text by Esther Lu
It would be hard to count how many found chairs to be associated with Wei-Li Yeh’s practice throughout these years of our acquaintance. Almost as a reoccurring leitmotif, the image of chair plays different roles, and translates itself into varying contexts and meanings in his projects. Needless to dig through my memory, the first image of Yeh’s chair I encountered more than a decade ago could still unfold every detail of itself vividly in my mind. It was taken in Treasure Hill, Taipei. An old-fashion wooden chair stood against a dark greenish blue wall in an absolute solitude. The light was dim but not fading. The image itself was intimate and powerful, mesmerizing with the density of colors: Yeh’s rearrangement of the chair simply created a stage from an empty room, and a theatre was born in the presence of a photographer, awaiting for narratives to take place. Chair is an object, as I remember how Yeh once noted, “calling for the existence of a person.”
It took me some time to understand Yeh’s persistence in negotiating with sites, their associated relations, objects and surroundings in a painstakingly slow-motion speed. Returning to his childhood hometown after twenty years being an immigrant in the US, Yeh has grown a peculiar sensitivity to attend to the shape of memory, and care for objects and spaces that interconnect (traces of) lives. His early works in Taiwan, including the Treasure Hill Tea + Photo project series (2003-2008), Three Places (2005), the curatorial project The Lake (2005) and so on, reveal a strong sense of belongingness—the desire for seeing through sites and histories in a close-up contemplation on those places where he resided and worked. It was a profound attempt to search and conceive the possible acknowledgement of home and identity from the insignificant ruins and margins. Through his personal laboring, building and collecting, Yeh created a fortified garden of narrations and discovered stories one after another to race against the passing of time. He did not merely capture the fleeting light on his films, but embraced and celebrated light in the way as it told histories like finely crafted origami art in its making—like flickers from various angles and different times coming together to show the invisible weight of being. Yeh continued to build up scenes and situations to accommodate interactions and bases to exclude estrangement, making objects and places shine. Resulting from the ceaseless effort, his work is not just about image making, but memory making, or furthermore—about making life out of things.
Among Yeh’s activities, collecting discarded objects and bringing out their new quality through his modification is his politics as well as his physical intuition and psychological tendency in response to today’s consumerism society. Antiquity-Like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate is a long-term project developed since 2010, and could be regarded as a new phase of his artistic practice as he re-settled himself from Taipei to Yangmei, the town where he was brought up as a child. His collection has been growing fast with collective efforts from friends and students, and this project indicates a much relaxed and playful position even from its title: the interrogation with things is not to unearth tensions but to rediscover possibilities. The narrative is no longer a singular first-person action, but conveys an elaborated collaborative journey to investigate the status quo of our material world, which is prescribed by the speedy circulation of raw materials and goods in the globalized economy, whirling and composing an ever fragile human network. Through this project, Yeh creates an extended community in the work-in-progress, and is able to amend the divided social relations by weaving his aesthetics through these broken links and values between life and art, garage and cultural artifacts, etc. Instead of being a documentary photographer to present spectacles of social ruins, Yeh becomes more and more as an experimental anthropologist artist to confront the contemporary objects with inventive creativity to prolong their elastic relations with human beings whiling challenging the conception and institution of art.
Sofa Prototype is the latest project from an obsolete item, which Yeh collected in an abandoned factory’s office in Miaoli, 2012, and has been exhibited in his studio as well as in the Taipei Fine Art Museum in its original look as part of Antiquity-Like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate. After becoming a traveling art object, the sofa’s condition ironically gets worse than ever, and demands a renewal plan from its decaying body. Yeh takes this opportunity to have a makeover plan for the sofa set, turning itself into a mini museum of its own with the original interiors encapsulated in transparent acrylic panels. The installation in Art Basel HK invites audience to enter the private history and the future of the sofa, and embodies a fine line between the discarded and the desired with the proposed speculation of objecthood. The project manifests the artist’s philosophy in approaching the underlying principles of materiality and form in everyday life, and the resulting presentation is articulated with Yeh’s artistic language and particular attitude so an object could eventually affirm its own right to yield an abundant life, not to be easily forgotten or consumed.
Centered to Yeh’s aesthetic consideration, form has been a main concern he ponders to mediate communication with audience. The multiple representations via imagery provide the depth of narratives, while the deconstruction and alternation foreground an immediate presence in this new installation. The sofa that poses its bare structure nevertheless leaves an overflowing sense of mystery, if not calling for an existence of a person, allowing projections of imagination to join the unfinished expenditure. Each face of the Sofa Prototype serves to construct a larger architectural structure, and composes together as a logbook that informs the detailed readings on the movements of the very object, labor, time and space. With the rich vocabularies in formal question, Yeh further leads us to rethink materialism in our globalized society, the changing economy infrastructure and environmental crisis from a fresh perspective. If materiality and biopolitics are to be redefined in the abstraction of our contemporary social relation, Antiquity-Like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate plays a significant role to provide concrete terms of investigation.
Yeh’s works generously offer a vast horizon to appreciate the unnoticeable correlations that bond us together and details of life passing through our fingers all times. By silently delineating the figure of absence, his stories are therefore always loud—from the metaphor of his chairs.
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