Dream in a Asian Contemporary
Secret Garden
Luchia
Meihua Lee
Treatment
of gardens has evolved into a genre featuring many aspects of nature: flowers,
trees, water, and fauna – all of which are messages to the dreamer. Gardens are realms of longing, both spiritually and
physically, and one expects them to be pleasant, visually colorful, or
playful. These qualities and other more
surprising ones are evinced in the work of these 24 Asian artists who challenge
the mainstream culture discourse that relegates Asian contemporary art to a
curiosity. Their collective oeuvre elucidates the diversity of experiences and
culture that may be grouped together under the rubric of Asian contemporary
art, Gardens change according to the season and as a result of human
involvement. They are moving landscapes, and children’s wonderlands, where
fairy tales start. More frequently grounded in literary contexts, Asian gardens
provide meeting places for poets, scholars, and literati; and mystical legend
love stories flower in the back garden.
I
conceived of a framework for Dream in a Asian Contemporary
Secret Garden
consisting of the four areas of poetic garden, landscape in motion, wonderland,
and hidden garden, and located 24 artists to distribute within these areas.
Within these broad categories, these 24 idiosyncratic visions generate a
kaleidoscopic array of works that take part in manifold artistic dialogues. Juxtaposed with an
Oriental floral motif is a Wall Street money matrix; pop images look down on kinetic
installation art; finely decorated kimonos share wall space with fantasmatic paintings; dayglow pink polluted flamingos line up to lure
sirens and forest messengers. Some of the gardens conjured up are neither
enjoyable nor welcoming, and contain secrets that can only be unveiled by an
artistic journey. Such gardens might be overlooked or ignored by untutored
eyes. The wide variety of different interpretations of and responses to garden
is the theme here.
Gardens in Asia
are typically more exotic and erotic than their Western counterparts, Of
course, a secret garden in an imperial palace exhibits these characteristics in
the extreme, and the intersection of private and public life lends itself
easily to passion, drama, and tragedy.
A dream encapsulates a person’s
spirit in a journey, a sequence of images, sounds, feelings, and experiences in
a different time-space. A famous Kuanqu opera “Peony Pavilion”
is
well-known for its story of garden dreams that lead to a stunning and tragic love
story. Dreams do not take place in a worldly, functional situation; they float between
sense and illusion. A dream might be a fragment or a continuous story. All
might be clear after the dreamer’s awakening, or it might be difficult to
recall and be found that be in conflict with the real world and consciousness. The purpose here is not to give
a scientific treatment of dreams, but to appreciate the artistic expression of
mind experiences.
A dream in a secret garden is a
romantic or erotic scene. While the contemporary world is much more sophisticated
than an idyllic garden, a metropolis may be considered as an urban garden.
Since antiquity, the garden has been a common
theme in both Eastern and Western art, and it remains so. The concept of garden originated with the natural scenes celebrated
in ancient times
, and expanded to imperial
back gardens and those built by the
nouveaux
riche during the industrial revolution or periods in which trade was
ascendant
. During these latter eras, private
gardens built by the rich afforded civilians the opportunity to enjoy their own
flora, stones, ponds, bridges, or creeks. As might be expected, in Asia they were developed by merchants after the opening
of international trade. This garden-building trend continued to develop in the modern
era, and now the city boasts its own gardens - on roof tops or in penthouses.
Poetic Garden
Poetic garden is the historical
and literary discourse - for example, through poems - to express the vicissitudes
of life
or society. It is a rhetoric of the
four seasons. A garden can be a heaven where poets express their imagination,
splash their color and abstract forms through subtle line as in Kay Lin’s
painting. The endlessly revolving landscapes of the four seasons are revealed
in her poems that label the expression of her inner mind. Lin’s work in some
sense combines abstract expression and impression, yet one senses that a
Chinese landscape underlies it all. She plays with Monet’s water lily pond,
Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting, and ink brush painting. Unlike
others, however, she characteristically covers the result with a smooth oily
surface that gives her paintings a different feel and a more contemporary
expressionism. Lin’s paintings, for all their modern appearance, all contain
Chinese elements. For example, the
Chinese titles seemingly carved on the paintings recall the art in DunHuang Grotto
. She writes “
Reading a painting like a poem. I
create a picture with a poem’s feeling. I paint a picture just like composing a
poem. With only few words, it flows.”
