text by Eric Chi-Puo LIN
Video recording is a mainstay medium of modern art. With the rapid progress of video technology, artists who work in the medium are, in effect, latching onto an arrow in flight and winging toward a new future.
Forty-six-year-old Yuan Goang-ming is a pioneer of video art in Taiwan. For more than 20 years, the art world has always looked forward with anxious anticipation to each new work he creates. Strange, then, that the rapid evolution of image processing technology makes Yuan uneasy.
In Disappearing Landscape (2007), Yuan explores the “time warp” introduced into our lives by the fast pace of technology. His understated style comes across as a resigned sigh. As soon as his exhibit opened, collectors were falling over themselves in a rush to buy copies of the video.
This coming September, Yuan will be launching a second installment of the exhibit, entitled Before Memory, to further probe the cracks and derailments that creep into memory over time. This work amounts to a middle-aged artist’s look back into the past, and hints at his nostalgia for the “slow march of time” in the days before digital technology encroached upon our world.
Yuan’s home in Danhai New Town is famed in Taiwan’s arts world for its otherworldly weirdness.
His home is located in a villa district notorious for its structures crumbling away due to the use of concrete made from poorly processed sea sand. Driving through the labyrinthine streets of his neighborhood, there’s an almost indescribable absurdity to the scenery. The community has been the subject of lawsuits, building restrictions, and redevelopment plans for many years now, but in the meantime many residents have taken matters into their own hands by reinforcing their homes. Others, however, have opted to let their property fall apart, holding onto it for the nonce in anticipation of eventual land appreciation so they can sell it off. The result is a weird juxtaposition of beautiful villas and crumbling ruins.
Artist in hiding
“It’s against the law to rebuild from scratch in that neighborhood, so I took the advice of my father-in-law as well as the Japanese architect Taira Iwakiri, both of whom had suggested putting up a steel framework within the original shell.” As he speaks, Yuan points to I-beams overhead.
Once the framework was in place, he installed a table saw in his work room and set to building his own kitchen, floors, shelves, and other things.
For the sake of the rebuilding project, Yuan put his artistic career on hold in 2001. I asked whether he might not feel some regret about putting his work aside for six years in the prime of life.
His initial reaction was immediate: “Yeah, a bit.” Then he backtracked: “But not really, though. I’ve done a bit of soul searching over it, but no—no great regrets.”
He adds a bit of explanation: “I got married during that time period, which is no minor matter for an artist with a fear of marriage. What’s more, my wife understands me better than anyone else. It’s thanks to her that I got over my insomnia. So if I could go back and do it all over again, I’d still make the same choice.”
So the time off was sweet, but when the subject is raised, he does still feel a twinge of anxiety about what might have been. This actually reflects to a certain extent what it is that motivates his artistic creation—angst about the passage of time. There’s no stopping its march, yet he attempts with his art to do just that.
Helpless about time
His downtime as an artist lasted until 2007 when Chen Hui-chiao, art director at IT Park Gallery & Photo Studio, scheduled him a personal exhibit. Thus committed, Yuan finally had no choice but to move ahead with what has turned out to be the most important work of his career: Disappearing Landscape—Passing.
Says Yuan: “I just wanted to put my house on display.”
And that’s precisely what he did. The exhibit consisted of three projection screens operating simultaneously, each showing stitched-together scenes racing toward or away from the viewer as the cameras move—sometimes in forward motion, sometimes backward—through Yuan’s home, an abandoned property next door, a green forest abounding in the huge leaves of elephant’s ear, and city streets.
With the field of vision jagging back and forth between a thoroughly modern residence and the ruins of an abandoned house, when you hop into the middle of a patch of greener-than-green elephant’s ear and then slowly back your way out of it, you can practically feel the elephant’s ear leaves brushing past your body. As we slowly retreat, we watch helplessly as a beautiful scene slips away. A gust of wind sets everything in the forest to swaying, but does nothing to avert the sense of loss.
From there, we suddenly find ourselves zooming along in a car, so fast it almost seems as if time itself might disappear. Then we return again, to shuttle back and forth between the residence and the ruins. Bopping twixt new and old, now fast-forwarding, now decelerating to slow-motion, leaves the viewer dazed and cramped as if caught in an awkward crevice in time.
But one immutable fact remains unchanged. Despite the fact that three projection screens operating simultaneously provide us with something akin to the eyesight of an insect with compound eyes; despite the fact that the cameras keep jumping back and forth between different scenes; despite the fact that events flow sometimes so quickly that the viewer can cross a city in an instant, and at others so slowly that the viewer has a chance to observe the scenery at the cellular level; despite the fact that you may be viewing the exhibit without so much as blinking an eye; and despite the fact that your gaze is ever so concentrated…
…the immutable fact remains: time passes on.
