text by Yu Wei
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Born in Shanghai, Tsong Pu relocated to Taipei's Wanhua district with his family in 1949. At that time, the timber business was thriving in Monga, and and his uncle ran the factory of Fuxing Lumber Company on Dali Street became a deeply memorable scene from his childhood. 'Every day I would jump up and down on piles of wood, and even made my own toys by sawing wood', Tsong Pu recalls.
These childhood memories inspired his new large-scale 2024 installation work, 123 Wooden Man(Fission). Visitors enter an open space where they can freely sit, lie down, and move around, reminiscent of a park or playground. Yet, the scene also resembles scattered driftwood, evoking memories of the powerful earthquakes and typhoons that struck Taiwan in the past year. Viewed from above, these sculptures appear as fallen anthropomorphic monuments, projecting the inexorable force of nature. The giant bodies lying limp on the ground resonate with our own bodies, creating a sense of shared vulnerability.
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As a pioneering figure in Taiwanese modern ar t, Tsong Pu has maintained a continuous practice since the 1980s, starting with geometric abstraction and progressively incorporating trace, gesture, space, process, and everyday experiences. In his most recent works, the concept of 'folding' plays a crucial role.
Titled 'Folding Landscapes', this exhibition attempts to capture Tsong Pu's recent formal language experiments in 'craf ting landscapes through folding methodologies' and his engagement with nature and contemporary life.
Folding creates angles on smooth surfaces and introduces new directions in lines. It revises plans and adapts originals — sometimes to fit circumstances, solve problems, or find ways through creative blocks. Folding transforms expected endpoints whilst preserving their origins in new forms. It carves depth from surfaces, creating mysterious, hidden interiors. The gaps it leaves behind invite us to explore, deconstruct, or fill with imagination. Folding generates contours, creating landscapes within geometry; it engages with three-dimensional space, transforming images into sculptures. It transitions from geometry to topology, exploring how objects bend, stretch, and transform continuously. Folding reveals process and traces, giving context to fragments of perception, whilst creating plots and weaving subtle narratives.
Tsong Pu's use of folding techniques serves primarily as a strategy for creating texture and imagery in flat or bas-relief works; in large-scale sculptures and installations, it often manifests as an external force that transforms materials. Across different types of works, folding consistently serves as a means of converting two-dimensional planes into three-dimensional forms.
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The use of folding techniques to create texture can be seen in a series of new bas-relief works, including Cold Mountain, Summer Chronicles, and Luna Ascending. These works extend from Tsong Pu's painting explorations in the 1980s, creating traces reminiscent of 'brushwork' through the arrangement of geometric colour blocks and metal strips on white backgrounds. On one hand, Tsong Pu responds to traditional ink painting's rendering and textural strokes, leading us to reimagine landscape painting through geometric abstraction; on the other hand, he also responds to Abstract Expressionist painting gestures — recalling Roy Lichtenstein's Brushstrokes series from 1965-66. Beyond these patterned, symbolic 'gestures', the real gestures revealed in the works are the diagonal cuts and lifted paper surfaces on the white matrix backgrounds.
More often, Tsong Pu uses folding techniques to create images. In some works on paper, he creates plant forms by cutting and peeling away paper layers to ‘fold out’ shapes. The originally interdependent ‘figure-ground’ relationship is transformed through folding into ‘object-projection.’ Similar techniques are directly applied to scenic sculptures like Three Smoke Rings. Within the work, the penetrable structure invites the viewer's bodily experience. The work transcends mere visual objects, inviting physical interaction while maintaining a dynamic dialogue with their natural environment.
In this regard, these works are reminiscent of Ferreira Gullar's concept of 'non-object' proposed in 1959. At that time, modern art was still focused on 'breaking the frame', and Gullar attempted to view artwork as a 'non-object' emerging from the fusion of subject and object, challenging the metaphors and fictional space in traditional painting. Tsong Pu's mission clearly extends beyond this - his 'non-objects' readily project pictorial meaning but are never limited to just that. They always juxtapose both illusion and reality of the same thing. I've always felt this reflects Tsong Pu's sense of humour: using quotation marks around things to make them self-referential, like quoting 'gesture' within gesture, and 'nature' within nature.
Another scenic sculpture, Fountains Outside the Dome, arranges elongated Lu Ban rulers in space to create a fountain-like scene. This work was originally a witty response to the delays in the Taipei Dome project, transforming Lu Ban rulers from tools for measuring landscape/ feng shui into the landscape itself. The folded lines at the top resemble both splashing water and decorative column capitals — the former adapts the given space, the latter supports it. This is Tsong Pu's version of non-object — through the dual imagery of 'fountain/beam', quoting 'space' within space.
V Shape and Whirlwind, formed by folded metal materials, transform industrial materials into free painterly lines. Whilst appearing as abstract drawings in three-dimensional space, they also mimic natural reality. The powerful external forces applied to the materials evoke post-disaster imagery, evocative of debris left by earthquakes and typhoons, echoing the exhibition's largest installation, 123 Wooden Man(Fission). If these works suggesting aftermath and alluding to uncontrollable natural forces constitute one endpoint of the exhibition, the other end is represented by the ordered daily experiences in the 2022 work You are the Beautiful Flower. The latter combines grid paintings, drawings, aluminium plates, and ready.mades in a 'one piece per day' diary format; Tsong Pu selected one month's worth from the 365 pieces symbolising a year.
The exhibition also features a series of small-scale works on paper, including sketches for the sculptural works that serve as creative blueprints for the exhibition's sculptures. While these sketches function as archival documents that capture the formal thinking behind the works, they have evolved through adaptation and recreation into independent works on paper.
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Like the differentiation strategies brought about by folding, Tsong Pu's creative journey over nearly half a century resembles a search for contemporary alternative landscapes along the modernist path. His formal vocabulary — matrices, sequences, repetition, modularization, and open structures — continues to evolve while showing deeper engagement with nature. Through his folding techniques, Tsong Pu not only mimics natural forms but also explores the external forces that create them and their transformative effects on materials. This new body of work uses abstract language to reflect nature's aftermath. In light of recent powerful earthquakes and typhoons, Tsong Pu's "folding landscapes" examine humanity's relationship with nature, inviting us to consider how natural forces manifest in our contemporary world — both as creative energy and destructive power.
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1 Price, Rachel. “Object, Non-Object, Transobject, Relational Object: From ‘Poesia Concreta’ to ‘A Nova Objetividade.’” Revista de Letras 47, no. 1 (2007): 31–50. |
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