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| Artist Wu Chi-tsung Modern Technology, Classical Sensibilities |
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text by Eric Chi-Puo LIN
Wu Chi-tsung in many ways typifies the latest generation of cutting-edge artists in Taiwan.
Born in 1981, from a young age he was put on the public school system’s track for the artistically gifted. In his senior year in university (2003) he won the Tai pei Arts Award, and while in graduate school was nominated for the 2006 Artes Mundi Prize, the most lucrative prize in the international arts world.
A member of an unburdened generation enjoying economic wealth, personal freedom, and social pluralism, Wu has pioneered new territory in capturing the spiritual mood of classical ink landscapes through modern media like video and installations.
It is March, the season of early spring rains. Wu Chi-tsung has been back for two weeks now from France, where he was participating in a joint international exhibition, but he still is suffering from jetlag.
Now 31, Wu represents the passage of the younger generation of artists—people who have been exposed to maturing influences faster than their older counterparts and who have been able to express themselves freely—to the stage of career success and achievement.
In the decade-plus since he started university, Wu has been invited to join in more than 50 joint international exhibitions. As for many of the artists of his generation, spending a lot of time on airplanes has become part of the normal career path. In 2010 alone he went to eight countries, showing his work, making contacts, and having fun, though he also found the time to create new pieces, fall in love, and ride a bicycle around the island of Taiwan—now that’s a life packed to the brim!
It seems like the nutrients bestowed for many years on young artists in Taiwan have been waiting for just this moment to produce their fruit in the remarkable achievements of people precisely like Wu.
Wu’s family lives in an industrial zone of Tu cheng, in New Tai pei City. His parents moved there from a rural area, hoping only for the chance to work hard and make it possible for their children to grow up with a good education.
Wu was lucky because both his older brother and older sister got terrific grades, satisfying their parents’ expectations and permitting Chi-tsung to enjoy the privilege of greater choice in his interests and direction. Because he enjoyed painting, his mother stuck him into a private painting studio with a teacher instead of a daycare center, where he was able to do pretty much whatever struck his fancy. All along the way he earned priority admission into the school system’s special arts classes for talented young people, receiving a firm grounding in tradition.
The aesthetics of observation
Growing up with no worries, feeling very secure about the future, thinking that life is for having fun so that there’s no need to get too serious about any one thing.... All this changed for Wu in 2001, when in his sophomore year in college he took a course in new media from Yuan Goang-ming, one of the pioneers of video art in Taiwan.
“My creativity just erupted! Everyday I was out there filming something, intensively trying out all kinds of possibilities for expression through video. One week I brought in five new works to discuss in class!” Wu relates that his piece Rain was filmed during this period, when one day he was just gazing out from one of the upper stories of the school dorm over the Guandu Bridge in the rain, and thinking how beautiful it was. The work is simply a document he made in passing by taking out his camera and filming the moment.
It turns out that the shutter speed was set at 1/8000 of a second, and he was amazed to discover that the “threads” of slanting rain that are seen by the naked eye become in fact delicately falling pearl-like “beads” of water when captured with high-speed filming.
Standing behind the camera, simultaneously looking out at the rainy scenery outside the window and at the images captured in the lens, Wu felt his heart start racing at the discovery that subjects we have become accustomed to thinking of as they appear to our naked eyes become completely different when observed through a different medium.
Wu worked on, quietly recording 13 minutes of the rain scene. The Guandu Bridge spanning a bend in the Dan shui River… Mt. Guan yin standing majestically in the background… Cars speeding by on the highway interchange in the foreground… Before his eyes appeared a modern video landscape precisely duplicating the formula for “two banks of a river” paintings, one of the compositional patterns used repeatedly in classical Chinese ink paintings.
Three years later, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo invited Wu to exhibit this work, where it was discovered by one of the judges for the Artes Mundi Prize. It was later nominated for this prestigious award, and was exhibited at the prize exhibition in Wales alongside art by the world’s most cutting-edge artists. It is hardly surprising that this event created a sensation in Taiwan’s arts community.
Ink paintings that move
Another highly regarded work, Wire I, which won the Taipei Arts Prize in 2003 (Wu hadn’t even graduated from university yet!), was another happy accident produced when Wu was experimenting.
At that time Wu needed a slide projector, but it was too much to ask that a student come up with the NT$40–50,000 price. So he decided to make his own. He started out by researching the mechanism of the machine, and as he tested out the principles of how it projects images, he was startled to discover that industrially manufactured projectors restrict the angles at which the projected objects are seen, thereby restricting the possible uses of a projector as well as the way in which the viewer observes the image.
