Installation art

An installation is not a set of separate artworks but one whole experience, centred on how the viewer perceives it. The artist Ilya Kabakov said that the main actor in the total installation, the centre toward which everything is addressed, is the viewer. Forerunners include Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau and the “environments” Allan Kaprow made from about 1957; from the 1960s installation became a major strand of modern art. In Taipei, Chen Chao-hua uses altered compressors and condensing techniques so that frost forms and melts again and again in the gallery, and in When Tomorrow is Forgotten at MOCA Taipei, one artist, drawing on their own care work, brings the spaces, objects, and traces of labour from care settings into the exhibition. A label reading “dimensions variable” means the size of the work changes with the space it is shown in.

Pause at the entrance to take in the whole space before you step in; once inside, notice what changes as you move.

Where does this work begin, and where does it end?