text by Wang Pin-Hua
TCHENOGRAMME is an artist, who always experiments the possibility of “flying at habitat”, which results in his becoming an artist, who “explores the existence”. This strength of thinking not only influences him but also affects the people who resemble his touch in depth, such as the title of his home-made work collection in 2002: ‘The inevitability of flowing permeates through immensity.’ This is indeed suitable for being the little point of entering his immense structure of arts. From this little point, it shall explore a whole giant and multiple threads of thinking system and the starting point of permeating through everything.
In 1989 to 1991, TCHENOGRAMME had completed 62 sets of “Cultural Measurement”. They are series of conceptual work composed of sketches, drafts, space graphics, charts, drawings, objects, writings, and movements. From these visual forms of drafts and models resembling thinking observers may discover that these writings on papers are merely visible tracks of sustained thinking conditions. They neither include the simulation of reality nor the conclusion of any objects. Of course, that is the disintegration of any visible phenomena, and the attempting description and imagination of “reconstruction”. However, “reconstruction” from everlasting hasn’t developed toward some specific form. It is merely a sustained initiation which makes every disintegration, query, and reconstruction become a movable active condition. It is exactly this kind of “super” structure open to the unknown and consisted of all kinds of non-linear coordinate. The observers cannot help but notice the starting point of the query is the breaking point between human and nature. It is the very condition that humans face the world in overall scientific, humanistic, and artistic attitudes, which are different from the position of modernism and post-modernism, but similar to the construction of expanding the world continually in imagination.
TCHENOGRAMME then used the original unit “TCHENOGRAMME” to refer to, “any existence”, including all affairs, objects, forms, writing, and …… (overall) formative arts (thinking activities). Therefore, from the very beginning, the observers would find out that actually the core of every kind of discoveries TCHENOGRAMME initiated is “any existence”. The very first statements are: ‘This is a withdrawing and recessive book, even though I keep on resisting the remains of my own ideas……’, and ‘It is similar to some never existing “machine” or “institute” which can measure everything. It attempts to intervene in the thinking area of formative arts by the means of non-systematic or non-hierarchy logics, and stretch out itself “by its variable ego.”’ The core of care is the “existence”, and it is anyone and everywhere. The way of its initiation starts from “the variable ego,” and expands a kind of interlacing, fluid, and non-stopping alternation which is the most novel arts in “multi-values” reality.
In fact, artists’ thinking direction is very clear in the very beginning. Modern arts long for the absolute spirit approached by abstract and concise vision, or some subjective condition eagerly disclosed by the automatic subconscious. In TCHENOGRAMME ’s structure, modern arts is not merely overturned, but also self-examined the subject all over again with more complicated open style, and even starts by means of deducting subjectivity, despite his cultural measurement is full of disclosure, differentiation, and re-derivation of bottom forces working on all kinds of things. Seemingly scientific thinking ways are actually the examination of scientific methodology. Therefore, if the observers follow the superficial references of these graphics, and place the thinking point on remained real snatches in the displayed scenery, they will lose the focus of TCHENOGRAMME ’s self-examination.
In cultural measurement, it reveals the artist’s personal decision of visual arts. He never expands the painting part in the whole writing. Even so, at the moment of writing, modeling, and thinking, it is brimmed with an “intransitive” transparency, which results from the characteristics of the artist’s writing. At this stage, we found out from the title of measurement that it is the conversation when individuals face groups, the conversation between men and objects, and between men and earth. (So called “earth” is not the solidity of objects, but “springing up” in Greek meaning. It is the “city of growth,” cited from About TCHENOGRAMME )
The very first writing becomes silhouettes later. The physiology of writing becomes “mirror images” in silhouettes. The existing mirror images reflex everything insides and include multiple coming and going of construction and dispelling. To comprehend at this angle, although the silhouettes in his latter creations from “So, as far as art is concerned, what do we have left ?” “Daily Life in 19,389 seconds,” “Circumference ; Sea Route : Moon is Sun ” “Plants turn Circles.” “Do you recognized the town ? / OH ! Where’s the Deutschland ?” to “Cloning taiwan ” in 2001 show up as a record of forms, it is a condition of a kind of conceptual documentation. So to speak, as it is used to be an effective medium to estrange the reality, and produce a kind of feedback of silhouettes in non-transparent meaning, it, on the contrary, becomes the dilemma of observation, which is the displaying field of “existing and surviving appearance.”
The observers, thus, think that this artist is able to come and go among the critical point of all kinds of subjective appearances and examine them from his work. In the interior world, it seems to reconstruct an immense “super” structure. In between, it is a kind of refinement of thinking activity, which penetrates, flows, and permeates everything and return to the life world accordingly. |
