The Playful Cruelty of Hsieh Chun-Te

by Dominique Païni

What struck me when I first saw Hsieh Chun-Te’s photographs was the atmosphere, the sense of a gathering storm that pervaded many of them. As if Hsieh was representing a postlapsarian world. Some of the compositions clearly indicate the performance of a violent action condemned by propriety and the rules of human society. It is nearly always a matter of punishment, of a body cast down on a symbolic field of thorns, of hanged bodies, of bodies abandoned in the indifference of our modern deafness, bodies drawn and quartered, bodies sexually punished, bodies that seem to be held up to public opprobrium. From Giorgione’s The Tempest to the prints of Gustave Doré, the storm is a manifestation of divine wrath. 

The artist who dares to show such scenes of sacrifice is a visionary haunted by the disquiet that arises from the complicity between Eros and Thanatos. I had never before seen a scene of capital execution whose final act is a sexual act observed by the usual, gloomy witnesses of that terrible ceremony which legally terminates life (The Romance on the Stele, Raw series). What audacity, what derision to mix in this way the legalised transgression that consists in coldly taking away life with the approval of the court and the most beautiful of all human actions! It is indeed a ceremony, here, and all Hsieh Chun-Te’s work is ceremonial. Of which, more below.

To describe Hsieh Chun-Te’s works more precisely one would have to compare them to images that form an ensemble, like caprichos that go beyond caricature to describe the disasters of the world. The allusion to Goya here is quite deliberate, because this is the impression that these big photographic compositions make on me: a set of dreams of reasons bringing forth monsters, to echo the famous title that Goya gave to one of his works, a collection in which black and white, ugliness and beauty, purity and vice clash with each other. Hsieh offers a kind of photographic equivalent of these visions of the end of a decadent and corrupt humanity, visions traversed by winds that threaten to sweep away the ruins of a post-cataclysmal world.

Several aspects of Hsieh’s work also evoke the poetics of Georges Bataille, the cataclysmal character of which Pierre Klossowski described in terms that offer a troubling echo of Hsieh’s images: “[in Bataille] the ontological catastrophe of thought is merely the reverse of an apogee attained in what he calls sovereign moments: drunkenness, laughter, erotic and sacrificial effusion, experiences that characterise expenditure without compensation, a measureless prodigality, a loss without meaning, utility or purpose.” Klossowski was speaking here of “simulacra” in Bataille’s work.

With Hsieh we are fascinated by a prodigality in the staging of elements that are at once atrocious and delectable and measureless; fascinated by an erotic loss. Drunkenness, sacrifice and sometimes cruel humour: this is what these very disconcerting images are made of. The pose and attitude of these three women seen in a street in Shueigin (in the county of Kohu, in the southern part of Taiwan), in Homecoming Day, irresistibly evokes lingshi, that mythical Chinese torture known as “death by a thousand cuts,” which Bataille wrote about in his Tears of Eros – “that ecstatic and intolerable pain, the representation of which mixes religiosity and eroticism.” And it is the photographic focus that selects and points up what must be looked at in this ruined urban theatre, and in particular the bodily parts of these three vestals barring access to it, by emphasising one of their breasts, as if this optical adjustment was itself an incision.

The iconography of Hsieh Chu-Te reveals multiple borrowings and in turn borrows from several periods of art. The first thing that strikes us is this anachronism. 

 If we nevertheless set out to contradict this loss of bearings that Hsieh very deliberately engages in, in other words, if we go back in time, the family group (Family Portrait) taken in front of a house in the same town, Shueigin, a place that obsesses the artist, comes out of a tradition in Chinese art, and can be related to certain images from the twentieth century. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei there is a plaque by Huang Tu-Shui which, it seems to me, belongs to the ancient Chinese tradition of rural images and constitutes a kind of iconographic predecessor of Hsieh’s visions. The peaceful nature of the relations between the children and the buffalos that Huang expresses in the gentle relief of this gypsum plaque has a correlative in the velvety black-and-white of Hsieh’s photographs. Hsieh does indeed have a very personal way with the zones of clarity and haziness in his prints, and the contrast between the bright, sunny foreground and the shadow of the house creates a depth comparable to what is conveyed by the delicate low relief.