Paper short abstract:

Latour curated the 2020 Taipei Biennial, with which he planned to land on an East Asian critical zone. Expecting ANT to enter into a new episode, he almost missed the chance to justify it. This event is however a critical example directing to a future post-latourian ANT in this Far Orient region.

Paper long abstract:

The 2020 (2021) Taipei Biennial, co-curated by Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard, is titled "You and I don't Live on the Same Planet." Latour visited Taiwan in September 2019 to called up domestic artists and STSers to join this ANT 'show' in which he especially tried to duplicate a Negotiation Theatre (NT), as he had done at Nanterre, France in 2015. This 'from ANT to NT' performance created an opportunity to demonstrate ANT on the opposite side of the Earth. However, because of the pandemic and his health conditions, Latour could finally realize it remotely in the end of 2021. It is a 'successful' ANT performance, for just looking at the example of a group of engineering students from the south of Taiwan (epistemologically and physically far away from ANT) to act in a scene of NT in the most prestigious fine art Museum of Taipei. This late-latourian performance consists of three elements of ANT for its future implications in East Asia: ontological consistency, epistemological discontinuity and methodological plurality. Heterogeneous assemblage is not strange to East Asians: their dynamic worldview is consistent with ANT's ontological presupposition. However, ANT's challenges to modernity were hardly recognized as it is still a modern process of knowledge production. Fortunately, Latour's re-orientation of ANT to an art-based method softened the rigid settings of scientific methodology. In short, this ANT show shows its potentials for emancipating disciplinary constraints, enlarging scope of public issues, enlisting more domestic actors and enforcing art power in the East Asian region.