text by Ting Chaong-Wen
I am skilled in dealing with mixed media, such as space installations which mixed with images and sounds. In recent years, I tries to concern the multiple perceptions and its mediation according to plasticity and extensibility of the contemporary experimental installations through site specific arts and features.observation the synesthesia relationship between the face of the work involved in emotional substance and history, this development belongs to the individual context and eradialectical differences in the microscopic experience,Therefore,A As an artist that grew up in Taiwan in the 1990s, my emotion and memory about the city are always related to some important historic moments. I was born in 1979 when the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan. An uncanny feeling pervaded among people in the country. Confronting changes of the overall situation, they felt the urge to be more connected with the world. After that, the lift of the Martial Law brought about economic developments; there was a wave of construction policies implemented by the government. Today, what we face is another wave, a capitalism which crosses borders. Urged by neo-liberalism, our country’s policies are oriented towards urban development projects. Just like organisms such as cells, urban landscape is constantly shifting in the cycles of aging, death and rebirth. In the past, perhaps it was a succession of foreign regimes that brought about changes in the country whereas now it is about the struggles between the exploitation of real estate and the ecology protection. Anyhow, the urban contours in Taiwan always appear to be fragile and fragmented. Similarly, our memories of them have become piecemeal. Maybe it is the reason that motivated me to record through my own work the infinitesimal experiences with regards to my surroundings.
A I feel lucky that I’ve been living and studying in the south of Taiwan.Tainan has been successively governed by the Netherlands, the Ming Dynasty, the Ching Dynasty as well as the Japanese colonizers before being taken over by the Kuomintang government after World War II.The four-hundred-years history can be seen as an epitome of Taiwan’s history. From official culture to folk culture, there is a huge amount of energy that is accumulated in this city. Artists can discover many wonderful stories here. As for the historic traces that are kept within the local daily life, they also manifest themselves in different archival forms.As an artist,what I should do is to reveal the perceptual experiences contained in the archives and to make installations that would create a “Blind Field” that surpasses the archive of memory. In viewing my works, the viewers’ emotion and imagination are released into a free state. Also, through reviewing historic archives, the viewers are invited to look at the synesthesia consciousness in our immediate circumstances of existence.
If you ask me to explain my habitual way of exerting the mind and observation in my work, I would divide my art-making into three periods.The first period is about material and memory; my work of this period is about using signs, objects, fogs and sceneries that are Relational Space Relational Space familiar to us as well as devices with certain functions.As a whole,they make a multiple setting. But the meaning they represent differs from the ordinary; so they become an alternative mode.There, I create some curious atmosphere that would arise from the environment; daily objects intended as instruments are inserted into an artist context and would no longer remain tangible objects of interpretation. Rather, they would manifest a kind of poeticness with multiple meanings. The second period is about corporal perception; what I’m interested in is the individualistic corporal perceptions in viewing and approaching works. My works of this period are not about boundaries among disciplines but rather the loss and the sublimation of the definition of boundary, the blurring of discipline categorization and the emphasis on corporal perception.The idea is to let self-discipline work with the heterogeneous, let art shift to life and vice versa and to finally let the artist and the viewer share an “imaginary” regime on the synesthesia homogeneous surface of “work”.We will no longer view or experience art through rational recognition but through resonances of corporal perceptions. Finally, in the third period, I shift my focus to social practice. Even though the context is still daily life, the works of this period no longer consist in inviting the viewer to evoke his/her memory; neither are they about corporal perceptional experience. These works are installations that represent becoming relations between historical memory and stock of information. It is also the base of my recent projects. For example, in my "Tsuo Chen Man" project, I explore the relations between pre-history and anthropology. |
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