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Wood, But Not Wooden: The Vivid World of Wang Chih-wen
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text by Eric Chi-Puo LIN
In contrast to the flourishing diversity we see in fields like installation art and media art, sculpture has been a road less travelled in the world of contemporary high culture in Taiwan. But 41-year-old Wang Chih-wen has persisted in honing his craft for 20 years now, and the fruits of this passion for sculpture, on exhibit since the beginning of 2012, have opened quite a few eyes.
The pieces in Wang’s solo exhibition, “The Little Prince,” capture and freeze fleeting instances of the spontaneous innocence that is expressed through the body language and facial expressions of a child. In terms of technique, Wang has broken through the boundary separating the “subtractive” art of carving from the “additive” art of molding, combining the two meticulously into a unique vocabulary to achieve a new level of representative precision.
New Year’s Eve, the last of day of 2011. The vast majority of Taipei residents are flooding toward one or another of the venues for fireworks and live pop concerts. You would think that the Yi tong Park area, with no such activities scheduled anywhere nearby, would be deserted. But a stream of visitors are passing through the doors of the VT Art Salon, even including a few foreign collectors who have come to Taiwan expressly for the current exhibition.
A charming portrayal graces the entryway to the gallery—a sculpture dubbed Prince of the Seas. A boy wearing frogman goggles and a shark-shaped flotation device, feet planted on a surfboard, intrepidly rides the waves.
Lighting for the piece comes from the front, above and to the left from the boy’s point of view, so that a long shadow is cast back against the wall behind the work. Forming a silhouette of the boy after he has grown to adulthood, the “cast” shadow epitomizes the psychological tendency in adults to try to imagine what a child will look like when he or she grows up.
Three elements, two translations
In the left-hand part of the exhibition space is a work called Home Boy. It is the same boy, but this time he is depicted wearing a patterned scarf, with his head bowed and mouth slightly open in that familiar “it wasn’t my fault” look that children often have after doing something wrong. The expression, a mélange of apprehension, uncertainty, inquiry, and courage, is endearing and makes the figure a very sympathetic one.
Move a little closer and carefully scrutinize the work, and you are suddenly struck by a realization: The sculpture is obviously carved from wood, yet you get the feeling that it could have been made from plaster! This effect is the most innovative aspect of Wang Chih-wen’s one-man show.
In the process of creating the 10 sculptures on exhibit, Wang incorporated the three elements of clay, fiberglass, and wood in a sequence running “from molding to carving.” Through two “translations” from one medium to another, he ultimately achieved remarkable precision while subverting the characteristic treatment and appearance of wood material.
Put more simply, for each wooden sculpture, Wang first shaped a true-to-life model of the child out of clay, then translated this earthen form into fiberglass, which served as the model for the final wood figure. Moreover, he used mixed types of wood material: raw wood and blocks made of layered plywood. He did this because raw wood will shrink as its moisture is released, but plywood has a very high stability as a result of the fixative used in manufacturing it. The harmonizing of these two kinds of wood materials required incessant refinement involving “micro-cuts.”
“Molding is an ‘additive’ process,” Wang explains, “and you can add and shape as you go along. Carving, on the other hand, is a ‘subtractive’ process, with emphasis on the exposure of the grain, so once you cut into the wood, there’s no turning back. It was because I wanted to have more control over the precision of the final representation that I first mediated the work through clay and fiberglass.” As a consequence, each work exemplifies the contradictory impact of having passed through both “additive” and “subtractive” processes.
Take Home Boy for example. The hair retains the scarred lines of the carving tool, a typical feature of all woodcarving. But for the skin, Wang dispensed with the customary glossy wood finish, and instead, using files and sandpaper, produced a much warmer plaster-like effect evoking the uneven, porous texture of real skin. Because of the precision made possible by working from the fiberglass model, the entire figure is extraordinarily lifelike, from his tensed-up facial muscles to the wrinkles on his knees.
It is hard to believe that this is the first time Wang has ever tried his hand at sculpting in wood! For 20 years Wang specialized in plaster and bronze, techniques calling for meticulous accuracy of form. Moreover, he always portrayed adult figures. But it was Wang’s very command of precision and accuracy that allowed him to run free and find a unique voice when he turned his hand to this new material of wood.
Taming each other
The problem when working with live child models is that, unlike their adult counterparts, they cannot hold the same pose for very long, and it is therefore much more difficult to replicate their body language and facial expressions.
But Wang was just too full of love for his son to let this chance pass, and therefore was willing to go to all the trouble of using his complex “translation” process for sculpting his son’s image, bringing him right to the threshold of creating a unique vocabulary.
