Humor meets a sharp eye

Visitors to Dimension Art Center's (帝門藝術中心) current exhibition are getting a bird's eye view of Taiwanese society and its eclectic culture. Folk deities dance with your next-door neighbor while historical figures sing side by side with Ronald McDonald. You may well find images of yourself among the crowd staring at you in some panels at The Populace (普羅眾生) exhibition.

The first solo exhibition by Hong Yi (洪易), a residential artist at Stock 20 (二十號倉庫) in Taichung, displays 37 of his works created since 2000. Having owned eight tea houses and pubs and one museum in this vibrant city in the past 10 years, Hong Yi's works are mostly scenes he saw there tinged with humorous imagination.

Untrained in fine arts, Hong, 23 at the time, opened his first tea house on the walls of which he hung prints by his favorite artists like Henri Mattisse, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and others. He went on to treat his businesses as works of performance art. Doctor's Room, his first pub, had all waitresses wearing nurse uniforms. It was shut down by the Taichung City government the next year for its "abnormal appeal."

Indignant, Hong established Church. This time, he had the pub's staff garbed as nuns and monks. Every weekend, he invited local artists to perform body-painting on models he hired. When the police raided the pub and found one of the models to be under-age, Hong's "work" was shut down and Hong was sentenced to six months in jail.

"The ruling stated that I created `obscene objects,'" Hong said with a sad laugh, recalling how ridiculous he thought it at the time. Attributing the incident to bad luck, he was indignant and disillusioned about running pubs, and decided to pursue the art profession.

Encompassing sketches, ink, acrylic and mixed-media works, Hong's works fascinate viewers with their bold colors, untamed vitality and humorous sarcasm. These qualities set him apart from the many Western-trained artists from Hong's generation and prompted Dimension to organize the exhibition.

Last year, Hong presented a work in a group exhibition that caught the eye of Christine Chen (陳綾蕙), the gallery's general manager. "It was a colorful sculpture of a dog in the folk style, but he had stuck his mini-photos all over it. It was an interesting and fresh artistic expression," said a staff member of the gallery. A similar sculpture is on show in the gallery's window.

With no academic background, Hong has a intuitive way of artistic creation. "Hong's works consist of things in daily life that people can easily relate to without strenuous deciphering," the staff member said.

Chinese Horoscope, a 2m-tall sculpture in the center of the gallery, is Hong's reflection on an exclusively Chinese subject. "Although Western horoscopes have become popular with young people, my friends usually talk about the 12 animals instead. It is an interesting way to know someone's personality or their age. It's purely Chinese," Hong said.

Chinese culture also inspired Hong in his use of color schemes. Although the colors, which mirror folk temple decorations, are considered tacky by some critics, Hong values them as quintessentially Taiwanese. "If we dust off the age-old dirt off the temple walls, we will reveal what beautiful things we have here," Hong said.

Keen on presenting the country's aesthetic values, Hong said that other artists have to make more efforts to create something particular to Taiwan.