There is a lot of bad art probing notions of superficiality, but in a new show called Zoo Part 2, Malaysian-born photographer Hooi-wah Suan (全會華) has managed to discard the cliches and present a subtle, outwardly simple and intensely gratifying take on the normally overplayed theme. It shows at the Taiwan International Visual Arts Center (TIVAC) until Aug. 1.
The exhibition consists of 32 photographs of animals taken at three zoos: Taipei's Mucha Zoo, the Tokyo Zoo and the Paris Zoo. The prints are small, either 5x7s or panoramic 3x9s, and sepia-toned. As objects and in addition to being photographs they are indeed objects, they seem to be both worth cherishing and worth studying, ornaments and documents. They have the quaintness of ceramic collectibles and the remoteness of 19th century documentary photographs. This sensibility of oppositions creates a tension in the photos, both individually and as a series, and out of that tension comes the work's extremely interesting message.
But before jumping ahead to this "all-important artist's message" -- the subject matter of the photos runs the gamut of standard zoo sights; there is an elephant, a lion, a rhino, an alligator, and so on. It's exactly what a zoo catalogue is supposed to be. And like a hypothetical zoo catalogue, the animals are centered within their picture frames, or rather cubby-holed and encapsulated -- and here's the unique and self-conscious decision of the artist -- by the photographs themselves.
So Suan is able to turn what would otherwise be a simple photo series of zoo animals into something much more philosophical. He takes a group of animals, each of which is caught in the cage of the photograph just as much as it is caught in the cage of the zoo, and uses it to examine the weird relationship between unnatural environments and those who live in them. Only in two of the 32 photos are animals shown without the trappings of their captivity (and I'd say one of those, a shot of birds silhouetted against a sunset, is an anomaly and should have been omitted). Deer stare from behind a fence; a fish swims in a tank; primates stare at rope swings; and flamingos parade in a field, where alas, there is a stone wall in the distance behind them. A few pictures focus simply and exclusively on the zoos' environments in themselves -- a birdless birdhouse with a forest mural for a back wall, a monkey gym with no monkeys.
Like modern masters Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed both wax museum personages and wildlife dioramas in natural history museums, and Sherry Levine, who photographed other photographs, Suan is able to use his photos to look closely at the nature of artificiality. The environments of zoos are simulated, yet the animals are real, and as real animals, must interact with their environments. In that sense, zoos possess a real (not an artificial) ecology. So who is not to say that zoos, these animal museums, do not count as "natural habitats"? Unlike the swarming shutterbugs that undoubtedly surrounded Suan at the zoos where he photographed, he decided not to crop out the cages, fences and moats and perpetuate the illusion that the animals live in their ancestral jungles, plains and forests. Instead, he presents them as being in Tokyo, Paris and Taipei -- location names that serve as the only basis for the title of each photo.
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