Close to the front door of the first building in the Huashan Art District is a printed sign that reads "Dying right here is strictly forbidden."
Not that this is apropos of anything in particular, except to say that there are some very strange goings on at this sprawling and partly derelict cluster of buildings -- formerly a brewery -- at the bottom of Taipei's Pateh Rd.
I'd been lured in by Look at the Comet Man, which promised a unique melding of installation art and live music. And my first glimpse of the show, at a small press conference on a rainy Saturday afternoon, confirmed the impression conferred by the sign I'd passed on the way in: There are some very strange goings on at the Huashan Art District.
By Chris Taylor
For a start, having limited experience of installation art -- mostly drawn from Yitong St's charming IT Park bar and studio, where you are forced to wander through the art to get to the beers -- I was finding it difficult at first to figure out where the art was. I was sitting on a tiny chair in a massive hanger-like building festooned with what looked to be 7-Eleven rain ponchos with inflated balloons for heads, back-lit with fluorescent strip- lights masked with blue cellophane. And it was only after a few minutes into the preamble by artist and show director, Hsieh Su-lien, that I realized that the rain ponchos, balloons and cellophane-masked strip lights were the art. The rain ponchos and balloons were the comet men, and the blue lights would, when evening came, Hsieh was telling us, cast a deep blue glow over everything that would suggest the overarching heavens, and also equally a womb-like atmosphere.
It has to be said, once you forget that you're looking at balloons and rain ponchos, the comet men do seem to take on an ethereal quality, with their translucent, formless bodies and featureless heads. They begin to look like wandering spirits. And that, according to the artist, is the point.
The project, she says, grew out of homesickness.
By Chris Taylor
"I was studying in Europe," says Hsieh, "and I felt homesick there. But when I came back to Taiwan, I felt homesick here too."
"For Europe?" jokes Jack Chang, the composer who wrote the music to accompany Hsieh's exhibition.
"No," she says without missing a beat. "I've always felt homesick."
The subject of homesickness will draw Hsieh into a complex personal theory about the origins of life on earth. In Hsieh's scheme of things, human beings have evolved from cells that came to earth on a comet, and those cells still roam the universe on other comets. In that sense, as her Chinese-language Web page explains, perhaps we all have alien origins. Hence her feelings of homesickness for a place she cannot find, and hence, as her press release puts it, "mankind's vague angst and yearning for their distant roots from which they have been long detached."
Hsieh is little concerned about whether her theories have any basis in science. She's an artist who lives alone in Yangmingshan. "I like to be alone," she'll say. "I often talk to the sky. I think maybe someone is up there. Maybe we all come from somewhere up there."
Composer Jack Chang has an infectious smile and the air of someone who's along for the ride rather than a true believer. But it's clear that Hsieh's musings have provided him with an occasion to tackle big issues, to paint with broad strokes.
"I was inspired by the feeling of outer space," he says. "I wrote the first section with the idea of the very beginning, when everything was chaos. The second piece is a comet man travelling across space. And the third part is the return, the going back."
Hsieh believes that her fusion of installation art and music is a first for Taipei. She says she chose a musical accompaniment because she wanted her exhibition to do more than simply display her vision of life evolved from cell-bearing comets. She wanted the exhibition to attempt communication with wherever our remote origins might lie. And to do that she clearly couldn't use spoken language.
"With music we can communicate across cultures," she says. "We can listen to the music of other countries and have a feeling for their place. So I thought music was the best way to communicate with the comet men."
Does it work?
At the Saturday night premiere a small gathering of about 50 people milled around, craning their necks at the floating comet men while Jack Chang and two other musicians pounded an upright piano and thrashed a small drum kit. As Hsieh had promised, the blue lighting cast an unearthly glow over the proceedings. The comet men seemed to float in space overhead, while Chang's musical accompaniment, at times frenetic, at times almost lilting, provided an element of drama to the proceedings. It was almost like being present at the inception of a tribal ritual of origin, watching the birth of a mythology.
But we were in Taipei watching the modern artist at work with rain ponchos, balloons, cellophane, a piano, drums, ideas, and dying was strictly forbidden, whatever that means.
Hsieh Su-Lien's comet men will be on display until April 7 at the Huashan Art District (1, Pateh Rd., Sec. 1, Taipei) from 10am to 5pm. Tel: 2392-6180
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