Kotaro Fukui’s poetic expression in his
statement reads “When complete peace comes,
How should I suffer? In our heart
and in society, there exists light and darkness, They never leave our
hearts.The Light and the Darkness exist within us
I want to give off
light in the darkness, existing in the same place without change, linking the
past, present, and future!..I paint, with these thoughts in my mind.” Fukui exemplifies
Japanese character by using traditional organic materials such as minimal pigments,
washi, bee glue, and Indian ink. Fukui
lives and works in Tokyo,
a very crowded and boxy city, and reveals one occupant of a city garden - the
ostrich. It’s an African bird, but the image in profile looks like a
traditional Japanese subject, the crane. The image and line of the ostrich are studies
in contrast - in shape, and in black and white.
For his “Silent flower,” which is the iris, Fukui use lapis lazuli
which he applies to a background of gold leaf; he then hangs the painting on a
dark wall. The vibrant blue contrasts perfectly with the warm shine of the gold
leaf, creating
a virtue and a blessing.
Fukui’s father and great grandfather were
both artists, and the young man grew up in an environment supportive of artistic
endeavor. He absorbed his great grandfather’s Nihonga
influence, and adopted his father’s advant garde spirit.
Fukui’s ostrich motif not only shows up on
paper, but also on kimonos and obis. He has expertly applied an ancient technique
to obis – foil which has been oxidized for hundreds of years was cut and
rewoven to produce incredibly beautiful obis.
Likewise,
his ostrich painting on washi kimonos is completely stunning. The atmosphere is
another garden for poetry reading
.
Sometimes
a poem combined with painting and dance can further advance the search
for the essence and encompassing definition of art.
Jessica Pihua Hsu’s paintings are always related to poems,
whether they be romantic, emotional, or an expression of daily feeling toward
nature. Irises and weeds are splashed by the wind in her work Dancing Iris; you can smell the flowers’
fragrance. Hsu’s Garden in Moon Light
was inspired by Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, one
of
Georgia O'Keeffe's most famous works; there
O’Keeffe pictured a bleached cow’s skull above a black stripe with blue and
white on either side supported with stripes of bright crimson. In
Garden in Moonlight, Hsu borrowed the
bright red for the curtains to present the magical reflection of her secret
garden. The moon casts silver light on her garden, capturing not only the
beauty of the roses but their fragrance as well
.
A
poetic painting does not necessarily come equipped with a foot note, if a
delighted atmosphere show its affinity with the universe. Tung Hsinru favors a painting
style that is formless and abstract. A few clear strokes show a dreamlike world
on canvas, and yield strong images on a blurred background. Using this method,
he draws constellations of comets that arc across and suddenly drop from the
sky. He engages the viewer in reconsideration of the earth and the sky. The
result is a striking work of stark contrasts that asks the viewer to reimagine
the earth as an organic part of the universe. Tung simultaneously asks the
audience to recalibrate itself against an astronomical measure, thus commenting
on our petty daily concerns.
A traditional Chinese brush ink
painting requires a literary poem with a seal. At first glance, Pan Hsin Hua’s
work is reminiscent of ancient ink brush painting. The content of the paintings
seems more narrative than merely representations of landscapes. For example,
Pan’s images show children playing with pets in the garden. But the paper and
colors have been treated to yield faded images
that give the paintings the cast of a far-away memory. In the artist’s own
words, “more important,
there is a wide gap in her works that indirectly separates her creations from imitation of tradition in a familiar yet
aloof, ironic and sarcastic manner. The works solely belong to the time in
which they exist.”
An
album or fan mimic a typical ancient literary book, as in Chang Lishan’s artist
book recording his in existence. Upon arriving in New York, Chang used this book to combine
his artistic career with his daily work as owner of a moving company. From a
trancultural perspective, he inhabited an in-between space straddling disparate
cultures and societies. The effect of cultural dislocation compelled Chang to
record his life when he came to New
York. Ever volatile, while preparing for an art
installation for the “Nexus”
exhibition at the Queens
Museum, he baked baguettes
daily, and formed over a thousand baguettes into an installation that expressed
the larger struggles of his life. Chang’s life itself is a type of art action and
performance; he adds a further layer of meaning by commenting on it in his
album, describing and existence halfway between the exigencies of practical life
and a literati’s poetic outlook.
