text by Eric Chi-Puo LIN
Lee Min Jong works at the cutting edge of e-generation art in Taiwan's contemporary art world.
Born in 1961, he was part of the first generation in Taiwan to be attracted to video games, with their exciting sounds, brilliant pictures, rapid movement and full-on sensory stimulus. His experience with games gradually led to the development of a form of surreal art that attempts to transcend the ordinary world and its cares.
Abstract oils are Lee's specialty. In the one-dimensional space of the flat canvas, he constructs multiple obscure perspectives and creates a sense of space through overlapping elements, as well as utilizing bright colors and strong contrasts. Symbols such as cats or cartoon characters may emerge from the depths of a work. An audience hypnotized by the visual stimuli may feel drawn into the sort of "virtual" state common in video games.
Lee is conducting a figurative art project at weekends, "A Hundred Portraits," featured on the social networking website Facebook, to create a fascinating blend of virtual and real worlds.
On 13 January 2011, Lee made a note in his portrait project page on Facebook: "I still do my own art during the week."
The smiley face emoticon on his Facebook page shows his satisfaction and happiness with his life. On weekends in 2011, Lee will put into practice his ideal of universal art, traveling around Taiwan to paint portraits of people for whom commissioning a portrait would be something of an impossible dream. Any form of art, in fact, would normally be well beyond their means. With the message spread through Facebook, Lee will have completed more than 200 portraits by the end of May. Many previously unknown visitors to his Facebook page have become his subjects for paintings.
Lee paints five to six portraits a day on an average weekend: hard work, but because of his cheerful manner, it has become an all-year party. And Lee's other creative activities have not been interrupted by the portraits project: he still manages these during the week.
The portraits project
Lee's home is located on the north coast of Taiwan, about one and half hours out of Taipei.
His paintings are everywhere throughout his three-story house, each looking like a colorful window to the outside world. Wanderers through the house may feel that they are being drawn into a world of video fantasy: one is attracted into rooms containing works with enticing and fascinating themes.
Lee's spacious studio is on the third floor. In the early afternoon, five of his Facebook contacts were there to have their portraits done. While they were eating and drinking with the room ringing with classical music and happiness, Lee's brush never stopped. Photographer Chen Mingcong, there to record the progress of Lee's portrait project, was taking photos. Time disappeared: the sun was setting, lights were being turned on, and five portraits were complete, each with its unique style. The day passed like that.
Similar creative parties have been held in cafes, galleries or street corners and arcades in Taiwan every weekend. For the participants, it's an enjoyable and very cheap way of getting their portrait done.
Lee's paintings in number one (postcard) size are usually worth about NT$5000. For the project, he charges only NT$5000 for a number six, so in this sense, people lucky enough to have their portraits done are making a fivefold profit. Being painted by such a famous painter, everyone is dreaming: "Will I look nice?" "Will my portrait become a work of art?" "Will it be like the Mona Lisa and last forever?"
During a session one day, his subjects were sitting for him on a chair. Others in the room, but not the models themselves, could observe the entire creative process. When the portraits were complete, many were shocked by what was depicted in the paintings. "Why is the character that I take so much trouble to disguise so visible in my portrait? Why do I look both young and old? Why are my wrinkles so clearly visible when I asked the painter to disregard them?"
A wide range of reactions to the works became apparent, but after they had taken their portraits home, they probably couldn't help but stare admiringly at their images. The day following the painting, the photographer posts each portrait into Facebook. At the bottom of the page, viewers add comments of praise, consolation and joy.
The simple relationship between subject and artist has grown into a study of collective behaviors with pluralistic interpretations. Every link in the project chain may affect the final outcome: the artwork. Many of the participants are looking forward to next year's exhibition when all the portraits are to be recalled for an exhibition. What an incredible event that will be!
The video games generation
Lee's artistic career began at a time when Taiwan's political and social environments were becoming more liberal and diversified. He was a teenager when Taiwan's economy was taking off, when the most popular video games were Pac-Man and Galaga that cost only NT$5 to play for 30 minutes. Lee remembers playing them all day long.
He borrowed a high-school friend's Apple II computer, a rather precious item at that time, to play video games, and returned it three years later. He taught himself how to write graphics programs and gained enormous experience mixing colors on the computer: an unusual introduction to traditional aesthetics.
