Art of “Made in Taiwan (MIT)” offers the Canberra audience an alternative to The Sight of Formosa (School of Art Gallery, 2011) and face to face. Contemporary Art from Taiwan (ANU Drill Hall Gallery, 2000), exhibitions which also showcased contemporary art from Taiwan.

While the Sight of Formosa and face to face posited Taiwanese art within an international (and largely) cutting-edge context, Art of “Made in Taiwan (MIT)” is unashamedly a celebration of current (-ish) two-dimensional art - ink-wash paintings, calligraphy, oil paintings, printmaking and graphic design.

Works in the exhibition date from the late 1980s to 2013 (with the majority clustering from 2010 to 2013).

The exhibiting artists are either members of, or have been selected by members of the Taiwan Academy of Fine Arts (TAFA), a group established in 2010 to promote the art forms enunciated above.

The exhibition in the not-easy space of the School of Art Gallery is a commanding and handsome presentation. As one would expect the quality and range of individual works vary.

The stylistic expressions and variations speak of the infiltration of the influence of Western art, particularly as manifested in both American and European painting from the 1950s to the 1990s. That said there is also a clearly “local” flavour to these infiltrations that raises them above cultural quotation to culturally questioned inclusion.

There are a number of strong works here. For me those that hold the most resonance are those that evoke their source in the culture of their origin. A particularly striking piece is Kuang-Nan Huang’s Rainbow (2009). This adopts the format of a flattened five-part screen. It is a celebratory red, overlaid with gold and silver gridded lines. The base occupies a very small percentage of the overall image. Silhouetted black mountains accompanied by gold calligraphic script offer stark contrast to the white-edged three right-hand panels (these covered with black calligraphy). This is a dramatic and commanding work, exemplary of the rich Chinese culture from which it originates.

A work formally similar to the preceding, but a nevertheless startlingly individual work, is Shiou-Ping Liao’s Gate of Prosperity(2010). This is a large work – 162 x 422cm – and impressively grand in cultural reference. Red once again predominates as background and symbolic reference.

Each panel holds a central motif (black and gold) that contrasts and stands out against its red ground. Abstraction and figuration play off one another within these panels, but the over-riding control of the red (subtly tonal but manifestly present) maintains aesthetic resolution.

Ming-Shyan Chiang’s Spring of Hong Village (2012) is visually far-removed from the above. Culturally the connections reverberate. The format is the same – essentially horizontal – 95 x 215cm. Abstraction has no role here.

A conglomeration of clearly articulated buildings, horizontally aligned in that delineation reflected, occupy the pictorial space. The geometry of built architecture is played off against the subtle calligraphies of text that sit in the top left-hand corner.

This is an exhibition about the way cultural/political influence infiltrates and is then assimilated. Influence is not simply accepted. It is examined and adapted (or not) as a way of giving expression to a culture – that of Taiwan – that is concurrently about its origins and about its present and future states.

As well as being an examination of a particular (and perhaps partisan) view of Taiwanese pictorial culture this is an exhibition that speaks of the universal importance of artistic expression to the human condition.

Art of “Made in Taiwan (MIT)” School of Art Gallery, ANU College of Arts and Social Science. Building 105, ANU, Childers Street, Acton. Tuesday – Friday 10.30am – 5pm, Saturday noon – 5pm. Until May 31.