text by Eric Chi-Puo LIN
Chen Shun-chu is one of a small number of Taiwan’s contemporary artists who maintain a clear focus on a particular and distinct chain of creative themes and media.
In the past two decades, the simple concept of “home” has provided endless inspiration for him to express his feelings in art.
While Chen’s work originated in photography, he has adopted diverse forms including mixed media, video and landscape installations. One quite unique creative concept is to collect and catalogue photos, selecting those needed for a work, and sometimes redefining memories along the way. His works, as a result, create effects in time and space wherein both disappear. Even using materials from his old hometown days, he is able to create works that appear upbeat and contemporary.
How long can the road home be? How deeply can one explore artistically the idea of home? The 48-year-old says that nowadays he is either home or on the way there.
Chen’s studio is located on a mountaintop in Xindian. Unlike many artists who tend to be laid back and somewhat untidy, Chen’s home is clean, neat and exquisitely furnished.
Standing in front of a large bookcase in the living room, the artist says that he enjoys tidying up his stuff, making complex things become concise with depth, gradation and order.
“It feels like being reborn when I tidy up, and I never do it superficially. When I’m tidying my books, I often check them to make sure they’re clean. Sometimes I’ll find an old letter or photo tucked away when I’m flicking through a book. The process of recollecting the past is very enjoyable,” says Chen, looking very satisfied.
Hometown longing
Born in the Penghu Islands, Chen lived at home on Magong Island (one of the major islands in the group) until he graduated from high school. His family was quite well off. His grandfather managed a construction business, and at the peak of the family’s prosperity, they also owned the only cinema in Penghu. His father, born to wealth, had a romantic nature and an artistic bent. He knew how to enjoy life, and loved photography and drawing. He also owned a luxurious US-made car (a rather strange green color), making the family only the second family on the island—after the county mayor—to own a car.
There are many reasons why Penghu islanders are reluctant to leave home, but because of work, study or marriage, they often have no choice. But the barrier of the ocean makes the road home even harder and more remote than normal, so that many of them, despite having a deep attachment to home, are often unable to return. Chen grew up during the final phase of his family’s prosperity, so home for him has a deep significance—perhaps deeper than for many.
While studying in the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese Culture University, feelings of homesickness and nostalgia for home became major elements underpinning his artistic work. The landscape of Penghu was at this time, for example, the main subject of his photography, helping him win three prizes in exhibitions at the Fine Arts Department, and was also the main focus of his first solo exhibition, Image and Imagery.
Chen has been on his way home for more than 30 years. The 2010 solo photographic exhibition On the Road is regarded as the pinnacle of his artistic career, and is seen to create a unique expression of aesthetics of the image.
The 57 photos in the exhibit were selected from more than 500 rolls of film shot over the years “on the way home.” Many photos are out of focus or are strangely composed—bad photos from the point of view of traditional photographic aesthetics. However, after passing through Chen’s unique selection techniques, they display an intuitively abstract sense of time.
Kuo Li-hsin, associate professor of the Department of Radio and Television, National Chengchi University, once commented: “On the Road contains both an abstract foreign land and a photographed hometown, displaying a quiet, lonely, aesthetic, orderly and rational temperament.”
For example, the piece “1994–8 Penghu Magong” shows the wild landscape of Magong with a turbulent ocean surging against the shoreline, creating the dense atmosphere of a ferocious wilderness during a northeast monsoon. However, look more closely and they are not waves at all—it’s in fact a raging fire from old boxes burning on the shoreline.
A distinctive aesthetic
Unlike the process of painting, wherein artists express their inner feelings through media to create something out of nothing, photography creates something from already existing elements. The artist determines to shoot the subject at a particular moment, and then makes selections from the photos. It’s mainly in this selection process that the artist creates the art.
“On the Road is like a highway of the memories of my hometown, and involves personal issues. Because of the personal nature of the works, I was able to abandon any traditional frameworks. I had a standpoint for making new rules and defining abstract aesthetics, without any emphasis on symmetry or depth of field. The aesthetics of memory are determined at the instant the shutter is pressed,” says Chen. Many trivial events crowd into our lives, but after we select and remove the nonsense, eventually those selected and kept will be given meaning—which may even surpass the importance of major events.
