Ren Rong's 'plant people' straddle East and West

The bookstore-affiliated gallery presents 82 woodcuts, iron sculpture and paper collages by Ren Rong, a Chinese artist residing in Germany. Ren Rong's work, on exhibition in Taiwan for the first time, is based on his famous design called "plant people" by the German critic Sepp Hiekisch-Picard or "hybrid creatures" by Shih Jui-jen (石瑞仁), a local art critic. Plant people are figures of organic human forms with long limbs stretching out like trees.

According to Li Xianting (栗憲庭), a US-based art critic and independent curator, Ren Rong's design of the plant people derive from traditional folk images, such as decorative paper cutouts for Chinese holidays and the Tibetan folk god "Dumu." Shih associates them with "mythological totems" and categorizes them as "surrealistic deified creatures such as unicorns, dragons, phoenixes and chimera." Or as Hiekisch-Picard says: "The plant people are a combination of hermaphroditic, floral and human forms."

Ren Rong presents his design of the plant people on painted collages or carves them out of wooden panels with a painted backgrounds. Some pieces are round and some are rectangular.

Hiekisch-Picard says Ren Rong's use of the round wooden plates have a twofold meaning. At one level, it is a "search for a new harmony between the medium of wood and the motive of the plant people."

In addition, the round form carries a semantic message as the symbol of the sun, which is the giver of life, and refers to the cosmic, polar power of yin and yang.

The rectangular wooden blocks, on the other hand, send out a different message. Li thinks that the twisting poses of Ren Rong's creatures, constrained in rectangular wooden frame, show a sense of repression.

Even more interesting is that Ren Rong's hybrid creatures or plant people may be a reflection of his current life situation as someone spanning two cultures.

"Ren Rong's creatures are metaphoric of the status of living forms that have deteriorated because of the restriction of environment," observed Shih. "His mixing of humans and trees can be said to be in a transitional status between animals and plants. The images of his creatures reveal a problematic situation as if they are going through a self-mutational process struggling to break from their current position into the next."

Ren Rong was born in 1960 in Nanjing, China and went to Germany in 1989. He characterizes the plant people as having great vitality, a statement that Shih echoes, saying plant people are "prototype creatures epitomizing strong will and energy." However, the 40-year-old artist is still on his way to finding a larger context to make his designs more meaningful.

"Ren Rong so far has not yet constructed a really persuasive system for presenting art. His work moves between metaphoric images and images designed purely for visual pleasure," commented Shih, who concluded that the resourceful artist needs to enrich the meaning of his work by connecting it with different contexts.