By experimenting, he found that if you move the forwardmost glass lens of the projector back and forth, you can constantly change the “focal length,” thereby narrowing or widening the angle of view. Moreover, if you use ordinary uncoated glass, the phenomenon known as “chromatic dispersion” appears; the projected object loses its definition, and instead takes on the feeling of inkwash.
In Wire I, Wu places wire mesh between the projector lamp and the thick glass that he uses for a lens, and allows the lens to move 10 centimeters back and forth on a mechanical track. As the focal length changes, the projected image of the wire mesh takes on the feeling of a traditional ink landscape painting, with the objects in the image appearing sometimes closer and sometimes farther away as if seen through a fog—drawing on the trope of mountain mists and clouds that is very common in classical Chinese painting. The objects in the image even assume the same texture as those in an ink painting, in which the edges of objects spread out and become less defined as the ink is absorbed by the paper.
By adopting this specific “way of seeing,” Wu transformed cold hard metallic wire mesh into an image with that same poetic sense that you get from classical paintings of places that are obscure and shrouded, elusive and mysterious. From there Wu began to take his explorations of the possibilities of projector technology further, and the resulting series of landscapes can be said to be more representative of his oeuvre than any other works.
In Wire II, Wu fixes the location of the lens, and puts the wire mesh on a reel (like film in a traditional movie projector), and as the reel turns the machine projects a dynamic, moving image, giving the viewer the sensation of soaring over fog-enshrouded precipices. There is a poetry and a rhythm to these journeys through clouds and mist that could be likened to chanting a five-character quatrain over and over.
Wu Chi-tsung thus smashed through the limitations set by the standardization of factory-made projectors. Starting with a few simple adjustments, he produced landscape imagery through “proximity,” “spatial depth,” and “speed,” and then moved on to play with “contradictions.” This creative process, in which he acted more like a practical machine inventor than a stereotypical artiste, allowed him to build a link between traditional landscape painting and new media art, genres which had been in very separate camps before, and through blending them to produce a whole new aesthetic.
The pleasures of labor
Thus even while still in university Wu created a unique new vocabulary. Foreign and local museums began collecting his work, and he found popularity among private collectors as well.
The most defining characteristic of Wu’s creative attitude is that of “discovering new aesthetic forms in the process of doing things by hand,” and “getting a sense of satisfaction from physical labor.” This work ethic can be traced back to Wu’s teacher and mentor Yuan Goang-ming.
Wu describes himself as a mature person with a calm and stable personality. Back in the day, he spent more time doing hands-on experimental creations in Yuan’s workshop than he spent in class. Learning from a master up close and personal, he quickly learned to consider rigor, discipline and precision to be the most fundamental principles for artistic work. Wu assisted Yuan in the laborious process of making the City Disqualified series, considered a major breakthrough in the history of digital art in Taiwan, a process which required painstaking trimming of each frame, one by one, on the computer.
It’s not surprising, then, that many commentators compare Wu with Yuan, and when they view Wu’s works, they routinely seek evidence of Wu’s debt to Yuan and consider that he is part of Yuan’s “bloodline.”
“In fact, there is an enormous difference between our basic orientations toward art,” Wu explains. “What Yuan Goang-ming is trying to do is to develop an aesthetic of pure imagery using new media, whereas I am using the same media as simply a new form that carries forward the aesthetics of traditional painting.” Those series that he is most fond of, including Rain, Wire, and Crystal City, all developed out of this concept.
Drawing on urban scenes
The installation piece Crystal City, done in 2009, is based on a very simple mechanical principle but produces a scintillating visual impact.
To make Crystal City, Wu started off with clear plastic boxes, the ordinary kind used for packaging or storage. With these he constructed a Lego land-like urban landscape of buildings. Then he ran six meters of track through his “city,” and put a car mounted with an LED light on the track. As the light passes back and forth through the boxes, it projects images on the wall, creating a “crystal city” that is very tangible yet at the same time is experienced in a “virtual” way.
It’s a little like the experience of riding the elevated train that runs from Mu zha to Neihu. All around you high-rise structures, fronted with transparent glass, cast their shadows and light effects in all directions, including straight at you, and the sensory experience of the geometric spaces of the city is amplified many times over. These are images that are so familiar to us that they seem to have lost their very existence, but as we observe them in a different way, filtered through a specific representation, the effects are very exhilarating. The viewer follows behind the artist as he lifts the veil on the city, while also peeling away layer after layer inside one’s own mind.
