flexibility in external connections and collaborations than other arts and cultural venues. Concluding an art space that has operated for over twenty years isn’t easy and can’t be handled well overnight. Thus, Ya-ping determined that alongside the step-by-step plan to conclude the physical space, the public accessibility that SLY had long been missing would also be put into practice in the subsequent programs. In order to sustainably preserve SLY’s spirit, Ya-ping, lacking any information technology background, decided to turn to digital technology for help. Ya-ping enlisted many interdisciplinary project collaborators, including Wikidata Taiwan convener Allen Wang and Chen Yu-hsien, project director of the “Save Media Art,” to assist in addressing SLY’s shortcomings in technical capabilities and digital expertise. Even with professional technical support, apart from the computer files, the preservation and digitization of physical paper art archives still needed to be addressed. Besides materials from solo artist exhibitions, there were various ongoing project programs, including the Emerge New Talent Project, the Interdisciplinary Arts Festival, 10th and 20th anniversary commemorative exhibitions, research projects, and other documentation. These materials, if not saved on computer hard drives, were preserved as challenging-to-process physical archives such as slides, cassette tapes, newspaper clippings, physical photographs, and similar formats. The organization of these physical and digital materials alone was already challenging; therefore, Ya-ping enlisted the help of Wikipedia Chinese Encyclopedia researcher Yu Chien-hsun (from TNUA’s Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts), researchers, part-time students, and interns to systematically organize the physical archives.
While organizing the original materials, Ya-ping found that although SLY had retained the exhibition materials and records of each member artist who had shown at SLY, publicly digitizing artists’ personal information required authorization and coordination from the creators themselves, essentially meaning hundreds of artists would need to be contacted. Faced with such complex administrative procedures, Ya-ping realized that compromises would have to be made regarding material preservation. Considering that the TCAA database built by the Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan in 2014 for Taiwan artists already retains abundant records of individual Taiwanese artists’ creative works and career paths, SLY decided to focus its digital preservation efforts solely on collaborative or cooperative content such as regular program exhibitions, major group shows, and project-based initiatives. Regarding data preservation, SLY decided to employ WikiData’s community technology platform to upload the compiled digital content to WikiData. Ya-Ping views the benefits of using WikiData from two main angles: website hardware maintenance and content creation. After SLY ends its operations, there will be no administrative staff, executive director, space, or member artists remaining, which also means that membership fees and grant funding will no longer be available. If they were to build their database, they would subsequently face the annual requirement of having someone manage website data and security maintenance and updates, plus pay for domain and hosting fees. The advantage of using WikiData is that the complete software and hardware infrastructure of the entire website is already established, generating no additional expenses. Concerning content, Ya-Ping also addressed why they selected WikiData over Wikipedia. This is primarily because Wikipedia’s content is basically corroborated by various reference sources and then presented in a descriptive format on the web for users to read and reference. For SLY, however, many of its artistic projects and creations are unilateral records or have supporting evidence from fairly limited sources, merely documenting event processes through materials that SLY has retained. Thus, documenting SLY’s project programs throughout the years should require a more emotionally expressive written approach. The original purpose of preserving SLY’s art archives on WikiData was simply to ensure a medium could maintain SLY’s content after the physical space concluded. However, throughout the process of organizing and uploading archival data and communicating across different disciplines, it not only created opportunities for international institutional connections but also enhanced local networking and increased public engagement. Ya-ping restructured SLY’s original annual project programs for collaborative execution with art spaces and community development organizations throughout Taiwan. Instead of focusing solely on artist capacity building, she sought to develop an approach akin to balanced news reporting, crafting novel methodologies in art criticism and curatorial studies that depart from traditional practices, thereby establishing a new discourse paradigm.
SLY Art Space was initially established as a collaborative space by like-minded artistic creators. Yet, influenced by broader environmental changes, upon completing its phased tasks, the organizational core found that continuously changing internal membership prevented the determination of an effective transformation mechanism. In decision-making aspects, the progressively declining consensus system resulted in the executive director position, once elected through voting, gradually transitioning to selection through appointment and voluntary service. In the shift from collective to individual, SLY cannot continue to be simply an art space that exists to provide exhibition and cooperation opportunities. For Ya-Ping, SLY was a gateway into the art industry when she joined in 2008 as a student from a non-art background. The knowledge transfer and learning from founding members provided crucial sustenance that allowed her to journey with SLY to this stage. In terms of the broader context, SLY and its physical space, perhaps having completed their phased objectives yet failing to achieve successful transformation, have become art historical traces, gradually being consigned to archives. Fortunately, this preserved content will be properly conserved through linkage and uploading to WikiData. In order to equally preserve SLY’s spirit and content across various media platforms, Ya-Ping also planned to consolidate the organized materials into a dedicated publication, showcasing SLY’s historical narrative through the concurrent presence of both physical and digital formats. Running concurrently was the renovation of existing annual projects through innovation: developing the former “Emerging Artists” group exhibition into an “Emerging Curators” project that examines the meaning and necessity of curators in art spaces through connections with other venues; meanwhile, the original “Interdisciplinary Arts Festival” has been restructured as “Negative Ion Newcomer Gathering,” aimed at cultivating novice writers interested in writing about art, culture, and social issues who lack publication experience. Though SLY has not implemented drastic organizational changes and innovations, by innovating project content, it has repositioned SLY’s standing and trajectory in the art industry, advancing toward greater public accessibility and international scope. Yet, innovation in project content fails to deliver more substantial income to SLY, and these innovative projects cannot be leveraged to develop a business model capable of ensuring the space’s financial stability. SLY must continue relying on grants from government and foundation sources. Under such circumstances, apart from proceeding with the aforementioned ongoing annual projects, digitization efforts, and physical publication plans, SLY anticipates gradually closing its physical space. With Bamboo Curtain Studio having concluded in June 2022, what kind of contemplation will SLY Art Space’s closure inspire in people who are presently running or wish to establish physical art spaces? Or perhaps, SLY Art Space’s closure is simply a tear shed by the times—profound yet falling with weightless grace.