Chen has been practicing this unique artistic technique for over 20 years, with his hometown as the fundamental source of inspiration.
A life-changing experience
On any island, the geographic distance between the living and the dead is slight—especially for a large wealthy family like the Chens. They lived in a large compound with the family cemetery close by, so the rise and fall of family fortunes can be clearly grasped from the grim landscape.
By the time of his high school graduation, Chen had experienced the funerals of his great-grandmother, grandfather and father on that land. Among them, his father’s sudden death had the most significant impact on his young life.
The event occurred on the day of the tomb-sweeping festival in his first year at senior high school. His father had previously arranged to meet relatives who lived on another island, who were taking a boat over. They were planning to go to the family cemetery together. Chen’s father hadn’t had much sleep because he’d stayed awake drawing, but early in the morning, Chen and his father went to the shore to wait for their relatives to arrive. It was a beautiful day. They waited a short while, and then Chen noticed his father inert on the ground. Apparently he had suffered a heart attack. Chen was stunned, not knowing what to do in that remote place without anyone around to help. Should he go to look for help, or stay with his father? He has forgotten what happened next—only the picture of his father’s dead body lying on the ground has remained in his memory.
A traditional Daoist funeral was held with all its complex ritual of repeated kneeling and standing, and its scary wailing. A funeral ceremony is supposed to be a form of mourning and paying tribute to the deceased, but all that remains in Chen’s memory is the terror.
Family black boxes
But as time moves on, past regrets need to be resolved.
After graduating from university and briefly touring Europe, in 1992 Chen announced a stunning solo exhibition entitled Family Black Boxes.
The exhibition adopted an approach of “replication,” mixing old family objects with photographs, creating an installation work both modern and nostalgic. The work was divided into two sections: wooden boxes, and furniture, doors and windows.
The wooden boxes represented a private ritual that Chen wished for his father 12 years after his death. He chose some of the old family photographs, and according to his own aesthetic concepts attempted to rearrange, collage and composite the photos, installing them in antique wooden boxes. The effect was almost theatrical: like a private dialogue between father and son contained in a an enclosed time tunnel.
The boxes featured both new and old, rendering time and space imprecise. Chen himself collected and installed his “good old days” into the small family black boxes, revealing a sense of vulnerability and sadness.
The furniture, doors and windows revealed a desire to break through the barrier between life and death. Using pieces of broken furniture to create the forms of doors and windows, Chen placed photographs into the different-sized geometric spaces created by the doors and windows. The photographs included dead birds, sad-looking old dogs, and human figures disguised as the dead. Some creatures looked dead but were actually alive, while others looked alive but were on the brink of death. The line between life and death was thus blurred.
Chen attempted to demonstrate through Family Black Boxes that with the power of art, life and death may not be as distinct as we imagine! As long as one is willing to filter the unhappy elements in life, through recollecting, the dead can live in the hearts of their family’s following generations.
Chen’s regret at losing his father was to some extent reconciled through his artistic creations. He started on a series of works based on his always vivid experiences as part of the family, including King-Do Relic, Flower Ritual, and Journeys in Time. He used old photos taken by his father as a foundation, and incorporated other materials such as tiles and plastic flowers, creating confusion in time and space and giving the impression that they could have been cooperative works between father and son.
Expanding the reach
Although Chen’s father died at the quite young age of 41, his spirit became embedded in his son’s heart, becoming an eternal object of attachment. But some critics have expressed concerns that Chen’s work tends to indulge in micro-personal experiences, so the artist has attempted to expand his reach, giving personal experiences a more general and symbolic expression.
In 1992, he started a series of programs that would last for eight years, Assembly: Family Parade. During the first three, he took photos of nine family members and friends as impromptu subjects, diluting the subjects’ emotions in order to impersonalize the images. As a result, they look more like a series of portrait symbols.
After collecting more than a thousand portraits (both negative and positive images) and selecting the best, Chen developed them into 8 × 10 inch black-and-white prints, arranged them in silver frames, and installed them in old houses, ruins and fields. Then they were re-photographed, eventually becoming a landscape installation work, and pushing his artistic concept of “creation from already existing elements” a step further.