Art critic Ericamigo Wu lavishly praises this installation work for its innate, subtle “draftsmanship.” “The appearance of the projections through the plastic boxes creates the linear texture of a drawing; it has the same kind of linear sinews that characterize drawing. As the projected images vary in size, the viewer feels like he or she is watching an animated film, but the content is a city that can move and change its shape. It’s very poetic.”
In Wu Chi-tsung’s explanation, meanwhile, the “crystal city” is the virtual city that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Transparent and weightless, it nonetheless also has the appearance of being tangible. “It’s a lot like the growth of a crystal. Each element is self-organizing and reproduces based on internal rules and logic, spreading out rapidly without end.”
The current generation of artists enjoys the affirmation brought by numerous prizes, the benefits of staying at international artists’ villages, and veteran agents who steer them masterfully through the marketplace. They have never worked a nine-to-five day in their lives, and many among them know the sweet taste of the well-known aphorism of author Eileen Chang: “If you mean to make a name for yourself, you had best do it early.” Art for this generation has returned to a more personal, micro level of aesthetic meaning.
Moreover, younger artists no longer have the same rage felt by the generation that arose around the time of the lifting of martial law—when the old political regime that had so deliberately promoted classical Chinese art as a legitimizing tool began to give way to unprecedented artistic freedom—and today there is no reason for young artists to deliberately eschew the traditional. At the same time, they enjoy the fun of playing around with technology as part of daily life. They are, in short, perfectly positioned to search for the possibilities of blending the old and new, in an environment that is relaxed and secure with individual expression.
Ancient soul of the avant-garde
In 2009, Wu devised a concept for yet another series, entitled Still Life, drawing on the inner world of traditional ink paintings—it came to him while he was on a plane returning from a visit to his then-girlfriend in Japan.
Using simple single-channel video, he combined the compositional forms of Chinese inkwash paintings with the “Zen state of mind” said to be a unique part of Japanese culture, and then added the bright clarity of new media. It was like producing a series of romantic little chansons celebrating the exotic taste of a cross-cultural love affair.
Still Life is divided into four works: 01—Pine, 02—Orchid, 03—Bonsai, and 04—Bamboo. Wu placed these small plants in a vat of liquid formed by mixing flour into milk. The water was then drained out through a pipe. The result is the gradual emergence, through what appears to be a dissipating fog, of glossy and supple plants. Then, by running the video in reverse, the plants are again enshrouded in a mist. In this work Wu captures the idea of “space deliberately left undone,” a vital if difficult-to-define conception integral to classical Chinese painting. He also brings the new media of video into new territory—the calming and genteel ambience of the classical Chinese landscape. This series can be seen as a major landmark, a work which, of all those in his career, seems to express most fully his “avant-garde ancient soul.”
For Still Life 04—Bamboo, Wu first painted the wood with black ink. As the liquid drains from the tank, the swirling causes the ink to seep out of the wood, creating a dynamic sense of gray smoke, and the lines that form in the swirling mixture a trance-like ambience.
When the work is exhibited, a traditional scroll painting hangs on the wall, while the projector shows a swirling landscape in motion—it takes the genre known as “dynamic painting” to a level of movement that truly befits the name!
“My original idea was that the water should not move, and I was going to use a robot arm to move the plants up and down through the water to create the vision of their gradual disappearance and emergence. But I found that no matter how many times I experimented, it was impossible to keep the motion of the machine steady. So I simply switched over to the approach of letting the water slowly drain from the tank. Afterwards, I rather flattered myself that coming up with this new idea was genius!” says Wu, not making much effort to conceal his self-satisfaction.
When asked what he plans to do now that he has reached 30 and achieved a certain status in his profession, Wu gets a look on his face that is at once worldly and ambitious: “I’m going to be ‘living large’! Starting at the end of this year I have three major solo exhibitions opening in Taiwan and overseas!”
He also plans to expand the Still Life series into large-scale works, which will incorporate the concept of majestic large-scale landscapes into video art. He has been collecting beautiful potted plants for this project since the end of 2011, and he expects it to be the culminating stage of his “blended” artistic concept.
“I feel very conflicted. Art for me is very much an ever-changing, unstable thing that is always churning and resists clarity. I know very well that my classical academic training has been the most important ingredient in making me who I am today, but also feel that this very ingredient is a kind of obstacle. While it is fine to draw on tradition, you have to remake it and even oppose it, but to me that’s as difficult as pitting my creativity against my own self!” What he can say for sure is that he will continue to explore more possibilities in the future, and produce even more mature works.
(April 2012 Taiwan Panorama p.88-95/ tr. by Phil Newell) |
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