In his introduction to the History of Chinese Photography (中國攝影史), Juan I-jong (阮義忠) discusses how people in late 19th- and early 20th-century China worried that a camera’s flash and the subsequent photo would capture their soul.
Painter, photographer and digital artist Wu Tien-chang’s (吳天章) images in a way do exactly that. But rather than possessing an individual’s immaterial nature, Wu digs down into the depths of the Taiwan’s hybrid culture and resurfaces with digitally created “paintings” that explore the country’s shifting identities. Eight of his most recent works are currently on display at Main Trend Gallery until Dec. 13.
“Taiwan is a replacement culture (替代文化),” Wu, 53, said over coffee and cigarettes at the gallery last week.
He explained that Taiwan is a conglomeration of the many different cultures — Aboriginal, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese — that have lived on and controlled the island, where one culture replaces or is superimposed on previous cultures.
“This is why it is difficult to establish any sense of identity,” he said.
It has been more than a decade since Wu held a solo exhibition. Main Trend, a converted factory and Taiwan’s largest art gallery, provides an ideal setting for his monumental digital images.
The works hung in the gallery reflect Wu’s ongoing preoccupation with Taiwan’s past and present and can be seen as a kind of pastiche of the island’s many cultural influences. The resulting layers of meaning require considerable patience to deconstruct.
Wu’s oeuvre can be described as portrait painting. Whether in the five overtly political oils he painted during the Martial Law period that depict different stages of former president Chiang Ching-guo’s (蔣經國) life or in his works from the 1990s that employ portrait photography to illustrate how consumerism overshadows Taiwan’s search for its own identity, his works are all an investigation of individuals’ places in a society that they create but that also has been forced upon them.
More recently, Wu has dispensed with oil painting and portrait photography altogether in favor of digital images that he manipulates on a computer but calls “painting.”
Characters that wouldn’t look out of place in a Barnum and Bailey sideshow appear in burlesque poses in front of backdrops common in early portrait photography (though here with turbulent landscapes or haunting clouds of purple, blue and shades of dark gray). The Blind Men and the Blind Street (瞎子摸巷) is indicative of Wu’s visual style, in which images are finished with a surface that resembles the metallic sheen of chrome and where clownish figures dressed in costumes culled from different cultures are seen attempting to overcome some apparent or vague obstacle.
Day a Good That Is All Right (曰行一善) is as bizarre as its title’s syntax. Two androgynous dwarfs dressed in glossy gold Boy Scout-style uniforms with flashy military insignia and made-up faces carry an injured comrade on a stretcher through a nondescript landscape. The victim is paradoxically smiling in a way that remarkably resembles former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) smile. The grin seems unmistakably Chen’s, and the blatant similarity creates a hilarious though tragic figure that harks back to Wu’s earlier overt works of political satire.
Elements of Taiwan’s local — particularly religious — folk culture are worked into other images that come off as overtly sexual.
Spell to Shift Mountains and Overturn Seas (移山倒海) sees a man dressed as a spirit medium attempting to bridge the chasm between the two sexes, which here appear as headless naked bodies holding replicated heads of the medium in their outstretched hands — as if to suggest that the medium becomes the individual requiring sexual release.
Spirit Dreaming Conjuration (夢魂術) continues the exploration of sexual imagery. Embracing in the center are three figures dressed in outfits resembling Elvis’ tacky Liberace-inspired 1970s stage clothing. On both sides of the figures, a spirit medium dances above a partially naked figure in repose over a bed of water.
After discussing the images with Wu and his career as an artist — one that saw him actively involved in the dangwai (黨外, outside the KMT) movement — I was left with the impression that he is somewhat pessimistic about Taiwanese finding their own identity through the glitz and distraction of contemporary global culture. Nevertheless, the works revel in the island’s diversity of cultures and are rich enough in symbolism to keep the observer transfixed for hours.
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