The mystery of the spectacle

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Wang Ting-yu (王挺宇) admits that he deliberately conceals his true intentions from gallerygoers, who are likely to look upon his latest series of oil paintings as merely the pictorial embodiment of the artist’s personal dreams and fantasies.

One work depicts what looks like an ancient landscape in the middle of which a mysterious crystal rises like a stalagmite with the full moon floating above. Another shows a group of hunters posing happily with their dead quarry in a burned-out forest.

Explanatory notes purport to fill in the gaps concerning where and how these seemingly inexplicable events happened in a quasi-objective manner that mimics news reporting. Wang’s monochromatic, almost sepia, palette conveys a sense of photographic realism. But the complete absence of perspective constantly reminds visitors of his works’ fictional nature.

The interplay between the real and

non-real is underlined in the 28-year-old artist’s solo exhibition, The World Mystery (世界之謎), currently on display at Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術中心).

“I don’t see my works merely as oil paintings. My interest lies in images, and [for this particular series of works], how the media use images to construct a world,” Wang said.

Wang based the characters in his paintings on found images he culled from magazines and the Internet. For Fishing Miracle, Wang Googled “John fishing” and used photographs he found on the Web to paint a group of fishermen posing with their catch. For Sky Worried and Silent Fall, Wang flipped through issues of Next Magazine looking for snapshots of couples that he transformed into a scene of people standing by their cars amid a landscape rent by cracks and fissures that seem to have resulted from a natural catastrophe. The characters appear to be waiting for some sort of miracle to happen.

“When I put together all these people who had been photographed at different times and places a story begins to take shape. Some people seem to be looking up at the sky and some appear agitated. From their expressions and gestures I can imagine the kind of worlds they live in,” Wang explained.

The artist, however, leaves clues to his characters’ origins in the real world. Unlike their surroundings, which are fleshed out in several layers of paint, the figures themselves are sketched simply in a few brushstrokes. Only experienced gallerygoers notice the difference, Wang said.

For not-so-experienced visitors, it’s fun enough to be charmed by these imagined worlds, which feel mythical and yet oddly familiar. The backdrop in one painting looks like a site used for a ritual, another mimics a tourist destination, and a third recalls a disaster area. The unifying theme running through all of these works is that the characters in them seem drawn to these sites by some inexplicable force. Critics have noted that Wang’s paintings re-create the supernatural and mysterious sensations photography evoked when it first appeared. Wang, however, says the experience he aims to replicate is that of viewing a spectacle as presented through the lens of the mass media. In so doing he hopes to encourage viewers to question society’s obsession with these spectacles and how the way in which reality is represented in the media determines how they themselves view the world.

For Moo-vei Ricpoche’s Psychic Shoot ─ Final Scenery (目費仁波切靈視攝影—最後風景系列), a series of photographic works that won first place at last year’s Taipei Art Awards, Wang created a fictional Buddhist master, or Rinpoche, named Moo-vei who is able to photograph the last image people see before dying. The visions captured by the Rinpoche are in fact the final scenes of movies Wang photographed from a television screen. The names of the deceased and their death dates were randomly picked from The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).