Last October, the erstwhile lead singer of the Talking Heads, David Byrne, published a book called New Sins as part of the Valencia Biennial. Bound in a red leather cover with a gold inscribed title, the volume was designed to resemble a pocket New Testament or Bible. For the duration of the Spanish city's art fair, the book was evangelically placed in hotel rooms and distributed to tourists free of charge. Its contents inverted traditional notions of virtue and vice in an attempt to prompt a reevaluation of what is really valued in contemporary society.
Wang Jun-jieh's (王俊傑) new exhibition at the IT Park gallery, Microbiology Association: Hotel Project (Bibless), includes a coincidental vision of a substitute Bible, the Bibless (神經指南), or Bible-less. Like Byrne's New Sins, the book is placed at a bedside table. The setting, however, is the IT Park art gallery, which has been converted into a hotel room for the exhibition.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WANG JUN-JIEH
The crisis both artists parody with their mock-religious handbooks is the spiritual vacuum to be found in a contemporary and increasingly secular world. Byrne's text inquires into value revisionism sardonically. Among other things, he revises the map of Dante's Inferno to include market researchers, journalists and other present day occupations, while spending most of his time making a street-level appraisal of the hypocrisies of contemporary "vices," including ambition, charity, hope and numerous other traits that have traditionally been held as virtues.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WANG JUN-JIEH
Wang's book and installation, meanwhile, make their comments through facetious reflections of contemporary life. He presents a luxury hotel room full of pleasurable simulacra, like porno movies and ocean sounds.
At the bedside, his Bibless reads more like an inflight magazine than a holy text, full of entertainment guides, a corporate profile and feature articles (like Fantastic Tale: When Sluttish Girl Met Macho Man). The book describes itself as "transcending pure religion ... a multipurpose guide containing wisdom as well as tips for entertainment and survival to counter the adverse living environment."
PHOTO COURTESY OF WANG JUN-JIEH
There is nothing didactic or edifying anywhere in Bibless, unless, perhaps, if the work is considered in the sense of deepest irony. Wang's outward purpose is pure, vapid titillation and distraction.
GRAPHIC COURTESY OF WANG JUN-JIEH
The platform for Wang's parody is the Microbiology Association (MA), a fictitious corporation that that he has been developing through exhibitions over the past two years. Its setting, admittedly, might as well have been compiled from computer game prologues and outtakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies -- an ambiguous and post-apocalyptic near-future of vanished oceans, in which humanity suffers from plagues of manic depression and an utter dependence on technology.
According to Wang's myth, it was out of these conditions of contemporary despair that the MA emerged with the preeminent goal of enabling people "to live a pure, strong and virtual life."
Much stronger than the generic sci-fi background against which the MA is set is the way Wang has proliferated the fabricated corporation through his exhibitions. Through various shows, the MA has bloomed through a stream of logos, brochures, brands, corporate trees, advertisements and consumer products. In each case, appropriate media, including graphic design, computer animation, embroidered bath towels and everything right down to Wang's own name card, have been used to create the various artifacts of the MA world. The installations themselves act as a threshold between the fiction of the MA and ostensible reality. In other words, in the gallery, viewers can see the real and tangible artifacts of Wang's imagined institution.
For example, at last year's Taipei Biennial, Wang produced a line of MA clothes that gallery visitors could pull of the rack and try on. The installation's focus was on "clothing as interface," or how we use our wardrobes to interact with the world around us.
In the current exhibition, the central artifact is the Bibless. Wang uses it to zoom in on the problem of spiritual anxiety, a problem which in the MA paradigm is necessarily atheistic, because in a corporate universe, what other kind of spiritual anxiety could be possible?
He chooses a hotel room as the penultimate location for this existential crisis, probably for the same reason that real evangelical Christians put real Bibles in real hotels. Generic and alien, a hotel room represents a place where people tend to come detached from their normal lives. According to the Bibless, this condition pushes individuals into a "primitive lonely state" full of unfulfilled "longing for community, happiness, preoccupation, wealth and indifference."
The comic coup of the whole installation is that it is the Bibless, with its erotic stories and hotel shopping pages, that is supposed to relieve the spiritual unrest. Wang has always been adept at eliciting the fallacies of commercial, culture and virtual surrogates.
His past works have included the online travel agency Neon Urlaub, which had a real Web site where people could make real reservations on fake tours, and FOCL (For Our Consumer Loving), a company that produced a cooking show on how to make artificial food. But it is in the Bibless that the phony virtual promises of the corporate overlords seem most obviously empty.
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