text by Amy Huei-hwa Cheng
The key issues in my artwork are about my social context. I am an artist from a marginalized region. I have never lived in one of those western countries where contemporary art history is written. I didn't realize until after many years that returning to my own life and starting out by examining my own experience of modernization were essential to opening up possibilities in my art.(1) — Chen Chieh-jen
Looking at this introspective quote leads us into Chen Chieh-jen's concepts for his videos as it clearly outlines the issues that have concerned him over the years. In addition to personal life experiences and contexts of marginalized society, it could be said that Chen has tried to broaden and renew reflective thinking from within Taiwan's social and historical condition in order to understand and narrate the experience of modernization.
When we speak here of marginalized region, it is not merely in terms of geopolitics or cultural anthropology, but also implies the West and its cultural centrism. This cultural centrism has been manifest in the production and expansion of administration through modernization, domination built upon the political, economic and cultural constructs in non-western regions, and is a result of western expansionism and more recent globalized capitalism. Chen Chieh-jen uses this comprehensive cultural and political critique to navigate the history of people in marginalized regions, and survey the actual conditions of their lives from local perspectives. More significantly, when discussing his own art practice, Chen advances his critical position and role as an artist living in a marginalized region, which entails rethinking the possibilities of art under long-term unequal allocation of cultural power and manifestations of western cultural centrism. Chen has consistently maintained this radical attitude and position of art's significance.
Chen Chieh-jen's predominant artistic medium over the last ten years has been video. Starting from his own personal experience, Chen carefully reëxamines and reärranges contemporary societal contexts marginalized by globalization with detailed and sweeping perspectives, and his reflexive gaze at history and daily life. Here it seems more fitting to consider Chen's video work as an evolving series of related dialectical thinking. After a long period of silence, Chen returned to art in the mid 1990s with work based on a photograph of lingchi taken in the early twentieth century by a French soldier. In this work, photograph and image serve as both subject matter and media, as Chen reëxamines domination in relation to the right to a voice, memory and historical writing. Using imaging editing software in his series Revolt of the Body and Soul 1900-1999, Chen introduced his own image into historical photographs of torture, playing the role of an observer, gazing at the Other. This series was the start of Chen's use of reflexive gaze and a harbinger of his role as politically dynamic observer in later films. Through his transformation into an observer/critic in his first video Lingchi, which also put forth his notion of the history of the photographed, Chen developed the deconstruction of authority and rewriting of the self.
Reflexive Gaze, First Wave: Factory While filming Lingchi in 2002, Chen raised one of his key issues: “It is impossible for us to be elsewhere, yet we aren't in the East either; we are just one part of the global consumer society dominated by capitalism.”(2) From this we can surmise that the modernity which concerns Chen is inextricable from the spread of capitalism. In his next video project, Factory, Chen focused on the plight of laborers in Taiwan from the 1960s world factory era to the 1990s when capital starting moving offshore.
Presenting this period of Taiwan's modernization in his video project Factory, Chen uses allegorical narrative, highly poetic and forceful visual forms as well as the inclusion of early Taiwanese black and white documentary film clips. To make the film, he assembled women garment workers who had worked at a clothing factory that had been closed down and abandoned seven years before, asking them to re-enact their work routines in the factory which now seemed like an historical ruins. At the start of this film, we are presented with a close up of an LED stock trading board lit up completely green, indicating that stocks were falling. The next shot is of a pile of discarded desks and chairs in a factory building strewn with items that seem to be left over from protests held at the time of the factory's closing. The camera pans to two women workers staring and standing motionless in the momentous atmosphere of this place frozen in time. In the next scene, it seems we are pulled into a dream of another era as the two women are roused from a deep slumber.
The film shuttles back and forth between two seemingly interlocking riddles of changing times. The first is of the women slowly opening articles of clothing to reveal the past within them; their eyes, along with the camera, seem to be directing our gaze into the garments to an historical situation located within. The second is represented by fragments of a documentary depicting workers in a bustling factory during Taiwan's manufacturing heyday off the 1960s, forming a stark contrast with the abandoned factory and hesitant actions of the two women. It seems time stopped when the factory was closed, as the left-behind tables, chairs, manufacturing equipment, newspapers, as well as megaphones used to protest the closing of the factory, are now all covered with a thick layer of dust. The women laborers who seem to have been reawakened are struggling to remember work routines that were so familiar before the factory closed. As they thread the needles on their sewing machines and tealeaves gently sink in their cups, we catch a glimpse of their elderly faces. Their silent expressions seem to be asking what that period from heyday to decline signifies for those who experienced it, that is, how does one exist in a society that has reached the inevitable end in the process of modernization as described by Zygmunt Bauman. The slow panning camera in Chen's video powerfully draws the viewer by focusing attention on every detail left behind by migrating capital, and in this process, it is discovered that the remnants ironically include the lost value and significance of labor itself.
