text by Kuo Sin-Sin
Get to know I-Chen Kuo from an airplane. In 2004, with his work “Invade the Taipei Fine Arts Museum,” he was selected as the youngest artist in history to ever appear in the “Taipei Biennial: Do you Believe in Reality?” From his point of view, whether new media art can form a self-image and seize their own experiences of “touching the hearts and making people reflect” has become his silent waiting during his continuous creation. He gathered the past, the present and the future, built a barrier to separate him from nihility and confusion, and reconstructed in the fragments of his memories. Perhaps some day, when you look up at the sky, a plane just disappears into the white lines. Please do not be sad! That is not a separation but for the next get-together. I-Chen Kuo has such good faith, and all he has to do is wait for good news.
What we remember the most clearly is not the time when we actually meet someone and something but the moment when we retrospect; at that time, we are no longer the participants but the onlookers.
I-Chen Kuo is a person who collects memories. His consciousness only appears in the places where there are memory traces. However, I also remember the situation at the time when we were having an interview, with a tape recorder lying on the table. This was the first time I encountered such a thing. Normally, we, the interviewer, need to do the recordings, yet I-Chen Kuo, the interviewee, had also prepared a tape recorder. He said that he had kept recording sound frequency at any time and place for more than three years, including the sleeping sounds made by his mother when she’s asleep. There will always be a day when his mother passes away. He hopes that by recording memories, he can form a new creation to convey his thoughts about missing his mother. He readily turned over his sketches of creative ideas and shared them with me. The memory of his own past enclosed him, layer upon layer. Through forwarding or backwarding of the hope-or-fear indicator, he talked about his own inner feelings. By various types of media materials, he used them as the metaphor of the starting point to constantly compare juxtapositions, large and small, near and far. Therefore, the memory of the tragedy of his father’s accidental death, the solitude of misfortune in love, being at a loss while studying and the helplessness of life and so on, these memories showed the antagonism between life events and special life contemplation. It made I-Chen Kuo’s pure memory turn into an unwilling memory. However, these past momeries have become the light of his creative inspiration instead.
In the experiment and technology of the “new media art,” have some people lost the extension of their own sustainable emotion? If so, we need to ask ourselves what the intrinsic values of “true feelings” are. Regardless of any type of art, he attempts to transfer the potential “desire of heart” into “implication,” and conveys a clearer perception. I-Chen Kuo collects all the trivial and inevitable materials from life, such as dust, noises and so forth. Under his care, these useless things restore their freedom and are saved as objects because they are no longer the means to achieve certain goals, but the most real intrinsic values. This is the comprehension that art exists in life. His theme has been clearly presented in the highlights of implication. The image of these metaphors has fully exhibited in the overall planning and delicacy that they constituted on their own. I-Chen Kuo, with interactive installations, video installations, single channel video and even sounds of behavior art, releases his ideas between the vague absence and presence, like the overlapping of multi-source videos. This extends the boundaries of thoughts and puts different things together, in a smooth flow of thinking.
Courageously facing the past memory in life will definitely produce more vitality. Only when he creates, will the restrictions of “time and space” disappear. I-Chen Kuo, in an unreserved positivity, makes us feel that the future is no longer a static extension, but the progress towards our own self.
Cacao Vol.2, 2011.03 |
