The Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) in Guandu (關渡) turns 30 this year, and to celebrate, the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館) is holding a group exhibition by some of the university’s more recognizable alumni, many of whom have been featured in these pages over the past few years.
Manifestation of Homunculi (藝變者遊行), as the exhibition is titled, presents work by 45 Taipei National University of the Arts graduates — Kuo Wei-kuo (郭維國), Lee Ming-chung (李民中), Liu Shih-tung (劉時棟) and Hou Chun-ming (侯俊明), to name a few — spanning three generations, who hail from across Taiwan. The paintings, sculptures, installations and video were chosen to reveal the richness and diversity of the imaginations of their creators, who combine different art trends and genres, whether East or West, traditional, modern or contemporary, to create original works by artists who emerged from one of Taiwan’s most prestigious art schools.
The exhibition is notable for the outstanding quality of the work on display — and the annoying, though sadly all-too-common, inability of the curators to offer a simple explanation of what they are trying to achieve. Instead, we get vague explanations like this introductory sentence from the curator’s statement:
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
“Mysterious, ancient alchemy and the precise neurosurgery of today are two disciplines that seem to stand in contradiction with each other, yet they invariably share the same imagery of Homunculi.” Fair enough, but what does that have to do with the works on display? They don’t say, and raising Carl Gustav Jung’s relatively complicated theory of individuation, in the same paragraph, provides little illumination.
Other statements, such as the “artist is like a neurologist, studying [the] the brain with [a] particular technique that is unknown to themselves,” seem written to perplex rather than edify. When they refer to the generation of the artist and region from which the hail, they write “spatial” and “temporal,” not space and time like the rest of us.
The six sections, each following “alchemical procedures,” bear equally opaque clues: Calcination and Dissolution, Separation and Conjunction, Fermentation and Distillation, Coagulation and Digestion, Sublimation and Ceration , and Multiplication and Projection.” Why not just state, in simple terms, what each section represents in relation to the artists contained therein? Looking at the exhibition brochure, which shows an image of each artwork, does reveal a clear narrative line.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
Calcination and Dissolution, for example, emphasizes installation and performance art, as seen through Taiwanese culture. Wu Sih-chin’s (吳思嶔) installation Cemetery (墓園, 2009), displays several miniature graves each of which has an insect encased in plastic resin. Murmurs of Living Dead Doll (鬼娃悄悄說, 2006), a performance art piece by Cheng Shih-chun (鄭詩雋) shown here in photographs and a video, depicts the artist dressed as a spirit medium committing suicide.
Multiplication and Projection illustrates how folk religion (both orthodox and heterodox) and traditional Chinese culture exert a profound influence on the artists, while at the same time experimenting with modernist genres culled from the West but transformed into an artistic language visibly Taiwanese.
Yang Mao-lin’s (楊茂林) pop-influenced Panda Sarasvati-Monroe II (技藝天熊貓夢露 II, 2010) made from stainless steel and titanium, depicts the iconic image of the wind lifting up Marilyn Monroe’s dress while standing on a cicada and suggests that our contemporary pop stars are worshipped as religious idol. Yao Jui-chung’s (姚瑞中) satirical Beyond the Human Being — I Trust in God ( 人下人 ─ 愛戳死的狗, 2001), a large-scale drawing of a human figure with dog’s head sodomizing a metaphorical devil, rams home the idea that charlatanism goes hand in hand with higher forms of spirituality.
There is much else to see here — Sublimation and Ceration could be subtitled Taiwanese expressionism and abstraction while Separation and Conjunction could also be dubbed Taiwan interiors/exteriors — and this reviewer suggests that visitors take a quick look at the well-illustrated handout first to gain a sense of the themes, genres and mediums explored in each section, and then proceed to look at the works.
The art world — artists, curators, critics and academics — often laments the fact that the visual arts play only a minor, indeed largely irrelevant, role in contemporary social discourse. Manifestation of Homunculi is a textbook example as to why this might be: rarefied passages by curators that do little to explain why we, the general public, might want to look at the works on display. Consequently, we walk out of the museum wondering what differentiates TNUA graduates from those of other schools.
Creators of Dialogue (創造對話語言者)
Much like Manifestation of Homunculi, the exhibition essay for Creators of Dialogue (創造對話語言者), a four-man show of new media art, quells the conversation before it can start because we are too busy trying to unravel increasingly abstract clauses.
“The most imperative issue facing our technology-driven world is how to escape from the establishment of scientific jargon and use relational relationships to redefine the culture and context of technology,” states the exhibition introduction.
How do the curators propose to escape this scientific jargon? By replacing it, as is obvious, with theoretical jargon, typically of the nominalized variety (“instrumentalization has already become an amorphous realm”), while obsessing over the impossibility of objectivity (“We can no longer disregard the objectiveness of science”), which, aside from certain graduate school programs, went out of fashion at the end of the last century.
This reviewer has difficulty with most new media art. Too often its conceptual foundations resemble the French new novel (nouveau roman) of Robbe-Grillet, whose work sought to purge subjectivity (with all its human foibles of plot and characterization) from the text. And much like the new novel, the work by artists in Creators of Dialogue exists in a perpetual present of immediate sensation.
That being said, Way Der-lor’s (魏德樂) Program Coding (程式編碼, 2012) is pretty damn cool. Using sensory technology, a screen displays text that collapses into a fiery outline and eventually disintegrates (“deconstructs”) when touched, suggesting that virtual phenomena are an ideal metaphor for the transitoriness of existence.
Sun Shih-wei’s (孫士韋) video Who’s Who in a Sports Video? (運動轉播影片中。究竟誰是誰?, 2012) links up moving images of basketball players with text on the same screen in a multitasking virtual collage that is meant to create a conversation between the different mediums. But aside from the obvious consumer applications — stats about the players — what’s the dialogue about?
This makes statements like the following quite odd: “Unlike the opportunists of Silicon Valley (equivocal personalities) who use system-level language to focus on capital gains or achieve political objectives during the twentieth century, new media artists are ‘interlocutors’ or ‘LINKuistrists’ who place their attention on global disasters and emphasize respecting individual values.”
A noble gesture, certainly. But as this exhibition reveals new media art remains fixated on information, gimmickry and technology at the expense of what makes much art interesting: the human subject.
Sunyata (造空者)
Perhaps the curators of Manifestations of Homunculi and Creators of Dialogue should have first taken a peek at the clear and concise (though syntactically bizarre) write-up for Sunyata (造空者), a solo exhibition of work by minimalist abstract artist Chu Wei-bor (朱為白).
Chu’s oeuvre can be divided into three categories: geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and realism. For the roughly dozen works on display, the museum focuses on his geometric abstract canvases; works that follow in the American minimalist tradition that emerged in the 1950s, and here are complimented by the Buddhist notion of emptiness, from which the exhibition’s title is derived.
White on Red (紅中白, 1970) illustrates Chu’s conviction in the innate power of the painting medium to raise consciousness with simple shapes and colors. The painting is predominately made up of red, but here and there the white of the canvas emerges, in the process drawing the viewer’s attention to the medium of painting itself.
In Slope (坡道, 1995), he cuts vertical lines into stretched linen and then juxtaposes red and black paint underneath. The torn surface evokes the simple brushstrokes of Chinese calligraphy, while the black and red coloring represent color choices that are a nod to lacquer and seal engraving, lending it an attractive graphic presence that is as deceptively uncomplicated as a haiku.
Though the size of Sunyata is a small, Chu’s controlled use of the medium and meditative nature of the visual language employed may just add a few years on to your life expectancy.
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