Wang relates that before beginning, he “built a psychological foundation” for his son. “Dad knows your face better than he can know anyone else’s, so if I can use you as my model, I will have a head start when it comes to the problem of projecting the right emotion.” His son was moved by this appeal to accept the job, though not without some reluctance. In fact, the most typical exchange in Wang’s workshop soon became: “Dad, aren’t you done yet?!” “Not yet, just hang in there a little longer.”
A child can hold a facial expression for a maximum of 30 seconds, and a pose for no longer than three minutes. Wang therefore had to complete his works in a series of stop-and-go sessions. Naturally, an element of the interplay of parent and child found its way into the final pieces. The choice of “The Little Prince” as the title of the show is more than just a nod to the familiarity of the French classic; it also relates to Wang’s experience of a “taming” process that enhanced his relationship with his own “little prince.”
As the story goes, the Little Prince says, “Come and play with me. I am so unhappy.” To which the fox retorts, “I cannot play with you, I am not tamed.” When the Little Prince inquires as to what “tame” means, the fox goes on: “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys…. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....”
From gymnast to artist
Wang Chih-wen grew up in Bei men Township in Tai nan County. In primary school he was the star of the gymnastics team, specializing in vaulting, causing him to take an especially deep interest in the human body right from childhood.
“There’s a lot that goes into vaulting. For example, most people probably think there’s not much difference between a single turn and one-and-a-half turns. But gymnasts know very well that there is a huge difference between the two moves, whether you are talking about the anatomical aesthetics or the use of your muscles.” Wang says that such problems were the origin of his fascination with the shaping of the human body.
He went to a technical high school where he majored in advertising design, but he also ran the dash for the track-and-field team. After graduation he spent a year preparing to take the entrance exams into university, and got his wish: admission to the faculty of fine arts at the National Institute of the Arts (the predecessor to today’s Tai pei National University of the Arts).
Starting his sophomore year, he focused on sculpture, which was not a very fashionable field at that time. Studying under Lee Kuang-yu, he stayed true to his own passion, even though his path took him in a very different direction from where trends were headed.
In the 1970s, because of the enormous international success of Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming, known especially for his Tai Chi series, sculpture for a time attained the status of a pop-culture phenomenon, and a lot of people decorated their homes or offices with carved figures. But by the time Wang was reaching adulthood in the late 1980s, numerous academically trained artists were returning to Taiwan from overseas and they were pushing conceptual art to the forefront, sparking a period of great turbulence and debate among culture vultures. In the eyes of many avant-garde figures, sculpture was passé, a mere “replication of replicas” and a “restoration of the old regime.”
Wang, given his love of the human form, found himself facing the first serious question of his artistic career: “If the new wave in art subverts or rejects the human form, does that mean that in the future sculpture should not include any true-to-life portrayals of people?”
Encouraged by his teacher Lee Kuang-yu, Wang moved steadily away from his initial fondness for abstract forms toward an approach more true to himself: realist human sculptures made using the “translation” technique.
Imagery with real impact
Materials being as exorbitantly expensive as they are, it is very difficult for any sculptor to focus exclusively on creative work. After graduation, in order to make a living, Wang took a job in a factory making reproductions, serving as an assistant to a senior artist and handling the more onerous preparatory tasks.
In 2001, Wang entered the graduate program in fine arts at Tai pei National University of the Arts. Engulfed in an enormous whirlpool of creative energy, on top of his own hard-earned practical experience learned in the factory, he quickly captured a series of prizes. In fact, between 2001 and 2004 he won seven awards, major and minor, from across the country. Nothing seemed beyond his reach, and he was able to sustain himself for a long time on the prize money alone (over NT$800,000 in all).
It was during this period that Wang became confirmed in his decision to pursue a realist style, but with a twist. He wanted to show that realist sculpture could be more than just a depiction of a person, or a narrative of an event, but could also carry symbolic meaning—that is, imagery. Two works he produced in 2002, Reflection (with a classmate serving as his model) and Stopping, are emphatic statements of the idea of abstract imagery in very solid and recognizable human forms. The works were instant critical successes.
Reflection is made of mixed media: colored resin and acrylic. Wang made two identical sculptures of the upper body of a man, posed with his hands covering his face, and then placed one on each side of a transparent acrylic slab, creating the effect of a mirror image. In the exhibition space, the piece is hung from the ceiling by fishing line, creating the visual effect of a person floating in mid-air. The overall feeling is thus one of lightness, but the spot lighting brings out with great clarity the tension of the muscles in the arms caused by their supporting the man’s head, lending a contradictory denseness to the piece.