In 1981 in Lee's first year of study in the Fine Arts Department at Chinese Culture University, Taiwan was about to lift martial law and society was changing. Besides playing computer games, looking after his pet cat and dancing in discos, Lee also participated in various gatherings organized by a group of artists known as the Taipei School.
"Whenever young artists came back to Taiwan, parties were held to welcome them, and to share their knowledge about movements in international art and their own experiences abroad. The parties were far more inspiring than an entire semester of art history," says Lee. Back then he remembers thinking: "It's time for change! The cumulative energy of Taiwanese art that has been gathering since World War II is ready to explode!"
While other artists of his generation were focusing their creative attention on political activism around the time when martial law was lifted, Lee turned in another direction. He looked back on his childhood love for painting, and tried to capture the joyful themes of his generation into his artworks: video games, cartoons and rock music. He created a style featuring a sort of symbolism of miniatures that attracted great attention.
When he was a child, there was a wall in his bedroom with a very rough surface. Every night before he went to sleep, he gazed at the marks on the wall and used his imagination to link them, creating shapes: perhaps a mouth or a face. Then he would try to complete the imagined pictures on a piece of paper. In a child's eyes, these marks had a flow or movement, and from different perspectives in different situations, the images could appear differently. Later in life, Lee was to apply such experiences to his art, so even when he painted concrete scenes, there was always a flow, a sensation of movement.
"No matter what you draw, everything is related to the eyes. Eyes exist everywhere in this world. Eyes may hide behind stars or leaves and are forever looking at us. We cannot escape them anywhere," says Lee. Since then, eyes and visions have become the fundamental themes of his art.
An abstract maze
The 1989 painting I Take a Walk, Walk, Walk... Then Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!... Really Hit the Spot, best reflects Lee's early philosophy.
The painting, 201 by 540 centimeters, features at its center a nude female figure with blue hair, spitting out a long red tongue towards the upper left of the work. The blood erupting from her body creates a network of crossing lines, which fall and divide the picture. The spaces created by these divisions are filled with overlapping symbolic shapes in brilliant colors, extending in all directions and at different distances. Cat's eyes, the heads of terrified birds, green lizards, floating fish, the arms of aliens: all are painted into the scene.
This is indeed a spectacular work, full of miniatures and an infinite variety of visual stimuli. And quite often when a viewer thinks they have had enough of the picture and are about to turn away, suddenly they notice a pair of eyes peering at them from somewhere hidden deep in the painting. Surprise!
Art critic Jian Dan describes Lee's paintings as like looking into a computer motherboard, peering into a maze of such incredible complexity that, once your mind enters, it will become lost forever. "Viewers are free to observe a work from many different points, and following the floating lines makes them feel as if they are becoming immersed in a huge modern high-tech game world, and then taking a walk! walk! then bang! bang! bang! really hits the spot!"
Because Lee matured early as an artist and experienced a diverse period of change in his youth, works from that period when he was at university and soon after he graduated have become collector's items. But his popularity has never gone to his head, and despite having achieved a measure of fame at an early age, academic study has remained important to his continued artistic development. From 1987, he studied in Paris for three and half years, and in 2002 at age 41, he began postgraduate study at the School of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA). His lecturers were painters from the same generation, but he didn't mind.
Miniatures
Lee's attitude to study is to make it as much fun as possible. In his postgraduate study, he made significant progress on his art theory of miniatures. From studying and discussing oil techniques in class, Lee's works, previously characterized by the maze illusion, began to generate an ambiguous, almost blurring effect.
Lee opens several of his albums to compare his art from different periods. He says that in his early period, he often painted colors on a canvas one at a time, and rarely made changes once it was completed. But when he was studying at TNUA, under the influence of the university's free and open academic style, he gradually began to experiment with alternative techniques, like layering colors and overlapping transparent and translucent pigments. He had never focused on particular topics for his exhibitions in the past, but in his 2006 graduation exhibition, Lee presented an explicit artistic claim for the first time: "The marks of time and tide-order from chaos."
Lee explains that painting is either depicting individual experiences that emerge completely unsummoned, or memories that the artist seeks to draw upon. Different past events that happened in different times are stored individually in memory, but the artist is able to create a sense of order from this chaos.