Landscape in Motion
We sometimes search for the eternal in the world surrounding us. While
the eternal never exists in the impermanent human material word, the landscape in
art is a human work that moves like an animation. We might find some images to
be clearer, while others are a jumble of memories from several lives. Urban
motion is never ending, while some flowers blossom only once. Therefore, people
never have enough patience to understand each other deeply, or grasp the true
facts.
A city is always on the move, as is the metropolitan garden shown to us
in Landscape in Motion, Chin Chih Yang’s video installation which focuses his
views of the city, of political issues, and of the current financial storm.
Living and working in New York,
Yang has a great subject to show his mind’s motion. In recent years, his work
has combined action and performance that communicate with the audiences, since
his work always points out the pressing issues of the society and environment
in which we live. For example, in Pollution
Solution he creates a disaster in our world that extinguishes the city. And
in 2050 Dumbo, he attached dozens of plastic bottles and soda cans to his
body. His is a type of poverty art that comments on a bitter and real life. The
review in the Village Voice read:
Chin Chih Yang’s inconvenient truth titled 2050
Dumbo, is a multimedia video projection that “drowns” the neighborhood in
water to show the destruction that rising sea levels can bring.
The expressive power of moving objects can bring out the harmony of a
series of related contrasted tone values. Shyu Ruey-Shiann juxtaposes warm natural
material with cold industrial metals and mechanical parts. A complexity of
spatial rhythms has been composed in his knetic art. To a certain extent, the
industrial material finds its precursor in modern western art, while the clean
simple form and dry sound echo Zen philosophy.
Shyu has recently moved from Taipei
to New York.
His kinetic art installation is not only about a moving image but also the
object of motion. Unusually for kinetic art, the mechanical part of Shyu’s work
dissolves into his concept; his cool iron pieces transmit a retrospective image
that draw a nostalgic atmosphere. To provide contrast, he uses not only worked
metals but also natural materials. Some of his work hangs from the ceiling, and
one piece involves small boats that float on the invisible ocean of our memory.
Position makes it possible to see an object from different perspectives. For
example, looking at the supernatural shows a different facet of nature. One has
to change one’s position. Danto announced the death of representation,
and Huang Po Chih has freed himself from the constraints of representation. He
uses scanners to produce distorted digital images of flowers, images that
assault our eyes. Huang’s
Flov"er piece unifies
the letters in the two words "flower" and "love," and for
him the meaning is a love that never ceases to flow. During the process of
creating his animation-like flower, he shifts the position of the flower to
preserve a sense of a shadow, a residual three-dimensionality. The level of
resolution rivals that of the images produced by microscopic photography. He
spent four months and scanned more than 10,000 image files, and with
photo-editing software, every scanned photo was retouched and modified. The culmination
was a merging of all these edited pictures into an animation of dancing
flowers. What surprises us is the unfamiliarly fine texture, which is decorative
yet not pictorial.
To question the internal and external, either from the inside out or from
the outside is only to see a partial world. The flat, industrial realism painting
of Fan Yang Chung, looks at another slice
of city scenery that has been neglected. He takes fragmentary views of airplanes.
These paintings are without affect and seemingly lack design or ornamentation, producing
very industrial images, despite the fact that Fan uses more traditional
materials, such as oil on canvas. The result is a contemporary image, by which
the artist refers to the metaphor of travel as a locus of dislocation and
alienation in modern life.
Yuan Guan Ming projects a video image which takes the living environment
as subject. Overlapping city landscapes present a changing view of metropolitan
buildings. His video images switch between the place he resides and the
Glenfiddich distillery in Scotland,
where he won a residency for 6 months. This piece ties together far and near
places, and intertwines his memory of the forest. In the 2007 solo exhibition Disappearing
Landscape, Yuan made a concerted
effort to change his creative direction by recording moments from daily life
which he found in the home, the environment, and nature.
