text by Wang Pin-Hua
In the exhibition space, audience first see a revolving mechanical framework, sounding a low buzzing, and casting a flow of light and shadows on the wall in the darkened room. The images of light and shadows are present like some illusory smoke, creating an atmosphere of airy gracefulness. This is a new work by Wu Chi-Tsung: the 'Iron Mesh III'. The young artist always provides audience a particular experience of looking.
In 2004, Wu wrote in the artist statement,
The consequences of media spectacle may be that everything is nothing. Too much varied information conflicts, contradicts and replaces each other. Such like when we hold a remote controller, swiftly shift among many channels, what is the principle of our choice? What are we looking at after all? It could be right that ‘media is information itself’. Besides the media we looked at, there is nothing more we can see. Here, the question I want to ask is 'what on earth is/could be Image?'1
If an audience confronted Wu why he wouldn’t let the audience first see the image, then the projector devices, he would contend he wanted the audience to see both at the same time. He wonders, if the audiences have seen the ways the 'beautiful images' created, would they still consider these Chinese painting-like flowing images interesting? Is there a contradiction of visual effect between the airy, graceful images and the coldness and hardness of the projector and the iron mesh?
In this image production process, the iconographical meaning of a traditional water and ink painting was dissolved. But the water and ink painting-like images kept generating through the skillful arrangement of kinetic mechanics and optical principles, staging a show of new visual experience. The transitory illusions in the darkness made the exhibition room a theater of vicissitude, or an arena of nouveau magic. The design on one hand invites the viewer to 'view', and on the other hand exposes the viewing itself. It is this dubious situation that fascinates Wu the most.
Wu is very interested in what the audiences see in front of the projection. Now that the 'look' was stripped to its fundamental, without any delusion and deception, what still attracts the audience? What do these images, being flat, hollow and meaningless, provide to keep the audience lingering? 'The images were the leftover products generated by the lenses of the projector framework, and the quality of the lenses particularly in the work of Iron Mesh I were really bad since they were the lousy products made in China. Without the protection of galvanization, those lenses reveal the chromatic dispersion, showing rainbow colors on the verges of all the images.'
However, he explains in an interview, when the images were reduced to the most fundamental, then perhaps we can see the process of 'how images are displayed through certain modes.' And the process is sensible. However, with digital images, this process is understandable but not sensible. 'Insensibility' plays a key role in image culture. For paintings and sculptures of the centuries, they are all sensible works in terms of this process. Every mutation was reserved in the process brightly and straight, and still stays there after one hundred years. While dealing with images is like a simplification of slicing; the imagery techniques made us lose our consciousness of existence. If we confine our life experience in the single mode, than the power of that simplicity as well as its result of losing the consciousness of existence will grow stronger and larger.
The powerful expansion of imagery technique causes the repeated loss of existential consciousness.
But we find out that Wu is quite aware of his standpoint upon facing the contemporary imagery environment as well as the human beings in it. He also consciously controlled his work and art exploration to be rid of the technical dominance. But we also find out his concentration on the mechanical framework in his work. The concentration was contained in an automatic imaginary mechanism which was transformed and created by the artist himself. Those mechanical apparatus look like a kinetic sculpture associated with images, letting out direct, non-illusive imagery experience with specific speed and effect. The speed is slow, and the artist draws out an unusual world from the hardened reality to embody invisible and unimagined characters. So the audience can sense that these new characters are in fact hidden in the original nature under the strangely transparent operation of the mechanism.
Let's take a look of the artist statement about the new work he is working on: 'Iron Mesh III' is part of the past series of work – the third iron mesh of mechanical projection installation, which extends the exploration and discussion on images, also takes a trial on the panoramic projection and introduces the issue of speed. In the middle of the circular room, a set of projection apparatus rotates extremely slowly. The projection moves along the wall making lightened area like a scanner discloses the imagery space, which seemed a bit like the beam of light from the light house wiping over the darkness and releasing the scene from the dark. The gyration picks up its speed, and the sound of the apparatus turns louder, the light in the space blinks, and the images become unrecognizable during the acceleration, then the blinks gradually slow down after the speed gets its summit; the movement becomes steady again, and shows a rectangular of stable light. The images appear on the wall around the circular room. After a while, the speed slows down further, and the work begins another cycle.'
A theatric atmosphere full of visual, audio and spatial experience was delineated in the statement. The artist created a situation to allow the audience escaping the reality and entering into a new world. There displays a set of metaphorical procedures disclosing the image-producing mechanism in our contemporary society. Now, what on earth is 'image'? The 'images' are produced and consumed here. You, as an audience, are looking and consuming the images.
The audience inevitably fell into the trap of 'seeing'. This behavior of seeing happens at the very moment without any coercion or forceful interference and seems more like a humorous self-ridicule or an amiable expression. In such a well-controlled ambience, the 'image' exposes itself, returns to itself, and nothing else.
Interestingly, no matter what the audiences feel about the preconditioned procedures and scenery, the artist stands as the first viewer. He even tells all the audiences present in the venue what allures him. And those meaningless light and shadows waving, changing in the infinite repetitions, shifting between the stable and unstable instant, all become a kind of novelty. By means of certain media, the audiences meet the nouveau experience which, brightly and lively, leads to the flow of time, slowly and gently.
Back to the discussion of the form of the work, 'Iron Mesh' series undoubtedly embody the material power based on certain extreme and virtualized mechanism. As the first viewer, the artist presents what he accidentally found out about the features of things under his playful exploration on the equipment or tools such like camera and digital technique. The hidden features of time changing or world scenery were realized through images to becoming some unusual senses. This redeployed ‘seeing’ generates a 'fabricated' power, to disclose the vanity of the images in reality on one hand, and to supplement another meaning which can provide a new interpretation of image, a sense that happen at the moment, and a corporal scene under changing.
The new scene stays in openness without any interruption. There is no meaning or reference except the new scene generated with the mechanical operations and discovered by the artist and the audiences. The viewers receive a sense in common without preconditioned induction. The artist has escaped the specific framework of self, and slipped away from the questioning of cultural meanings. The observing eye opened here is not in a cold mechanical territory any more. Rather, it is constructed skillfully on the behavior of ‘seeing’ itself, an open area full of unknowingness, imagination for exploration. In this highly-controlled situation to expel anything but seeing, the artist plays a role of both the addresser and the audience. Through his work, the question he raised is not only 'what is image', but furthermore 'what do we see?' and 'who is looking?'
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1 Quote from the interview of Wu, Chi-Tsung by Yu Wei 'Behind the images, what do we lost?' |
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