Trans-Guanyin is a curatorial project by the TGY Collective that reimagines the site-specific resonance of Treasure Hill Artist Village through the lens of profound trans-curatorship and extends to multiple sites throughout Taipei.
Drawing inspiration from Treasure Hill Guanyin Temple, resting on the hillside with foundations reaching back over three centuries to the early Han settlements of the Qing Dynasty, the exhibition insists that this terrain is neither simple nor neutral. It is built on settler colonialism, whose ongoing transformations continue to naturalize and obscure the dispossession and reordering of indigenous land, life, and spiritual relations. Against this backdrop, this exhibition approaches the upaya of Bodhisattva Guanyin, revered for their boundless compassion and mercy, as a methodology for queered, inclusive, and compassionate curatorship.
From their origins as the male Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara to their current manifestation as a female form, and their coexisting iterations as other benevolent deities, Guanyin can be understood as a transformative and translative being who sees and hears the cries of the world. Guanyin is, more precisely, trans-, a figure that resists binaries in both their spiritual nature and iconography. Trans-Guanyin is thus not a fixed identity but a relational process of becoming, a transit across limits that reconfigures relations rather than settling them. To approach Guanyin as a curatorial strategy, and upaya as art, is to ask how a world might be reoriented through acts of mediation that, like a curatorial gesture, remain attentive and responsive.
By embodying Guanyin and negotiating situated positionalities across geographies, disciplines, and political contexts, and in awareness not only of the interpositionality towards each other and themselves, but also in relation to the logic of the neighborhood, the TGY Collective orients this exhibition through a democratic commoning where boundaries remain open, and an organic coexistence unfolds, expanding as a synesthetic sensory field across various encounters.
Understanding the untranslatability of cultures and considering this as a queer failure, cure, and care becomes a shared condition of coexisting and co-producing, offering new ways of making connections and building relationships across, through, and beyond cultural, linguistic, and relational boundaries. Through artists, curators, audiences, local residents, and satellite architecture and surrounding environments, Trans-Guanyin emerges as an enduring relational current, in which togetherness sustains difference and ethical relations remain alive.