text by Iris Shu-Ping Huang
Wang Te-yu's works have always sought simple ideas. She has always tried to explore the feeling of spatial presence with an extreme economy of media, and go on to meditate on the existential form and situation of people in these spaces. In 1990 she began spreading out a pure spatial form with fabrics of different material, and this has become a primary motif in the artist's work. In a series of spatial creations whose titles begin with a number, she has pursued continuous research into the spatial theme, transforming the subjective/objective relationship between spaces and people, and letting the body's sensory experience replace visual experience. In this way the interactive experience between viewers and works functions directly as a pathway that the artist provides for “entry” into the spirit of the work—a work that symbolizes the artist's subjective consciousness. The work also unexpectedly encompasses the participating viewer's subjective experience and constructs a commonly-sensed space through the mechanism of interaction.
While the face of contemporary art has gradually evolved through the development of new media art, with its emphasis on theories of the image, the use of virtually interactive installations simulate human sensory experience, and the visual illusions thus created become the fantasies of a virtual world. The pathway of development in contemporary art also seems to be heading in this direction, where the visual directs cognition. People rely on vision to understand the things before their eyes, and art—from the flat surface of the canvas to the flat surface of the screen—still seeks to depict visual realms that “seem as if you are there.” The spatial sense expressed by artists reflects the condition in which vision leads sensory experience. The spatial installations of Wang Te-yu's series, which are created by different kinds of fabric, go against one's sense of volume and vision. They use as their starting point a kind of vanishing point unlike the kind in traditional visual perception in order to explore reality and illusion, existence and disappearance. She aims to get rid of all existing known cognitive systems (and most of these cognitive systems are constructed from visual means of understanding; the so-called abandonment of visualization is the minimization of knowledge sensed through vision) to let people's experience with the works revert directly to primal sensory experience.
These works are concerned with how you sense the space around you. Indeed, as Wang Te-yu has said, “When you enter my works, don't look, don't think, just walk and feel.” And everything that one senses upon entering these spaces is the totality of the work. The artist has deliberately let go of the power to interpret her works, and she emphasizes their participatory mechanisms and their communal constructability. Many people might wonder what these works really express. After all, does one's artistic and esthetic sense depend on artists’ glib explanations? If so, then how should the viewers’ direct sensory experience upon confronting the works be positioned? And the art and the satisfying interpretation that viewers expect—what are they? When every interactive factor becomes an irreplaceable explanation within the work, and when recording becomes a meaningful value in sensory experience, the works’ outer appearance and their content also constantly increase in value. If each viewer's participation, and the dynamic state of each moment, organically changes the spaces’ forms, then how can these constantly changing spaces be given a definite interpretation? The artist and the viewers, the spaces and the people, all become subjects within the work, and as each objective experience and subjective sensation in this dynamic state flow across one another, they blend into a spatial region where nothing is understood or explained.
The Museum of Contemporary Art's display of No. 50 extends the artist's method of working with inflatable spaces. She fills translucent plastic materials with air, which causes the original “solid” space of museum's interior to vanish. She uses air flow and the free movement of viewers to create the work's randomly interactive state. People can walk freely on the uneven, buoyant floor. Even your sense of balance is challenged by the flowing spaces and air, and perhaps you can worm into the space's interior and go under the floor. In this pure white area, where nothing exists, the space over your head, which is constantly collapsing toward you as a result of other people's movement, causes you to change where you walk, to bend, or to crawl.
Different positions and different movements affect the spaces inside and outside, reflecting the interactive, accommodating power between one person and another, and between people and space. Wang Te-yu's reduction of the work's expressive forms includes her use of a single material, understated color, a bare minimum of material, and simple techniques. In this way the full force of expression is released and given tothose who participate. Compared with interactive devices of high-tech media, Wang Te-yu's work allows for direct, powerful, real, plain sensory interaction. Because of light's penetration through the material, the space she has created is more hallucinatory than virtual reality. The empty space makes you feel as if you have entered a realm of sensation. Since you are forced to abandon all familiar, existing knowledge, you can only depend on exploring your original sensory capability and ability to adjust, capturing an abstract feeling of existing within an adventure. The artist causes viewers inside this work to recall memories of their original sensory capability. She wants viewers to believe directly in their own sensory capability, and to use it to understand the space around them, to understand the work.
As a work that purely represents space, No. 50 does not have too many complicated ideas to constrain viewers’ direct contact with it. The artist has said: “I did a work, and it's exactly the way you see it and touch it, that's all.” In this straightforward, simple way, this work is everything that you see and touch after entering.
When entering the world of post-virtual art, whether we return to primitive simplicity as a counterbalance to the profound unfathomable language of images, or whether an expressive style which goes against the primacy of vision will take the best of art anywhere, neither concerns our direct experience of sensing the pure motivation of contemporary art. Wang Te-yu's work emphasizes entry and intervention. The work stimulates a unique, intimate, interactive relationship with each person. The more we attempt to construct a complete explanation or theory for it, the more we block the direct cross-flow between sensory experience and the work and lose the directly perceived experience. The work in that case is no longer engaging. |
