文 / 蘇珊
Artist Chen Shun-Chu (陳順築)is best known for his poetic photo-based installations about memory such as his early 1990s’ installation of framed photos of his close friends and family members that were hung on the exterior walls of abandoned houses on Penghu Island and later exhibited in galleries as photo documentation.
For his current exhibition titled “The Remnant Vision – Solo Exhibition by Chen Shun-Chu” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (Dec 2, 2011 to Jan 29, 2012), Chen displays both previously exhibited works and specially designed works for the site.
Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter a tile installation on the museum’s exterior entrance. Chen’s choice of medium is always heavily laden with meaning, so a mere ceramic tile is not just a tile, but instead conveys layers and layers of implications. However, to understand Chen’s artwork, one must begin with Chen’s story and Chen’s story is his biography.
Chen was born in Penghu, an archipelago of 90 small islands in the Taiwan Strait, located off the western coast of Taiwan. The islands are also known as Pescadores, which means “fishermen” in Portuguese, and reflects the area’s early colonial history in which a succession of pirates, Dutch and Portuguese colonialists tried to settle the area. A harsh climate confronts the island inhabitants who live on the windswept plains as typhoons hit the islands in the summer, and gale winds strike in the winter. Unlike his seafaring neighbors, Chen’s father had worked in the construction industry, so when Chen uses ceramic tiles in his artwork, it is used as a tribute to the memory of his father.
For the artist (whose modest beginnings started off in a small windy and sandy place, with a father who built homes) to recapture his memories, he uses building materials as totems, as powerful objects to conjure up his past. Thus stacked-up stones, construction tiles, pieces of furniture, and piles of wood are all used to metaphorically recreate his childhood in a formal art gallery setting. Chen’s use of objects is similar to Orson Welles’ Rosebud in the film Citizen Kane in which a child’s sled represented the innocence of youth.
The way the exhibition at MOCA is set up compels the viewer to figuratively step into and inhabit Chen’s life story as the first images are stones stacked on a beach. He shot the images in high resolution files, which captured the sandy texture and speckled natural color of the beach stones. Then he transferred these images onto ceramic tiles, which were then plastered on both the exterior and interior of the museum’s entryway. Entering the exhibition through the entryway is akin to stepping across the hearth and entering someone’s home. In this installation, the stones symbolize Chen’s birthplace, the tiles his father, and the entryway his home and family. The process of image-making with the photo-silkscreen technique represents progress and the future; thus entering the exhibition is like walking into the past and future simultaneously.
Search for Lost Time
At first glance, the photographic images on display in the various rooms are not that easy to discern, nor easy to read, as the nature of these images is conceptual which forces the viewer to not take them at face value, but to look beyond the obvious surface.
In room 105 of the museum, Chen exhibits previous work of large black-and-white photos, framed and inset with tiles. These enlargements of his family photo album contain all the scratches and marks with no attempt at restoration, as if to say that these family photos are mementos, acting as fleeting monuments to the past. However, the use of original scenes from his family memories in all their marred and naked honesty was not enough, so as Chen seeks to witness the truth, he assists his memory by inlaying ceramic tiles into the images as a subtle way to remember faces and events. Even though the actual photographs were not retouched, Chen uses the ceramic tiles as an element of manipulation to edit these photos in order to convey his biographical story. It is similar to how we selectively remember the past, as we carefully choose the memories we wish to keep and forget the ones we do not wish to preserve, so that as time goes by we are not even sure anymore how truthful our remembrances are.
Taiwanese Nostalgia
In the first room of the museum, one will see the installation piece “Fengkuei Chair,” consisting of two turn-of-the-century antique Taiwanese-style chair and cabinet. Fengkuei is a well-known scenic spot in Penghu; its name literally means “cabinet of the wind.” Each of the furnitures’ legs are placed in bowls of water. In the past, Taiwanese placed furniture legs in bowls of water to capture venomous creatures. Here, the chair is rational, upright, and surveys the entire room, reflecting the isolated nature of an island, while the circulating electric ceiling fans represent the windy nature of Penghu, its desolation, along with Chen’s yearning for his boyhood and his homeland.
Nostalgia is a yearning for the past, albeit an idealized past, a rosy past without social problems or any negativity. Nostalgia also seems to be a by-product of colonialism, and as Taiwan was a colony of Japan for fifty years, the nostalgic yearning is entrenched in the Taiwanese psyche, in its culture, songs, images and history.
Chen’s work operates on two levels of nostalgia: personal and technical. Like the artist Louise Bourgeois, Chen explores themes of childhood and familial relationships in his work. He investigates the cozy feelings of home and family, but he looks back at his childhood as a displaced adult, as one who has grown and moved to the big city, but is still wracked with homesickness. The photos of home and family seem to bring him some sort of temporary comfort, but it does not replace the real thing.
The 2nd type of nostalgia in Chen’s work is the yearning for the film technology of the past. Before digital photography, the photographic emulsion on cellulose acetate was the popular type of film used in the 20th century. A roll of film was placed in the camera and wound up in its spool. On each roll, the first shot was usually taken inadvertently, so when it came time to develop it, the image would often be an unidentifiable surprise.
Chen has gone back to his archives to find old black and white negatives, especially those first shots from the roll of film. Perhaps that first unconscious shot with its ghostly image, its overexposed white spaces and ethereal shapes, is a closer attempt at revealing the truth then those posed snapshots. After finding the suitable first shots from his archives, Chen silkscreened the images onto plates as a way to go beyond the nature of photography. In Chen’s newer work he is treating the photo technique more like painting and mixed media rather than as factual documentation. The new images, where it is two-thirds image and one-third overexposed with mixed media manipulation, are abstract with very little narration. It is the photo itself as subject matter and the effect creates both a literal and a figurative black-and-white contrast as the images provide a sense of being and non-being, realness and non-realness, tangibility and non-tangibility.
In his earlier works, Chen showed that the search for lost time could yield potential results, as he maintained that old photos held the light to the truth and could restore our fading memories. However, in his latest work, the consensus is jaded, that the search is futile, and that the camera, in fact, is not just a tool of the reflection on reality.
By Susan Kendzulak, November 12, 2011 |
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