Youth on the edge
Chen Hui-chiao once described Yuan as “passionate, flashy, overbearing, and hot-blooded, yet at the same time tense and angst-ridden, as if something were weighing heavily upon him.”
Pretty much every time he puts on an exhibit, he can be seen before the opening fretting about how “the exhibit seems to be missing something.” In the end, he always gets on with the show, but he puts himself through hell in the process.
Every artist draws inspiration from different sources. Yuan frankly concedes that his inspiration comes from “a discomfort with the mysteries of life, and with time,” so he has never worked comfortably. It is only after a work is finished that he gets a brief respite.
Perhaps his emotional state as an artist derives from his experiences as a youth. Yuan explains that he had emerged as a stellar student in elementary school, but in his third year of junior high he and some friends took to smoking and listening to pop music by day, then studying late into the night. “It’s not that we had gone bad. We just couldn’t stay awake in class. That whole year was a waste.”
Yuan scored horribly on the national high-school entrance exam. His book-loving father registered him for an admission test to Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School. He tested in, but “just couldn’t get into it.” Feeling too good for his surroundings, every day he would skip classes, get into fights, and spend time in dance halls.
“One time I was out in Ximending and some guys thought I was acting too cocky, so they came over and beat me up. I was knocked unconscious. It was my friends who got me back home. My dad felt that things had gotten too far out of hand, so he suggested that I transfer to night school.” A tinge of the old cockiness creeps into Yuan’s voice as he recounts his past.
The other night-school students were all older, working for a living, and feeling an urgent need to make up for their lack of education. The exposure prompted in Yuan a sense of regret for his own waste of time. He buckled down and tested into the Department of Fine Arts at the National Institute of the Arts (NIA). Driven by his interest in the topic of “time,” he concentrated his efforts on the study of video recording.
In the 1980s, amidst the golden age of Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema, the arts world began to contemplate what could be accomplished with video recording outside the ambit of cinema. Yuan’s personal interest and the tide of history converged, and Yuan leapt to the forefront of contemporary art.
Two works that he executed as a university student, On the Way Home and Fish on Dish, illustrate better than anything the angst at the core of his artistic inspiration.
Yuan got NIA professor Su Shouzheng to play the lead role in On the Way Home, which depicts the daily life of a teacher. It rains continually as the teacher trudges in solitude back to his home, where he opens the door and enters to find the sink in his bathroom overflowing. There is no plot or startling twist in the story line, yet the video is taut with suspense. With this experimental piece, the fresh new face walked off with a Golden Harvest Award in 1990.
Fish on Dish, meanwhile, is a piece of installation art in which the image of a beautiful goldfish is projected onto a white ceramic dish. At first blush the goldfish appears to be swimming about without a care. It’s quite a beautiful image. However, as the seconds and minutes slide by, the goldfish never manages to swim beyond the confines of the dish. “Carefree” gradually morphs into “confinement,” and the viewer comes to share the hopelessness of the goldfish.
Confinement and release
In 1992, Yuan collected all the works from his youth in Out of Position, a highly acclaimed exhibit that earned him a DAAD Germany Exchange Scholarship. With this scholarship money in hand, he entered a master’s program at the Institute of Media Arts in Frankfurt.
But the high-flying Yuan came down with a serious case of culture shock in Germany. In the deliberate and reserved arts community there, the world of the goldfish in Fish on Dish became his world, for he was trapped inside the invisible constraints of language barrier and culture. It was a claustrophobic experience. On top of that, there was pressure to finish his studies within the period of his scholarship. Yuan was in a continual race against time that nearly drove him crazy. In the end, DAAD broke with precedent and extended his scholarship from two years to four. Breathing easily at last, Yuan set intently about the task of absorbing all he could, like a sponge. “I would type away at the computer until I couldn’t lift my arms. I’d try to reach for a cigarette but pick up a soldering gun instead. In this extremity of solitude I found the greatest joy of learning.”
In 1998, after returning to Taiwan, Yuan put on an exhibit called The Reason for Insomnia. For Taiwan’s art world, it was an eye-opening introduction to what the Germans are capable of. In just four years, a non-techie art student was trained to a high level of proficiency in mechanical design, and was now able to use technology as a medium for the expression of powerful artistic tension.
After Fish on Dish, Yuan followed up with The Cage, in which a video camera is mounted to the underside of a birdcage, looking upward through the bars at the bird within, and past the bird at the scenery above. As Yuan goes out for a walk or a bike ride, he takes the birdcage along, and it continually swings and spins. But most interestingly, the “bird’s eye view” represented by the camera turns the bird into the center of the action. It comes to feel as if it is the bird that is fixed in place while the buildings, trees, and other things outside the cage are the swaying, spinning objects.