During the eight years, he photographed his way from Penghu, through Jinguashi in Taipei to Fukuoka, Japan. Among the works, Penghu House II, 1995, and Fukuoka Apartment Project, 1999, are the most impressive.
In Penghu House II, a deserted cottage where fishermen store their fishing gear is used as an installation setting. The roofless cottage with its collapsing foundations and empty window frames is set against a blue sky. Chen’s photos are hung on the outer walls, the metal photo frames reflecting the clear bright light. The installation looks like Penghu, but could also be on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, or perhaps in the Middle East. The work is geographically neutral.
But the stark black-and-white family photographs seem to suggest death. Viewers are forced to confront mortality in an atmosphere of hope and optimism, under the bright open sky. Chen seems to be attempting to impose the essence of the Family Black Boxes onto this project. He has brought death abruptly into dynamic life in the middle of the day, permeating every corner of the world. And there’s an insistence that life and death are not distinct—boundaries become ambiguous.
The Fukuoka Apartment Project was done by invitation for the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan. Chen chose a four-story deserted apartment building with no particularly distinctive features, and again hung photos on its outer walls. Here, there was even more emphasis on removing the sense of a single, definite place or locality from the work, and because more photos were used, the portraits looked more symbolic—reflecting common characteristics of the “Asian family.”
Sweet new life
Chen got stuck on the woes and tribulations of life and death issues for a long time, and seemed unable to free himself. Through repeated retrospection, he has forced himself to analyze his sadness. This was especially true after the death of his mother, when the family property was divided up and his elder brother leased out their old house. So when he returned to Penghu, he had to stay in a hotel, and a sense of rootlessness overwhelmed him.
When he got married in 2006, suddenly all the past gloom began to clear. He eventually escaped from Penghu and began to settle into a new life in Taipei, establishing a new home and moving his emotional attachment from his natural family to his wife.
Every time he mentions his beautiful wife, his face takes on a gentle sweetness. Ruby, a prominent businesswoman, is four years older. By the time they met, they were both over 40—but it was love at first sight and the relationship developed rapidly, ending in a few short years in marriage. The couple have each achieved much in their respective fields, and both possess enough personality and mutual respect not to push their views on the other. Their new home allows a comfortable living space for both.
In the summer of 2006, Chen personally supervised the decoration of their new home, with discarded debris from the decor installed by the previous owner filling several dozen wheelbarrows. This was a significant symbol of change, of discarding old objects and embracing his new life. He photographed and filmed the entire cleanup process, and from the material produced the series Family Dwelling: 4x5 3Times.
Four large-scale color photographs are the most representative works. Four different barrows filled with rubbish are awaiting removal, but the joy of a new beginning pervades the rubble. They look so realistic—almost three-dimensional—that viewers cannot resist the impulse to reach out for the handles and push them out of the scene.
“I supervised the entire renovation. My wife was very tolerant of the way I handled things—she came only once: when we had to pay the renovators. She knew that no matter what she suggested, I would follow my own ideas. But I designed an elegant bathroom especially for her. There are at least a thousand bottles and jars of skin care and other lotions in that bathroom—it’s the untidiest place in our home. I don’t know why she buys all these products—maybe it’s just her way of being a woman,” says Chen.
With security and a sense of well-being has come more self-confidence. This underpinned Chen’s decision in 2010 to do the On the Road project, symbolically drawing a line under his oeuvre completed to date, and opening a new stage in his life.
But others in the field are curious. They wonder if Chen has really got out of the family tangle, and whether he’ll be able to sublimate old family attachments to a new lifestyle. Retrospection represents a desire not easily eradicated. Only by constantly looking into the past, the intersection of life and death, into the essence of happiness, are we able to comprehend inner purity and innocence—to cherish the infinite mystery of life, to confirm our roots. Our real hometowns are in our hearts.
No-one will be surprised if the artist’s future work continues its long road home.
(September 2011 Taiwan Panorama p.92-99/tr. by Geoff Hegarty and Sophia Chen)
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