English

The Feast of Chun-te

Monique Sicard

Pleasant interval. Foreigner works. The photographs of Hsieh Chun-te surprise us, shock us, delight us. By playing on our Western conventions, our thoughts – single and multiple – they provoke us.

The format, first. Then the texture. These very large, black, deep blue paintings mix the sharpness and blur into a single image with no other intention than their aesthetic confrontation. From that, waverings between image and reality are born. Pleasantly unsettling.

Next, the scenes. A “signified” if a bit schematic language is in play. The devices of fiction depict the dreams of the night that the author has carefully drawn before calling the actors to the rescue. (Figure 4-1) Ascendancy over a world that moves, closely entwined with sexual fevers. And since dreams are unspeakable, everybody can see what he wants or what he rejects in these allegorical scenes mingling the violence of happiness with happy anxiety about the future. Hsieh Chun-te reveals these compelling forces, intimate and political – against which we can do nothing, except perhaps to present them photographically. Reality of human dreams, indexicality of the unconscious.

The best, perhaps, the subtlest, are these cracks of a changing world. The images tell of an intergenerational conflict, friction between city and countryside, modernity and tradition. They scream the confrontation between a complex past, so tragic that its shadow still grows, and the new world with its skyscrapers, its youth, its hope.

A family of eight people goes down the river in a long motorboat against the magnificent backdrop of Mt. Guanyin.(Figure4-2) They have taken their motorbike, their animals. They are happy. But at the front, the dog is concerned about the uncertain future that awaits them. They leave the countryside and the old world and they make their way toward the city, hoping to live in one of the dizzying skyscrapers of Taipei. A little further, on the terrace of pretentious buildings hiding mountains, two fishermen watch the movements of unreal fishes. ( Figure4-3) They say that the hope of joining the modern world is partly doomed. They will always be strangers in their own country. Maybe they still dream of the family house with the roof of rounded tiles where elders passed on a passion for books to the youth, where children climbed, laughed, on false stone buffalos( Figure4-4). Happy days that the photograph inscribed forever in memories. But also the power of this “photo-graphy” in witnessing the very happiness to which it gives birth. The black and white claims the truth of this fiction forcefully.

Crushed by the past, still marked by the former Empire of Japan, dwarfed by its huge mainland Chinese neighbor, Taiwan rebuilds its history gradually. Who better than one of its artists to can claim in photographic dreams the disparity that we cannot without difficulty call “identity”? No need to use the Chinese language: the images speak for themselves. The paltry technology of an old motorcycle shrieks praise for a thousand-year-old culture filled with attention paid slowly to landscapes, as a constructive contemplation. The political status of the economy would reject the island in an uncertain profile and in the grayness of a commercial destiny. But there is a resistance to that. It comes from a philosophy where the body is spirit, where the long time devoted to exercising one’s own freedom is something important.

Between two curtains near the sea, the lost artists are wondering.(Figure4-5) What to do? What do they need to stage? The music, the children, the animals, the women, the human body? All the while, they are marked by these slow desires in a world that goes too fast.

The feast of Chun-te combines these dreamed and “photo-graphed” performances in the implementation of a meal. Because art is eaten here. Or rather, any fragment of life is rich, potentially, with an artistic future. We are moved by the inestimably long time required to prepare such an exhibition – twenty years, perhaps more – in praise of unpolluted water and carefully chosen, beautiful, true food.

While embracing the latest technologies, an artist sets out to find traces of the past and his own origins. It is not insignificant that Taiwan is an island. The creative forces express their originality in such enclosed places, surrounded by water. Less affected by the masses, protected from the movements of crowds, they are the havens they need. Do not forget, however, that these beautiful places are also the most fragile.