Local workers lost their jobs when factory owners moved capital offshore seeking cheaper labor, and as Chen has noted these workers had no means of following the capital. Bauman has said that those who have been made redundant, lost their place in the modern chain of production and the means of earning a living become “human waste.” Of the time he was filming Factory, Chen said, “When making a film in 2002, I met these women workers that had lost their jobs when the factories unscrupulously shut down. Listening to them tell of their long struggle with the factory owners, I was reminded of the first factory that was set up near my home when I was a child. At the time, the whole neighborhood was abuzz with the news of the brand-new, huge factory. Soon after, everyone, including the neighbors, my family members and even myself, went to work in the various factories, and so this seems like an experience that many of us share. After the 1990s when industries started moving abroad, more and more owners were shutting down their factories and refusing to distribute severance pay and pensions.” (3) In the 1990s, Taiwan was caught up in the global drive for capitalism and quickly transformed into a media-rich consumer society. During this period of great pride in the attainments of electronic information industries and the joint efforts by the government and people to play up yet another leap forward in society's modernization, Chen Chieh-jen was using this film to remind everyone of the experiences he and his generation underwent, and the outcome they ultimately faced. Art as Protest: Revisiting a People's History in Empire's Borders I
From a macro historical perspective, the inevitable flight of industries abroad; the Cold War and its conclusion; and the opening of China, Southeast Asian countries, and even countries of the greater Asian region, are all part of a series of linked global developments, and Chen's thinking has evolved along with these changes. In 2005 he filmed his video project Bade concerning transient workers; in 2006 he looked back on Taiwan's Cold War period with Ongoing; from 2008 to 2009 he filmed Military Court and Prison concerning connections between contemporary society, the Cold War and martial law consciousness; and most recently, Chen completed Empire's Borders I, an exploration of contemporary imperialistic consciousness. Confronting these successive changes in Taiwanese society, Chen has linked events in Taiwan's thirty-eight year history of martial law since the Nationalist Government retreated from the Mainland in 1949, and also reëxamined Taiwan's special relationship of economic and political dependency with the United States.
During the Cold War period, which closely followed Japanese colonization, Taiwan entered into a new process of modernization dominated by American social values and ideologies deeply influencing the consciousness of society as a whole. Even after martial law was lifted in 1987, Taiwanese society continued to be deeply affected by thinking formed during the martial law and Cold War period along with the incursion of new hegemonic ideologies. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed this power which has entered our everyday lives global empire, and this notion has appeared in Chen Chieh-jen's artwork, especially Military Court and Prison and Empire's Borders I.
In his video project Empire's Borders I, Chen focuses on the plight of nine Taiwanese women who were inexplicably treated poorly as they applied for United States travel visas which were ultimately denied, and the stories of eight Mainland Chinese who came to Taiwan for marriage and were closely investigated by government authorities. These cases expose the oppression which individuals suffer under surveillance and exclusivism in the contemporary world order. The inspiration for this video came from Chen's personal experience of applying for a visa at Taipei's American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) after he was invited to attend the exhibition Prospect New Orleans in 2008. During his visa application interview, Chen was accused of trying to illegally immigrate to the United States, which prompted him to establish his blog The Illegal Immigrant where others could share their stories of discrimination and verbal abuse at the hands of the AIT workers. Many personal accounts detailing this rarely talked about discrimination were left on Chen's blog everyday, forming a never-before recorded history of oppression. Later discussing his concept for Empire's Borders I when he began filming, Chen said, “I am using a typical case of a Taiwanese person being denied an American visa for no reason, and contrasting this with the inhumane treatment Mainland spouses endure at the Taiwan National Immigration Agency when arriving at the airport to present the hierarchy of global imperialism as it is constructed by various sovereign countries. While the United States is of course the dominant empire, other countries, including Taiwan, also adopt an imperial attitude when monitoring weaker others from different regions.”(4)
