No Masters in the Contemporary: Decentralized Collective Creation

“─Contemporary has come to designate something more than simply the art of the present moment. In my view, moreover, it designates less a period than what happens after there are no more periods in some master narrative of art, and less a style of making art than a style of using styles.” —Arthur Danto, After the End of Art

In this seminar, Chia-Hsing Ho, designer of Timonium Lake, and Chien-Hung Huang, Director of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, explored how creators might orient themselves and engage in collective creative practices in the “current” moment—particularly within a contemporary context where traditional ideological markers have dissolved.

The modernist masters were pioneers who defined the styles and ideologies of their era. As art transitioned into the contemporary period, the notion of fixed indicators within specific domains has gradually faded. The prevailing perspective shifted—from singular points to expansive networks, from focused clarity to diffuse plurality—signalling a broader divergence in the moral compass of society. Questions such as “What is good or bad?”, “Can such values be defined?”, and “What does it mean to be contemporary?” have become central to artistic and cultural discourse.

In this seminar, Chia-Hsing Ho demonstrated how graphic designers can respond to cultural shifts through the visual styling work he has developed over many years. Meanwhile, Chien-Hung Huang, drawing from the framework of French philosophy, offered a reinterpretation of art shaped by historical transformations in global politics, economics, and society.