Tu Pei-shih’s (杜珮詩) four-minute-plus animation Another Beautiful Day begins with a few happy villagers living in a lush forest where apples and strawberries grow and doves and colorful balloons glide across the sky. Suddenly everything is ablaze. Fighter planes and gigantic flies turn this never-never land into a hell over which the flags of the world’s hegemonic powers flutter.
Such are the contrasts expressed in the 28-year-old artist’s solo exhibition, Happy Bubble Life (快樂泡沫生活), currently on display at Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術中心), an intimate gallery that opened last August and focuses on contemporary young artists in Taiwan.
Tu’s mixed-media and animation works have a deceptive fairy-tale look. Her palettes are dominated with saccharine pinks, bright yellows, blues and greens. Her cartoonish characters and infantile images of flowers, fruits and trees look like they were cut out of illustrated children’s books. The sounds of insects and birds chirping in the background soothe visitors.
The artist’s visual vocabulary is the basis of a fantasy life that is perpetually imagined and manufactured in a capitalistic society. Under its veneer of perfectness, ugliness and absurdity intrude on this manufactured world.
Who Cares About the Real, a four-and-half-minute long animation, takes as its muse a caricature published by The Guardian in which the G8 leaders are seen discussing world hunger and international food
shortages while enjoying a lavish dinner banquet.
The four-minute long Uneasy Journey begins with a utopian setting that is blessed with singing orioles, flowers and white clouds, but which quickly deteriorates into a gloomy rubbish dump. The work is based on a news report on how a poor Chinese town in Guangdong Province became the world’s biggest dumping ground for electronic waste produced by developed countries.
Though seemingly preoccupied with the injustices and suffering caused by global capitalism, Tu said her work’s main motif is the tension between what is real and what is imagined.
“The primary concern in my art is about society’s fantasy life nourished by capitalism,” Tu said.
This theme is reflected on the types of media and materials Tu culls to make her art and the way she works with them. The artist uses decorative patterns, garish materials and pleasant imagery to deliberately pander to popular tastes. Tu deems animation’s innocent and fairy-tale-like qualities applicable to the making of fantasy, or in her own words, to create a “misconceived naivete.”
For an artist who is conscious of the correspondence between form and content, it seems only natural that Tu makes her art works by hand, image by image, or frame by frame, as if they belong to a handicraft tradition.
“Audiences and critics are smart. What will they think if you claim to criticize capitalist society but spend big bucks making your art?” Tu said.
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