Chen uses a dramatized reportage style, filming his videos on sets that emulate the uninviting interview room at AIT and customs office at the Taiwan airport; spaces which are symbolic of national sovereignty. Each scene is the reading of a first-person account taken from Chen's blog or field research. The accounts are filled with dread and uncertainty about the treatment these individuals may face, and the inhospitable sets outfitted with monitoring devices represent administrative mechanisms, producing an icy tension and highlighting the friction and contradiction between individual survival and legal survival as defined by national sovereignty. This kind of tension reminds us of the women in Chen's video Factory, who seem to have lost all vitality as they stand in an abandoned space, and also calls to mind a scene from Military Court and Prison where the actors are pushing against a large metal structure creating a loud and abrading allegorical noise. In Factory, Chen interrogates history with the silent staring of the women actors; and in Empire's Borders I, he returns those who faced ill treatment back to the scene of the incident using stage sets and the filming process, so that they may regain their voices in a situation like direct social protest. The Potential of Art
While Lingchi and Factory were silent videos, Chen has added sound to his more recent videos Military Court and Prison and Empire's Borders I. In his early series of computer manipulated photographs, Revolt in the Body and Soul, and his video Lingchi, Chen has explored authority relationships as dominant and weak peoples observe and interpret one another. In Military Court and Prison and Empire's Borders I,Chen has given oppressed and voiceless Others, generally conceptualized in the third-person, a platform for active writing and speaking. For Military Court and Prison, Chen invited homeless and unemployed individuals, and foreign spouses to perform and write their plights outside of the boxes on official forms which are symbolic of state mechanisms and social norms. In Empire's Borders I, Chen has presented the unreasonable treatment endured by those who wish to travel to other regions or countries through first person individual accounts. Commenting on Empire's Borders I, Taiwanese scholar Huang Chien-hung has said that Chen's work can be considered a “treatise or a call to action.” (5)Viewers glimpse the struggles that arise from the deployment of economic capital and national sovereignty, as well as the impact and distortion globalization imposes on their own lives, through the unique spaces and narrative methods established in Chen's videos.
From Factory to Empire's Borders I, the development of Chen Chieh-jen's videos has spanned ten years. Discussing his work, Chen has said he tries to “uncover realities hidden in society.” We can understand this to mean that Chen's videos are related to domination and authority, and the various topologies they form in contemporary social relations. Because he reëxamines and delineates these social relations, and investigates the confusion (Chen emphasizes that confusion is the place where we must start when reviving our political social consciousness) which results when he involves himself in them, Chen's videos uncover the power of latent political manipulation and systematic oppression. Regarding this continual process of archeology, Chen has said, “The making of every video is also a political action.”(6)
Of course we should not overlook the significance of political action in Chen's videos, as it informs all aspects of his work; from the interactive contexts of video, the evolution of the filming process, his motivation in drawing inspiration from his own experience, the staging of his videos as a response to social issues to the final presentation, which is intended to engage us in dialogue. In fact, it is not until the audience sees this process as being integrated that they can enter more deeply into Chen's imaginative representations and understand their various levels, and the possibility of reversing established power relations whether in social space or on an ideological level. Both Factory and Empire's Borders I renewed our initiative to become the subjects of history by teasing out repressed memories, and offering enlightenment through the reflexive gaze and listening. In this way we can also cast off existing experiences and mainstream discourses and acquire the power to see the reality in which we are situated. No doubt, this is an important start in reversing positions of authority and creating more possibilities for initiating key changes.
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1. Interview with Chen Chieh-jen. “dangshizhe de zaixiangxiang yu zaishuxie” (trans. reconception and rewriting in the first person). Art Time Magazine. February 2010.
2. Cheng, Amy Hui-hua. “bei sheyingzhe de lishi: yu Chen Chieh-jen duihua: lingchi: yizhang lishi zhaopian de huiyin.” (trans. linchi, history of the photographed: an interview with Chen Chieh-jen) Art Today, June 2006, pp196-200.
3. Chen, Chieh-jen. Artist introduction for Factory. 2003.
4. Cheng, Amy Hui-hua. Interview with Chen Chieh-jen, “zai wufa you dangan de shijian zhong, shengchan xingdong he dangan” (trans. manifest actions and archives when recording is forbidden) Contemporary Art and Investment. No. 32, August 2009, p41. and Cheng, Amy Hui-hua, ed. Art and Society. Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2009, p87.
5. Huang Chien-hung. “cong Chen Chieh-Jen luxing zhankan yingxiang de wentihua.” (trans. Chen Chieh-jen's video and issues raised by images) ArtView, No 41, January 2010, p134.
6. Cheng, Hui-hua. Interview, Contemporary Art and Investment. p43 and p89. |
