text by Wang Jun-Jieh
It is so illusory that for a moment we forget our identities, time and space, hovering between reality and unreality…Disneyland, a wonderland that many people have experienced. In 2002, a close friend died suddenly of illness. The shock of this event generated several of my art projects, including the photo and video installation Travelling with You (2004), made for the exhibition “Spellbound Aura – the New Vision of Chinese Photography” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Featuring entirely virtual objects (mountain, airplane, sky), this work constructs scenes seen from three different “viewpoints”. Also on display was a video on the Tokyo Disneyland's simulation of the lake scenery in the West of the US. The omniscient viewpoint used in the work means that you can move in and out of the setting and change to another time and space at random, just like the illusion of Disneyland, while underlining the insignificance and emptiness of the self within it.
The subject of Travelling with You is a fictitious journey and a fictitious world, as well as the ambiguous roles that people play in it. Through this association, I started another project Untitled 200256 in late 2004. It was the first work I shot with 35 mm film. Consisting of seven scenes, each lasting seven seconds, it was projected on two adjacent screens in a loop. By combining some actions in everyday life (walking, opening a door) with motifs of death (intravenous drip bottle, aura), it creates a highly alienated and cold style. The continuous repetition and regrouping of seemingly non-narrative short scenes produce a new kind of narrative, which derives from the evocation of the spectator's own experiences and memories through the repeatedly shown images. This film is extremely short, but it attempts to use non-narrative visual images to manifest people's abstract and subtle sensibilities in an environment. This was a difficult conversion for the artist. The medium of film negative was chosen because its high contrast helped to convey the dual sense of real and surreal.
After completing Untitled 200256, even though the high budget and highly professional production mode of quasi-film were a drawback, I felt that the vocabulary of expression was not yet fully explored. Thus, I started planning the next work Condition Project II in 2005. Originally, it came under the Microbiology Association series launched in 2000, and explores the new relations that constantly evolve between the body and the spirit of man nowadays. These relations break down into a mixture of reality, fantasy, memories and fears, that is, "conditions" made up of numerous small fragments, which are the components of people's lives today. The work is a three-screen synchronous interactive projection installation. The film only starts after a spectator enters a designated pool of light in the space. It consists of six independent short films, each lasting twenty seconds, projected in a loop following a random order. The films show the juxtaposition of real and surreal scenes, like the simultaneous intrusion of images of everyday life and dream sequences, such as a seat in an aircraft cabin, a TV screen emitting a snow-white luminous light, someone walking and opening a door, a man shot and lying in a pool of blood, cherry blossoms drifting in the air…The inspiration for these temporary “signs” or “images” comes from people's behaviour, information or association. The disconnected narrative seeks to reflect the complex and fragmented conditions of our real-life situations. Condition Project II alludes to the theory of Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung (1875-1961). According to him, human beings created civilization with their“ego”. However, the archetypes of the“self”are constantly buried by civilization, so that we only see“civilization”, but not the“self”. People have totally lost the ability to judge their own subtle behaviour. Learning about the“conditions”that surround them is an important step to exploiting the potential of the "self" and to purifying the environment.
After Untitled 200256 and Condition Project II, in terms of exploring the abstract theme of the intersection of real space and abstract consciousness through the means of video installations, I felt that a larger work was required to explore questions like the perception and experience of art, the language of the medium and the mode of artistic expression. This evolved into the third and largest work David's Paradise. In addition, I grouped all three works with related subjects under the name David Project. While it is named after the deceased friend who triggered off the whole project, the big challenge was how to transform the artist's abstract experience and feelings into concrete images. The installation version of David's Paradise is a five-screen synchronous projection. During the two years of its making, there were numerous technical problems of shooting with high-definition digital video to overcome. The surrealistic scenes in the video were shot in a constructed set in a studio following a meticulous shot breakdown, and altered with digital special effects in lengthy post-production work. These technical tasks are not just the basis of the piece, they are also key to the conversion of experience into artwork, to the question of “conversion” and “vocabulary”.
The “paradise” in David's Paradise does not really exist. It is merely a metaphor for the illusory happiness, space and desire in the real world. The work's starting point is a mundane living space that unfolds continuously. A protagonist who may or may not exist enters the house from a garden outside, and walks from the doorway to the study, living room, bathroom and bedroom, and out to the garden again. The film moves slowly through scenes that are half-real and half-surreal. In a series of real and illusory everyday settings, it attempts to convey the ambiguity and uncertainty of the co-existence of spirit, soul and body in the environment, space and time. The themes explored in David's Paradise include: condition, memory, time, space, desire and fear. People's affirmation of the value of their existence is closely related to space. Conditions also raise the corresponding issue of space. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) asked, “What is space?”, “In what form does space exist, and can space have a kind of presence? Is space a primitive phenomenon?”. “According to Goethe, once people are aware of these phenomena, they will experience a certain fear…”. German psychologist Fritz Riemann (1902-1979) said, “Fear is a part of life. It accompanies us in different forms from the day we're born to the day we die.” The fear that we try to overcome throughout our lives is a projection of desire. The intrinsic characteristics of space will manifest themselves. People's living space and actions represent the duality of fear and desire. They are projected onto different conditions between subconsciousness and consciousness.
“Experience is not just the definitive source of the enjoyment of art, but also of the creation of art. Everything is experience. But perhaps experience is the element in which art dies. This death happens so slowly that it takes a few hundred years to complete.” --Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, p.66
In his important lectures “The Origin of the Work of Art” delivered between 1935 and 1936, Heidegger discusses the essence of art and the relations between artist, work and art. Apart from the general perceptions and experience of the world, what other kinds of thinking can it have? Heidegger sees art as a “riddle”. Solving the riddle means pondering on the truth that art expresses. While pointing out that people judge art in terms of beauty, he also refers to the concealment inherent in art, which makes it suffer from a chronic terminal illness. Then what exactly is art? Does it represent truth as Heidegger says? Actually it carries the meaning of “revealing” and implies an “open space”. Artworks are not ordinary objects, and art is not just an appendage to pop culture. Apart from responding to the contemporariness of video language with precise technical expression, the David Project series also raises the question of the quest for the essence of art in contemporary art in addition to questions of medium, form and technique. What is the relationship between the form of artistic expression and the creator's own experience? What constitutes today's art? And what is the essence of art? Just like the questions that Heidegger poses in “The Origin of the Work of Art”, they are worth exploring. |
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