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Virtual impossibility
In `Human Disqualified,' Taipei denizens are confronted with empty streets in broad daylight, prompting them to reflect on the love-hate relationship they have with their city
By Vico Lee
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Dec 30, 2001, Page 19
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PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
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"It's so completely silent. So silent ... that it seems almost violent," pondered Yuan Goang-ming (袁廣鳴) at IT Park (伊通公園) on one of the three pieces in his current exhibition, "Human Disqualified" (人間失格).
City Disqualified (城市失格) consists of a silent projection of a digitally altered photograph of one of Taipei's busiest areas.
The silence, both literal and figurative, is what disqualifies the manipulated image of Hsimenting from being a cityscape.
What's on the screen can be quite disorienting, as the projection of the busiest section of Hsimenting has been manipulated to show a bizarre scene: the concrete jungle on a clear afternoon, all the stores are open and there is no sense that anything is wrong, but something's missing -- any trace of people. There's no traffic, no parked cars, and no pedestrians can be seen.
"It's a classic concept to show the city streets with no human presence. It dates back to the beginning of last century with photographers shooting empty city streets at the very early morning or the dead of night," Yuan told the Taipei Times.
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Artist Yuan Goang-ming's Disqualified Digitalization, above and left, shows an empty Hsimenting.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
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However, not until recently, thanks to advances in digital photography and image-manipulation software, has it been possible to create an image of daytime downtown streets without people or traffic.
The eerie image is projected on the screen in an equally eerie way. Yuan uses software to project the photo onto the screen pixel by pixel, and projecting the entire photo takes nearly three hours. To see such a familiar cityscape in such an unprecedented way may be disorienting, but its lyrical quality is simply beautiful, rendering the viewers speechless.
| Art Notes: |
| What: ``Human Disqualified,'' Yuan Goang-ming solo exhibition Where: IT Park, 41 I-tong St. (伊通街41號)
When: Until Jan. 12
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This photo of Hsimenting is also part of Disqualified Digitalization (數位失格), which contains a similarly manipulated image of Chunghsiao E. Rd. devoid of people and traffic. Seeing the two photos, one hopes that this really is their own fresh, clean city. But it is, paradoxically, a city "disqualified" exactly because there are no human beings present.
The title piece, Human Disqualified, is a multimedia installation based on the same Hsimenting image. Using transparent ink and phosphor powder, Yuan turned the photo into a silk print on acrylic board. Set up in a dark screening room, the image surfaces and glows for several seconds in the dark after a fluorescent tube sweeps past it like a scanner.
Most of the time viewers see only the tube sliding back and forth, while the image emerges once in a while briefly before disappearing again under the fluorescent light.
"To some extent, this expresses my memory of Hsimenting, where I used to hang out a lot in high school years," Yuan said. "The landscape in my memory keeps passing over and re-emerging and passing over and again emerging."
Like a departing soul seeing his or her own body, one sees a city devoid of human beings, the spirit of a city. Whether the city is going to decompose after its soul has gone or it will gain a new life after this catharsis is left to each viewer's imagination.
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