text by Hou I-Ting
Li Shih-chiao, a member of Taiwan's first wave of oil painters during the Japanese colonial period, portrayed a fashionable woman from Shanghai walking through a marketplace in a 1945 painting. The local Taiwanese people in the painting all stare as the woman passes, presenting Taiwanese society as it confronts the Other in this period. Today under western-led globalization, differences between the world's modernized cities have become increasingly negligible. Feelings of unfamiliarity when approaching our own culture and how to return to an essential Taiwan are problems that we currently face. The starting point for Complexing Body was Li Shih-chiao's oil painting Market, and in a similar fashion I use the people and working conditions in the marketplace as the backdrop for my artwork. My intention is to present Taiwan sixty years later under the effects of globalization, facing cultural hybridization and transplanting, and to raise the issue of how we on the margins are to confront centers of empire as well as the plight of contemporary art in Taiwan.
How should Asia see itself and its problems after globalization and empire? I use Taipei’s few remaining street markets that haven't been systematically administered by the government as the setting for my series Complexing Body. I photograph myself on site at these markets, and then embroider over the pictures to make a statement about the authority of western art history, copying iconic images and patterns from western painting that, when juxtaposed with the settings of the photos, produce a collapse of significance. Reading these embroidered images as symbols is of no use, as they are only another two-dimension level that create exotic spaces and visual impressions in juxtaposition with the digital images. When contemporary knowledge systems, such as imagery from famous western paintings, are situated in public places fed by the vitality of society’s lower levels, such as those in my photographs, a conflict is produced by the complete lack of connection between the two. Therefore these photographic spaces and hand-embroidered images produce complex and ambiguous relationships.
In the Complexing Body series, I copy from the Arnolfini Portrait by the Medieval painter Jan Van Eyck, Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. In my work Complexing Body—Nonexistent Body in an Interior Painting, I appropriate the Van Eyck painting which is actually a portrait of typical capitalist, and the long green dress worn by the female figure suggests restraint, chastity and everlasting prosperity. I refer to this painting by embroidering a heavy green robe over the figure in my photograph, which creates a curious contrast with images of dismembered poultry in the surrounding market. The standing figure in the photograph appears to be between violence and restraint, and is out of place with her setting. By situating a member of Taiwan's contemporary art world, who is therefore familiar with North American and European art techniques and western intellectuals, in this setting, I present the experience of being rendered a foreigner by using contemporary art language in real Taiwanese society. |
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