Angelic Verses
Marko Daniel,
Professor of Southampton University, UK

The Angelic Verses form part of the Exchanges series started during Chen Cheng-Tsai 's 2001 stay in Japan and grows, at least in part, out of his earlier Portraits of Angels in which he filmed thirty-minute portraits of people he had met while teaching on an art education programme at a day centre of the Children Are Us Cultural & Education Foundation (for mentally impaired children) in Taipei. The current Angelic Verses consists of two parts, Portrait of Angels – Tokyo Version and Exchange of Roses–Angelic Verses.
On the functional level, Exchange of Roses represents the process by which the artist established communication with the local community in Ibaraki Prefecture near Tokyo. A series of photographs document how he handed over a single rose (the prefectural flower, as if it needed yet another symbolic meaning) to local inhabitants, including residents in a home for people with mental disabilities. They reciprocated by making sketches of the flowers they had received, which in turn form the basis of another piece, a large grid-like arrangement of these sketches on the gallery walls. This closes one circle of the exchange of gifts.
The Tokyo version of Portrait of Angels presents the viewer with a darkened space that is dominated by two video projections on opposite walls. Each video shows a single figure wearing plain, casual clothes, seated on a simple chair that is placed against a black background. Thus the images put a stark emphasis on the identity of the figures themselves, on the details of their behaviour and their small movements. The near life-size figures, the residual luminosity of their black background only lightly framing them against the darkness of the space, are projected relatively high up on the wall so that we need to raise our eyes to them. They are the Angels that guard us from above. Yet if we try to establish contact with them we are frustrated. They do not address us verbally nor is there any but the most minimal background sound. In the absence of spoken language, gestures and gazes are the means by which we relate to persons that share are our real space; convention has also shown us how gestures and gazes provide the clues by which the mute protagonists of a painting communicate with their audience (and we still consider ourselves their audience).
Here we soon realise that the very movement given by video isolates us from the Angels rather than bringing us closer to them. As we focus on them, we are struck by their indifference to us; their actions are self-involved and even where they show that they are curious about their environment (heads moving, looking) their curiosity is not about the spectator. During preparations for the recording, the artist had told his sitters that they would spend thirty consecutive minutes before the camera and asked them to sit still, or as still as they felt comfortable to be. During this time they would be alone with the artist who would not answer questions or otherwise communicate with them. Chen Cheng-Tsai asked them to spend some time thinking about happiness in their life; about their families; and about themselves, their present, past and future. With this strategy, the artist created the preconditions for the isolation of the sitters in the world of their own minds. It also draws attention to the double absence on which the experience of moving images is based: the absence of the spectator during recording and of the sitter during projection. While the duration of the video projection fixes a common length of time for both events (especially here in the absence of any editing), each takes place in its own independent sphere. This is emphasised by the similar lack of communication that exists between the Angels themselves, enthroned on their chairs quietly facing each other above the spectators' heads.
Here we have a fundamental difference between this video installation and conventional video portraits as seen on television, that is a documentary following a person during the course of a working day or whatever it is they and the film crew thought defined that person's interest to the viewers. While each may last half an hour, one is designed to be busy and characterises its subject through words and action; the other is essentially quiet and offers its subject for visual scrutiny. According to the young conventions of the video diary, we are invited into someone's world and enter it through the film's edited narrative. In the Portrait of Angels, the subjects inhabit their world and by their indifference and self-absorbedness keep us out of it.
This stillness also explains why they have more in common with the long tradition of painted portraiture. As portraits, they need to be distinguished both from stylised, formal portraits that celebrated the status and power of the sitter and from the psychological portraits that attempt with brutal honesty to present an analysis of the sitter's essential features and character. They are neither Van Dyck's royal patrons at the court of Charles I nor Rembrandt's self-portraits. These video portraits share more of the spirit of Velazquez, not least formally, in the isolation of the sitter against a plain background but also in the combination of detached observation and distance that equally marks his images of, say, King Philip IV of Spain or the dwarf Don Sebastián de Morra. As paintings, these images condense the long hours during which artist and sitter faced each other onto a single canvas and the hard stare of the subject meets the spectator unflinchingly. The half hour that is recorded in the Angels Project seems little by comparison and yet it is precisely because of its duration that the installation most challenges the spectator. Perhaps it is because the sitters flinch. A painting is easier to stare at as it always looks back at us, and always in the same way. The Angels, however, sometimes look straight out, then look away, play with their clothes, smile and frown and fall asleep. Throughout, whether they appear comfortable or not, they stay in their seats, that is to say, they remain visible and subject to our scrutiny. Thus, the interest of the Portraits of Angels lies in the fact that the spectators gradually begin to doubt all their assumptions about what they are seeing and why they are seeing it. Portraits are there to be looked at. This knowledge provides a legitimising framework for the spectator's voyeurism and curiosity, for the unchallenged, detailed inspection of the sitters in search of revelations about their nature and character. But the duration of the recordings challenges our understanding of how they function, whether they are portraits at all, and how we ought to look at them. We realise that the subjects are not purely putting in a performance for our benefit, that their awareness of being on camera slips in or out of focus, and at those moments they reveal most about themselves and we become most aware of our own watching.
In some ways reminiscent of Gillian Wearing's videos of contemporary British society, Chen Cheng-Tsai's work is not so much about the individual subjects, but forces the spectators to question their own engagement with the subjects, their own gaze and the conditions of their own intersubjectivity.