In the exhibition space, the light breeze generated by a fan sets the sculpture slightly swaying, adding a somewhat scary, or at least unstable, element. The work evokes a variety of metaphorical contrasts, but expresses them through a form that is all the more persuasive because it is true to life. Wang seems to be pointing to somewhere deep in all of us, and saying that “reflection” can be both perilous and profound.
In Stopping, made from the mixed media of plaster and plywood, the torso of a naked man (the same model as for Reflection) emerges from a table, hands pressing down on the surface and edges, in an embarrassing predicament of pushing with all his might but being unable to free himself. His upper body is tense and slightly trembling with effort, with the biceps at maximum exertion. But the lower body is composed not of two human legs, but the four long and slender table legs, creating a juxtaposition of heaviness above and lightness below.
As art critic Hong Li zhu notes, Wang, unlike many artists, has not looked on realist sculpture as simply a transitional phase one must go through to get to something else. Wang, she says, is “virtually obsessed” with the accurate replication of the human form. “Viewers will ultimately realize that this is a performance by a group of sculptures, with the viewer him- or herself becoming part of this group of life-sized figures, making us performers and living sculptures in this space.”
Desire, imagination, space
After getting his graduate degree in 2005, Wang hit a creative wall. He invested a lot of thought in the concept of juxtaposing the real and the unreal, the present and the void, for a series called Mutual, but this didn’t lead him anywhere, and he found himself in a state of great anxiety looking for a new theme. Fortunately he’s got a “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” kind of personality, and this carried him through to a new creative peak.
In 2008, Wang reemerged with two solo exhibitions, quite a rare accomplishment among artists who do realist human figures requiring a great deal of refinement and attention to detail.
The most representative work of this period is Divided Manifestations. He discovered that a male model he had been working with for many years was getting a stronger and stronger build. Wang asked him about it and found out that although the model was an instructor in a physical development program that emphasized muscle relaxation, his own personal ideal was to have a very tight and robust body like the kind that comes from weight training in a gym.
Wang was very surprised at this contradiction, and so produced a work that created “divided manifestations” of the same person. (The exhibited work was made of resin, for future transformation into bronze sculptures if ordered by buyers.) One manifestation was of the model’s “current self,” the other of his “ideal self.” The relationship of the two figures is not only spatial—they are side by side—but also temporal, as the ideal is one possible future of the current.
The two selfs are both very lifelike. The meticulously realistic rendering shows the current self naked. Though its form is healthy and attractive enough in its own right, it appears belittled and weak when juxtaposed against the “ideal” state. The muscles of the upper body of the “ideal self” are so developed that their power seems to jump right out at you, and while the lower body is clad in pants, they do little to hide the pronounced feature that defines the male gender. Both figures are of the same “self,” but placed side by side they don’t look very comfortable with each other!
Unlike artists whose works are exclusively abstract, metaphorical or symbolic, Wang’s work directly and purely communicates his imagery, giving his pieces an accessible visual impact. The door to his works is left wide open, inviting viewers to relax and come inside, and he directly spreads out before them the counterpoint among desire, imagination, and space that is integral to the human form.
An object of passion
As visitors to “The Little Prince” will be able to see at once, when an artist’s technique reaches the point where he has his own unique style—despite vast differences from the past in terms of materials, subjects, and narrative style—there is still no doubt that these works come from the hand of Wang Chih-wen.
“I’ve always relied most on diligence, and in the course of doing creative work I rarely have an ‘epiphany’ or anything like that. But in recent years, as my children have been born one after the other, they have brought new life experiences to me. My daughter especially, with her active personality—she loves to roll around all over—is exactly the same as I was when I was a child, and the emotional impact of looking on a small girl who is the product of your own genetic reproduction is more special than words can express.” Wang adds that this gave him new perspectives and new ways of imagining the human form, and set him in the direction of doing sculptures of children.
Wang once described his passion for the human form in the following terms: “In trying to figure out and depict the human body, you follow the rise and fall of the muscles, their direction, luster, and coarseness, their relaxed and tensed states, and the conveyance of human emotions… that’s where I find the greatest pleasure in the creative process.”
With “The Little Prince,” Wang is charting a realist course for himself and for all of sculpture in Taiwan. “For me, the human body is an object of passion! For instance, take my interaction with you right now. Your hand is propping up your jaw, your facial bone structure is very pronounced, and your eyes are bright and lively—just from observing your exterior I can tell some things about your psychological characteristics. Even just considering the propping up of the jaw, some people do it when they feel disappointment, others when in deep contemplation, and the differences between the two are very subtle,” explains Wang as he throws down the gauntlet: “Is anybody out there going to try to deny that the human body is endlessly fascinating?”
(March 2012 Taiwan Panorama p.98-105/tr. by Phil Newell) |
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