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Youth Power-Contemporary Art Group, the Wonder Boyz
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text by Eric Chi-Puo LIN
In recent years a new generation has emerged on the Taiwanese art scene, with works taking the limelight at popular exhibitions in local galleries. And some of these young artists are adopting a novel strategy in order to stand out from the crowd: they're banding together in groups to create stimulation and boost their collective reputations.
One such group, Wonder Boyz, comprising Robbie Huang, Chiang Chung-lun and Su Yu-hsien, has gained the most attention. Established two years ago, Wonder Boyz has swept the art scene-particularly hot news on Internet forums-and member Su Yu-hsien was one of the Taiwanese artists to have works exhibited in the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011.
The group focuses on lighthearted emotions expressed in a bubbly, almost superficial style, and uses the creative logic of the Internet generation to create a stunning visual experience for viewers.
Inart Space is a gallery on You'ai Street, Tainan City, set in a laid-back neighborhood known for its easygoing lifestyle and delectable snack food outlets nearby.
Gallery director Jamie Tu, a legendary figure in Taiwan's arts community, has helped and guided many young artists over the past 20 years. In 2003, she was responsible for the artistic decoration of Hai'an Road, since regarded as a representative work bestowing a new look to the timeworn landscape of Tainan City. Even today her gallery remains a shelter for budding and established artists.
At the end of this autumn, the three members of Wonder Boyz turned up independently at the gallery. They regard the director's office as a home away from home, so they're all familiar with the place.
"In the art market, collectors anticipate new works not only for their artistic quality, but also as investments. And artists benefit, especially those with established credentials: they are able to create and enjoy the returns from the market." Tu is overjoyed to witness the emergence of "boyz power."
Like pop-music idols, who each have their own characters but together create a whole greater than its parts, Wonder Boyz are all individuals. Robbie Huang is handsome and bright, Chiang Chung-lun is good at making kuso jokes (a Japanese style of camp), and Su Yu-hsien flaunts the style of melancholy youth.
Prank works
They are fellow students of the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tai-nan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), and have been good mates since graduate school. One day in 2009, they were driving somewhere together on an outing. Huang showed the others his latest discovery-a pop song called "Nobody" by the Wonder Girls, a Korean girl group. They were all knocked out by the rhythm, and with the Wonder Girls as their inspiration, the three artists decided to form their own group Wonder Boyz, and embarked immediately on a series of creative ventures.
At the same time, artist Hsieh Mu-chi was beginning his Muchi & Painting program in which he created a draft design on an oval canvas and invited other artists to color it in. Wonder Boyz was invited to participate and ended up creating their first collective video work Wonder Washing about the program.
Shooting was done in a motel suite. Inspired by scenes of pillow fights and bubble baths on pop-music videos, their video featured the three of them washing the canvas with a background of their own music. The work attempts to mock artists who simply put colors onto a canvas, but don't realize the fact that it's as much fun washing them off.
Wonder Washing was selected for exhibition in "The Simple Art of Parody" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tai-pei at the end of 2009. The work aroused a great deal of interest among younger viewers for its jokey and spoofing style, and marked their first success. In the next two years, they completed more works including Wonder Studio and Wonder Iron Man Team.
Set on a whale-watching boat during a seven-day trip around Taiwan, the latter comprises both performance and video art. A treadmill was set up at the front of the boat, with the artists running on the treadmill to compete with the boat in terms of the distance they traveled. They worked out, designed medals and trophies for the winner, and recorded a song to celebrate the event. In the end, the boat won, of course.
Huang, king of exclamation
Each member has a unique vision and way of expressing the three-in-one creative idea of life, action and art.
Born in 1981, Robbie Huang puts emphasis on the visual aspect of his work, often electrifying viewers when they first set eyes on his work.
On Huang's Facebook webpage, almost every sentence of his notes has several exclamation marks at the end. Sometimes he even writes: "Today let's start with some exclamation marks!!!!! Good morning!!!!!." He seems to be constantly in a state of excitement, expressing curiosity about everything. His friends call him the King of Exclamation.
His most mature series, Splashing Splashing Splashing, shows the effects of his exclamation marks. In 2006, when he was studying at TNNUA, he photographed a splash in progress, and through post-production created the effect of a painting.