"Some issues are major events in people's lives, such as work, study and marriage. We often think that these issues represent the whole, forgetting that in fact a great number of trivial things take up most of our time. And the butterfly effect generated by these trivial things may rearrange our memories of the past and affect our futures."
Another large work from 2006, I Was Gently Hit by a Small Fragment of a Meteorite from an Asteroid, 227 cm high by 182 wide, is full of symbols and perspectives with a dense coral-like composition, and a hazy and blurred sense of fluidity. This style is different from past works which feature distinct colors. In this painting, things from the real world and from memory are juxtaposed and blended by the layering of transparent and translucent pigments, and a degree of overlapping color in lines and geometric blocks.
Digressions
In 2008, at nearly 50 years of age, Lee's creativity made another great leap. He introduced the concept of topical digression to further supplement his earlier use of miniatures.
"When we sit down and have a chat, it's quite impossible to focus on a single topic without bringing in other trivial topics. These trivia are annotations to the main topic, and they can be extended into a story." While Lee is speaking, the writer sips his coffee and praises the coffee maker. The topic suddenly diversifies into a discussion on the amount of caffeine per day which people can reasonably bear. "Ha ha," he laughs: "We've digressed!"
The works in Lee Min Jong's "Solo Exhibition XI" in 2008 were more abstract: like microscopic visions of the trivial things in our daily lives. The colors were less primary; the audience did not have to look for little objects hidden in the pictures as they did in earlier periods: the little objects were enlarged to the extent that viewers were unable to focus on them.
But the images in Kiki and a Fly (Cat and Insensible Existence) are quite concrete. The work focuses on a huge bright green-bodied fly rushing towards a bowl of moldy oranges on a table where a knife, plate, coffee cup and a box of tissue papers have been discarded after a meal. At the top of the work, a toaster has exploded and is on fire-a surreal scene-and as a result what should be the horizontal surface of coffee in the cup is actually tilted. The real and the absurd are juxtaposed, yet Lee's pet cat Kiki with half an eye and one ear poking into the lower left corner lends a sense of calm to the scene. Everything, in fact, seems quite reasonable.
This painting is a representative work mixing the abstract and real worlds. It argues that the creation of order from miniaturist chaos can not only exist in an abstract painting, but because the digression is totally unpredictable, who would have the authority to say that Kiki and the fly couldn't appear in real life? The work features Lee's overlapping perspectives, hidden symbols, blurred spaces and total lack of predictability. It also points towards the abstract artist's next project-figurative portraits.
The artistic surfer
If the 200 completed portraits of the Portraits Project 2011 were put together, they would create an enormous canvas on which each figure and every brushstroke would be like the miniature features on an electronic circuit board. If we were to take a detailed look at an individual figure, various perspectives, symbols and spaces would be seen to exist on each face.
The artist's sharp sense of observation will portray the traces and marks of past experience; the abstract aspect of a person's appearance will be captured and depicted vividly. No wonder they express surprise when they see themselves, but eventually become reconciled to their representations.
Many critics describe Lee as possessing a sophisticated innocence, like a naive child living in an adult body. Lee himself also admits to a certain childlike quality: he likes having fun.
While some artists hold back from Internet activities and remain critical of the medium, Lee has thrown himself into Internet activities without reservation. Technology is moving forward at a rapid pace; computer games have developed from simple Pac-Man games to the complex online games of today, and then Facebook. Lee has watched every stage of computer technology with interest. He even became president of a player association when he was enthralled with the game World of Warcraft.
"Social networks can evolve an incredible multiplicity of features. Some people don't understand this. It's quite a pity," says Lee. The portraits project is an ongoing experiment on Facebook, basically as an exercise to see how far it can be taken.
The English language describes keen Internet users as "surfers." In Lee's 1994 album, he notes that "the key to successful surfing is to keep ahead of the wave, with the speed of the surfboard the same as that of the moving ocean!"
As a keen artistic "surfer," Lee has always tried to maintain the same speed as the wave; being left behind would be anathema. This attitude puts him in the vanguard of the e-generation. Each of his works is an experiment, never reaching its ultimate end (becoming a so-called mature work) because art is like surfing: keeping always just ahead of the wave.
(June 2011 Taiwan Panorama p.116-124/ tr. by Geoff Hegarty and Sophia Chen) |
