text by Huang Yi-Hsiung
The artworks of Tania Tsong de O’Pazo are often defined by elements of feminist art. Buttons, soap, knitted fabric, cups, plates, and other items of daily life accumulated over time are incorporated into her work. Through visual art, these familiar items are able to touch upon the close relationship of people with their family, friends, and environment. Although most people who notice the feminist attributes of de O’Pazo’s artworks tend to describe them from a perspective of gender, we prefer not to use that angle to view her works. Instead, we look at de O’Pazo’s life experience to find a more suitable perspective, one that revolves around awareness about life - its attraction and obsession with experiences, feelings, and the body.
De O’Pazo spent her childhood in Taiwan, then lived and studied in Spain as a young adult. It is hard for us to compare the influences these two cultures had on her. However, crossing intellectual and emotional realities inspired de O’Pazo to use art as a means to bridge this rift in her life, forming the underlying “temperament” to her creative process. De O’Pazo embarked on her artistic endeavors in 2007. Her current works, Dwellings, Memories, Migrations, and The World is Flat, can be seen as efforts to eliminate feelings of estrangement regarding her own identity. They present non-linear trains of thought that are filled with gaps, and which focus on memories and issues that attempt to grasp a greater understanding of the world. Concepts include the exploration of the relationships amongst proportion, reality, and migration. In terms of condition, these works present the outer surface to an emotional fantasy.
Regarding “Memories”
Only remembered things go down in history. Only things that are changing are remembered.
--Hegel
Memories play an important role in de O’Pazo’s works. For the work, Scars, the artist interviewed her friends to ask them about certain scars they had. She then sewed embroideries in the shape of these physical scars onto paper, and explained the history behind each one with short texts. She used alphabet-shaped pasta to spell out lyrics based on her friends’ memories of songs. Angela Kepler describes how Jan Assmann’s notion that collective memories communicated by a family are able to shape and alter the collective memory known as cultural memory. “Communicative memories lie closer to daily life than cultural memories, which are distant from daily life.” However, in modern society, this notion goes beyond the described scope. “In a small community such as a family, the role of Communicative Memories is similar to that of the Cultural Memories of larger communities. At the same time, they serve as a large collection of numerous Cultural Memories. On the contrary, if the many social and cultural memories do not stem from the daily interaction and communication in local daily life, then they hold no influence over people.” (Note 1) In Dwelling, items that allude to memories of daily life form a narrative unrelated to any descriptive memory and show a personal facet to the daily lives of “those who are present.” In terms of meaning, each of her items is endowed with the elements of a “memory,” connecting a personal life to the outside world. With global capitalism as the backdrop, items transcend their physical aspects through a “cultural” process, thus making culture the driving force for an economy and a symbol for consumerism. The artist applies the same logic throughout her creative manipulations. Yet, her goal is not driven by economic factors. Through the weaving motions of knitting and sewing, she solidifies a meaningful notion to the “present,” and items become vessels for the storage of memories. When items embody the traces of “those who are present,” they transcend their original meaning. For contemporary art, the main narrative is comprised of many small stories, even taking on the guise of a compilation of many spoken tales. However, to find a suitable train of thought that can cut into one’s social environment is not easy. For this, de O’Pazo uses broken language to alter the times, events, secrets, and questionings in her own daily life as she attempts to find a connection to the outside world. “Within the many items of our homes, there lie the memories of our lives we endow. The memories and illusions embodied with them cannot be told apart. However, this city is made of prefabricated houses and mass-produced objects that are both similar and disposable.” (Note 2) When cardboard boxes, garbage bags, pieces of old clothing and other accumulated junk or mass procured disposable products are infused with memories, their intended “informational value” becomes “communicative value.” When the domain of daily life is connected with the actual world, the present is sewn into reality, alleviating the artist’s unease regarding her uneasy sense of estrangement.
Recognizing the World
Regarding the exploration of knowledge, the copious use of ambiguous and contrasting intertextuality in de O’Pazo’s works raise questions over epistemological problems, such as those regarding the real world, copies of the real world, and copies of copies. And, these questions conform to the unfolding of the artist’s unique “temperament.” In the works, the contrasting language of “virtual vs. reality,” “planar vs. three-dimensional,” and “micro vs. macro” are like individual experiments of thought in a mapping of personal “temperament” without clear rules or a plan.
Regarding difficulties in grasping the real world, Plato believed that all objects in nature are in a constant state of change; only categories are real and remain unchanged. Regardless of whether they are dead or living material, individual entities are but shadows. From their essence, one grasps their nature and, from this, discovers that everything is similar - there is nothing real about them. And, in modern times, the nature of the real world seems to be an intractable struggle that is an even more confusing and real copy. It not only is the shadow of a cave, but also a continuously repeated reflection of multiple copies of copies. Regarding questions surrounding this type of recognition, de O’Pazo utilizes a cumbersome and scattered style to simplify the relationship between material and geometry into a reference model. For example, her work, Tetris, borrows from Plato’s three-dimensional comparison between a material’s geometry and nature - triangular pyramids, quadrilaterals, and other multi-sided shapes are placed amongst abandoned brick piles produced by people. Symbolizing the material world, they bring a connection to the real world. The World is Flat was the name of her solo exhibition in 2010. “In the exhibition, visitors will find a forest made of money trees. A number of boats land on grasslands, gasoline lakes, and world maps filled with small houses. The works are filled with color, almost innocently and naively. They use the game, Monopoly, as a thread (the banknotes, small houses, cars, and other Monopoly game objects). However, the content explored is a bit gloomy.” (Note 3) These colors bring forth a fashionable game setting: the small houses folded from world maps, the individual money trees cut out from the bank notes of Monopoly, the small vehicles folded from car advertisements in magazines, and other objects that come from the artist’s understanding of the world linked together through her use of symbolism. Nelson Goodman stated that: “An object at various times may symbolize different things, even nothing at other times. A tedious or purely practical object might be operated in manners similar to art. And, an artwork might be operated like a tedious or purely practical object.” (Note 4) He points out that the recognition between artworks and objects is connected with the operation of the symbolic system. The world we have come to understand is not an objective world, but an understanding produced by an ambiguous, symbolic connection. And, objects that have been converted into symbolic content and copies of objects are hollowed and even made into three-dimensional forms. In this process of re-copying conducted through the structural operation and conversion of the work, imagination is integrated, and a relationship and line of thought that transcend visuals is established between the work and viewers.
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References:
1. 安格拉‧開普勒，〈個人回憶的社會形式－（家庭）歷史的溝通傳承〉，收入季斌、王立君、白錫（方方土）譯，哈拉爾德‧韋爾策（Harald Wwlzer）編，《社會記憶：歷史、回憶、傳承》，北京：北京大學出版社，2007年。
2. 莊昀，「家屋聯展」，《家屋》作品說明，2009年。
3. 莊昀，〈「地球是平的」創作自述〉，2010年。
4. Nelson Goodman,“When Is Art ?”收錄於David Perkins and Barbara Leondar (eds.) . Art and Cognition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1977, p.19.
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