The Reason for Insomnia is an interactive piece of installation art. On a white bed sits a pillow that expands and contracts as if breathing. The bed, when touched by the viewer, undergoes a change, as a series of eight incredibly realistic images are projected down onto the bed from above. Now crackling flames burst from the center of the bed, only to halt just as suddenly. Now blood wells up and dyes the entire bed a bright red. Now a knife rips a slit in the bed, leaving no escape route.
Is this not precisely the perturbed mental state of an insomniac? In the middle of the night, while the rest of the world sleeps, time passes in excruciatingly slow motion—so slow that every single emotion has a chance to make an appearance, to be amplified, and to afflict the sufferer in a string of surrealistic assaults. The bed, which ought to be the most comfortable place of all, becomes a place of discomfort where the sleepless must face himself.
Digital handicraft
Prior to the year 2000, interactive art was all the rage internationally, and in Taiwan Yuan was among those most in step with the times in that sense. But he soon came to note something odd about it all.
Yuan explains: “Interactive art got everybody focused on technology. Showing off one’s technical virtuosity became an addiction.” Yuan was put off, and decided to retreat to the basics. He executed his City Disqualified series by processing his still and moving images using time-consuming handicraft methods.
In 2001, Yuan chose the bustling, congested district of Ximending in Taipei to shoot more than 300 photos of the exact same scene over the space of two months. Then he superimposed the photos on a computer, cutting out any vehicles and people, leaving the image in the next photo below to show through. Where any people or vehicles showed in the next photo, those were also edited out, and so the process was repeated until there was nothing left but a scene of Ximending totally absent of people and vehicles, yet bursting with a sense of life.
It was City Disqualified that pushed Yuan to a new pinnacle, and into a full professorship at Taipei National University of the Arts. In the space of a year he received 10 invitations to exhibit overseas. He got to know the Japanese art critic Mio Iwakiri and ended up getting married. Everything changed. His disillusionment with the world, his feeling of unease, and his insomnia gradually disappeared during the six sweetest years of his life—six years spent without executing a single new work of art.
Redefining time
Though Yuan had risen to prominence at an early age, he never went in for the idea of “sacrificing everything for art.”
Yuan laughingly describes himself as a “better to live a coward than die a hero” sort of artist. If there’s no one forcing him to get something finished, he would just as soon do nothing and enjoy his life.
He readily admits that despite his expertise in digital art, he nevertheless has a love-hate relationship with technology. With a shake of his head, Yuan laments: “Anyone who was past the age of 40 when they crossed over into the ‘digital age’ is not at home with the technology, but still must deal with it. It’s an ambivalent relationship. When an old body has to get used to blazing speed, the result is a bit like the ‘short circuit’ that happens when you get too close to a receiver.”
But Yuan accepted an invitation to go to Scotland in 2008 and serve as a visiting artist in the Glenfiddich Artists in Residence program. The quiet countryside there got Yuan to let go of his glum obsession with the passage of time.
Yuan’s exhibit in Scotland formed a part of his Disappearing Landscape series, and he named it Disappearing Landscape—Scotland. In the video, the cameras once again fly in a straight line over and through the distillery, a forest, and rooms, but this time the forest no longer retreats reluctantly away. Instead, with a loud “pop” the cameras slowly advance into the forest quietude. The video also includes scenes of people dancing, showing the viewer that “slowness can also quicken the pulse.” It is very relaxing.
This experiment appears to have pointed the way forward for Yuan, who will be putting on an exhibit called Before Memory this September. Even though the scenes filmed in Before Memory are the same ones filmed in Disappearing Landscape, the exhibit this time will be expressing an entirely different philosophy regarding time.
As before, the cameras move in a straight line between the artist’s home and an abandoned property next door, but the father seen in the original work has already passed away, while new to the scenery is Yuan’s delightful little daughter. Yuan’s longing for his deceased father is so strong that Yuan allows the elder to appear in an imaginary den created just for him. When the cameras glide past scenes re-created from memory, “time” suddenly seems ever so pure. No longer is it such an oppressive force.
The story of a hot-blooded prodigal son who comes back home is not at all unusual. What truly is moving, however, is when the returned son finally learns to accept his prodigal past, and move on.
Yuan holds his three-year-old daughter for a family photo. He wants his two dogs in the picture. Yuan shouts out: “Everybody look to the camera!” But if it’s not the daughter failing to pose for the camera, then it’s the dogs that get out of control. The shutter clicks amidst the chaos, capturing the moment.
And in that moment, happiness strips “time” of its uneasy shell. Even if there is a bit of worry, it no longer matters.
(July 2011 Taiwan Panorama p.84-92/tr. by David Smith) |
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