text by Lin Hsin-I
Abstract
This paper uses the concepts of absurdity from Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis and from Albert Camus’《The Myth of Sysiphus》to discuss the works of Wan-Ren Chen. The researcher examines the repetitive movements, cultural gestures, and rhythmic milieu in Chen’s work, using them as the central structure of this writing and transforming them into an extreme sport, one which corresponds to the linear/circle consciousness of Chen’s work. The purpose in doing this is to study how the absurd images and repetitive movements of everyday life transcend the circle of eternal return, producing a spiritual gesture of being in the world. This spiritual gesture has become a resistant power to the system－an empty but positive living rhythm that suspends the absurdity of subjective contemporary life. The paper begins by discussing how Lefebvre uses the concept of dressage to explain that a movement is transformed into a gesture through culture, and then becomes an abstract symbol. Further elaborates that the rhythm of everydayness is a movement and divergence within repetition itself, using Lefebvre’s concept to analyze the existence of the corporeal and time in Chen’s work. Summing up, repetitive movement, through using movement in myth as an analogy, is a kind of eternal return due to its absurdity and nihility, which is a spiritual gesture hailing meaningless.
(Paper presented at The Forum of Asia Arts-DELTA: The Living Gesture in Asia, TNNUA, Taiwan.)
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