In the work Who Says It's Impossible to Be Like the Breeze, Huang started to experiment with images of splashes. In front of a withered tree, Huang took several hundred photographs of splashes of green paint and layered them to form leaf-like shapes with a fluid luster. They look like leaves fluttering in the breeze, like youth crying out: "Who says it's impossible to catch moments of a flutter to collage passion swinging in the breeze!"
Another work, Even If I Have to Waste Youth, was photographed on Lin-feng-ying Farm. Near some grazing cows, milk was splashed into the air, creating a cloud that bends light and creates shadows from the undulating liquid. The title denotes the idea that some moments in life may seem as if we are wasting "nutritious" moments-but those instants can be the most dazzling of our lives.
"I love seeing the vitality of bright colors in natural light, and this quality can only be captured outdoors," says Huang.
In 2008, he used different beverages including fruit juice, soy milk, papaya smoothies, and Ya-kult drinks to create richer shades of light and shadow, and variations of light gloss, expanding the connotations of the work. In Go to Africa 2.0, for the first time Huang used images moving horizontally across the field, splashing beverages to build a map of Africa with aircraft flying above, all to a strong percussive rhythm. The work has a dreamlike quality: a place that young hearts are longing to visit, providing a sense of peace and delight for viewers.
The Tiger and Dragon series is taken from gangland tattoo images of a green dragon and white tiger. In an apparent black-and-white-ink background, there is a visual sensation of blood splashing from a wound. Huang's "splashing" technique has become more refined and reflective.
Chiang's little universe
Like many young people who enjoy science-fiction movies, Chiang Chung-lun has a special interest in the phantasmagoric universe.
Born in 1979, Chiang uses concepts of disintegration and resemblance, dislocation and restructuring, finding subjects from daily life. And his work echoes the concept of the universe, creating an effect similar to GPS codes on smart phones.
The title of his 577. 26. 5F-2 series in 2007 was derived from the decoded latitude and longitude coordinates of his home address, like the spacecraft in Star Trek which can constantly track its location.
577. 26. 5F-2 is a photo series that applies the techniques of forced perspective and parody. The artist interacts with domestic furniture and consumer goods to portray a range of optical illusions that people have grown used to.
In number 28 of the series, for example, he wears a partly open long-sleeved gray cotton jacket; a large round light bulb hangs from the ceiling. He stands with his hands on his hips and his head raised, his attitude a parody of the hero in Iron Man.
The third of the series features the complex components of a reverse osmosis water filter as his performing tool, with an alarm clock on top of the machine and a barrel of cooking oil alongside. As Chiang carefully cuts up the machine's components with a pair of scissors, he looks like an emergency worker dismantling a bomb.
In 2011, he took a further step, applying his inspiration from every-day objects to his own wedding. Dual solo exhibitions of the couple's works, collectively entitled "Together," were staged simultaneously at Inart Space, where they also held their wedding ceremony.
Astronomical star conjunctions were used to portray their marriage: art is the longitude, love is the latitude. Chiang extracted the radicals of his own and his wife's name characters, and transformed them as Mercury Man and Jupiter Woman.
On the wedding day, the gallery served as the venue for the banquet, and all the wedding paraphernalia including photos, gowns, gifts and rings were transformed into installation works and displayed for sale: life integrated with art.
Su's creative fluctuation
Su Yu-hsien, born in 1982, has won the most awards among the three members.
In 2007, in a period of just 12 months, Su won the S-An Art Award, regarded as an indicator of potential for new artists, the Kao-hsiung Award, and the Taipei Art Prize, causing a great sensation on the Taiwan art scene. Suddenly people were talking about this under-30 art student, and in an environment where gallery operators- were eager to exploit newcomers, Su was regarded as a potential star.
The Donghe Hardware series, which won the Kao-hsiung Award, is an expression of appreciation towards his family.
The title comes from his father's hardware store. The work is a computer image with the main picture showing the buttocks of a perfect female body with sleek almost perfect skin, a sense of unique material texture somewhere between metal and ceramics. A tree with red leaves all fashioned from plastic is growing from the top half of the female body, the shadow of intertwined branches and leaves reflecting onto the body, creating a texture composed of winding floating lines.
Created in the same year, a computer-print work Eyes, the Dropping Tears of the Moon is a very touching work.
The inspiration came from a joke by Show Luo, a pop singer: "I was lying in bed crying because I'd just broken up with my girlfriend. As I lay there, I held a mirror to my tearful face to see whether I still looked nice." It's difficult for Su to understand the world of narcissists. What kind of logic is that?
Don't people cry because they are unable to restrain their emotions? In that moment of extreme sadness, how is it possible for someone to worry about their appearance? Aren't those tears insincere?
Based on this moment of reflection, Su created Eyes, the Dropping Tears of the Moon, which shows that even when one cries like a fountain, one can still be beautiful. He asked a fellow student (whom he had secretly loved in high school) to be the model for the work. Drops of gel were attached to her face, creating the appearance of tears streaming down her cheeks.
Because the "tears" were actually glued on, she was able to "cry" vehemently but at the same time remain beautiful. By enlarging the face and the tears, the two maintain their own independent beauty, and the contrast of great sadness with exquisite loveliness adds a subtle layer of attraction.
Courage of young art
Su's video pieces embrace delicacy, but at the same time are witty and fun. He deliberately manipulates images to blur the focus, creating an effect similar to the rough finish of handmade crafts. This effect seems capable of provoking the viewer's nostalgia for the television images of the past. And with his own English-language songs as backing, the works possess a unique character which distinguishes them from the mass of sharply focused digital images.
Su himself was the main character in Tennis Player (2008). He is seen holding a tennis racket among trees at night, waving the racket around trying with all his strength to hit tennis balls, occasionally crying out like Russian player Maria Sha-ra-pova. With even more overstatement, he seems to be perspiring to the extent that it's like rain pouring down his face-and emitting saliva. He's clearly making a great effort to win the match.
But in the end, when the match reaches its climax, viewers suddenly realize that it's not a tennis racket that he's waving around, but an electric mosquito swatter! But because the early charade has already been accepted, when he scores a hit on a mosquito-generating sparks and a buzzing sound-the thrill is no less than that of a real tennis tournament.
Under the Black Sky from 2009 mocks the development and competitive nature of the space race. The work is a music video which imitates the sounds and images of the first astronauts landing on the moon, with one of his English rock songs as background. The image of an astronaut bouncing around in near-zero gravity next to an American flag looks simply like some sort of play activity.
"While massive amounts of money were spent to get to outer space, our only apparent benefit is an image of astronauts jumping up and down on the moon. It's very much like Tele-tub-bies with cute characters insanely bouncing around," says Su.
Sounds of Nothing was one of the works representing Taiwan in the 2011 Venice Biennale. Su moves away from his past style in this piece, acting as an investigator exploring the possibility of the simultaneous coexistence of video and documentary.
Su went to a garbage dump on the edge of the city to film people at the lowest level of society: scavengers and the homeless. In one of the series, Plastic People, a down-and-out man chats about the variety of plastic garbage, at the same time tapping on all sorts of plastic stuff to generate different textures of sound. After editing, a unique percussive sound was produced, creating a sort of artistic realism.
Sounds of Nothing created some controversy at the Biennale. When Su was asked whether he had been affected by the comments, he assumed a calm expression, a bit like a Buddhist monk, and claimed that the work was a success. It was just that viewers found it hard to understand the creative process wherein things from daily life were reflected in art.
Compared to the generation of artists during Taiwan's post-martial-law era, who were generally focused on media and themes, the Wonder Boyz show that the digital generation is interested in everything. For them, work is play. The gap in creative attitudes and ideas between the two generations is enormous. And this has created something of a dilemma for collectors: it's often difficult to judge whether the works of the new generation are sustainable or just currently fashionable.
"We believe that life has depth, and because we are young, we dare to pursue our dreams without fear. Our works may not represent deep and sophisticated philosophical ideas yet, but when we are older and look back on the range of our work, they will have their own pattern of logic and stories to tell," says Huang.
Seeking the integration of life with art, and gaining inspiration from fun and pleasure, Wonder Boyz has somehow brought art closer to the public, marking the revival of art in the southern part of Taiwan-a region which has been creatively quiescent for a long time.
(December 2011 Taiwan Panorama p.116-125/tr. by Geoff Hegarty and Sophia Chen) |
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