Motion needn’t only be physical moving, but may be expressed as film,
video, or performance to indicate a change in location or position. The effect
can be paradoxical –there is movement,
but no change in position or size as in Marcel Duchamp’s
Rotorelief set of cardboard
disks
. A labor-consuming piece created by Chen
Chun Hao uses thousands of push pins to make geometrical two-dimensional “
Targets” painting-like works, where the
subtle shining of the surface of the push pins creates a smooth, mechanical,
and industrial appearance. Projects of this kind may be said to engage in a physiological
optics, a type of retina painting. What is more, their reflections may cause
optical illusions. Strangely, as the viewer moves, the art seems to move as
well. This gives the work a restless, charged air, which of course clashes with
its seemingly impassive mode of presentation. Its both analogical and symbolic.
Viewer participation has been acclaimed since “Creative
Act”
from 1915. Chiu Chao Tsai’s interactive
installations mix optical art and language concepts. In his piece called Betwixt, the challenge has been to articulate
the relationship between the artist and the audience. The Chinese characters corresponding
to the four words You, I, She, and Him are formed when the viewer slowly slides
the metal bars attached to Betwixt. This forces the viewer to define a
relationship with the art. Of course, Tsai runs two risks with this art. First,
language restricts the work. Second, the viewer needs to take an more active
role than usual.
Wonderland
“ I like the word ‘belief.’ In general when people
say ‘I know’ they don’t know, they believe… to live is to believe; that is my
belief, at any rate.” A
wonderland only exists in its own time and space. It might suggest a
tranquility of spirit. A fertile imagination makes a flower grow in the middle of
a concrete floor, an ancient goddess transform to a modern working lady, or pervades
a forest with the metaphysical, purifying the soul and spreading harmony. Eun Young Choi has created a garden that turns
out to be a Wonderland. In Choi’s
installation, black vinyl has been cut into a decorated floral ivy–like
pattern, that meanders up and down, left and right along the wall and around
the windows. It is an organic form that upon closer investigation might be molecular
– perhaps some type of microscopic creature that swims by the windows. The
paisley shapes hint at a classic Persian weavings. Groups of bouncing bluish
balls complicate the issue and infiltrate an organic crowd that may be either
under the sea or in the crown of a tree. She is also fond of using stickers
applied to mylar to form flowers, blue
sky, butterflies, cartoon characters, and other denizens of the dreamscape. Choi
not only shares with us the moment of childish innocence and joy or colorful
narratives but also provides an open-ended forum that absorbs diverse
expressions.
A deer raises his head from a forest to watch audiences in a city
museum. Aihua Hsia suggests a forest wonderland
where she captures a Buddhist god of ancient Indian legend; this god – so the
story goes – was changed into a human for fighting too much with the other
gods. Via changes of costume and posture, Hsia transforms him into a girl because
she feels that the battles the god-turned-human must fight are all too familiar
to women. The artist accentuates these primitive and simple forms stemming from
antiquity with the traditional material of lacquer. Hsia studied in Japan, where
lacquerware has been used on a daily basis for the
past thousand years. Lacquer is associated primarily with Asia,
and thus the materials and techniques participate in their own stereotypical
myths. The subjects she chooses are all from a forest, a secret garden in the
forest, and are populated by fairies, pixies, or the forest god of the
garden or locale.
In a cartoon movie, a group of animals escape from the boring jungle. Wandering
through the urban jungle, overwhelmed by the noisy buildings, they end up by
losing their freedom in circus cages. The city wonderland is in hindsight a
place of slow death. Lu Chih Yun’s sculpture is the epitome of elegant popular
art; it is a group of toy-like flamingos, radiating an unnatural dayglow pink evocative
of industrial pollution. The statement of the artist confirms that the color of
the flamingoes results from chemicals ingested in the polluted world. While flamingos are normally associated with wild
expanses, these birds with their heads emerging from flower pots –
transplanted, as it were - are inextricably linked with the urban environment. Lu has thus chosen subjects that are neither Asian nor, in her depiction, exotic. These flamingos are a
paradigm of reduplication, and thus reify the tension between the artistic
ideal of individuality and the industrial holy grail of standardization . Hence
is proposed a new aesthetics.
Exploring an underground treasure land or a long tunnel leading toward a
cave are normal parts of childhood play. In Huang Pey Yin’s amusement park, discarded
industrial or corrugated paper forms site-specific installations. They create stylized
rocks for scholar gardens. Paper has been used successfully as a sculptural
material before – for example by Chen Longbin a Taiwanese artist in New York who challenges
reading sculpture, or by the architect Frank Gehry’s famous cardboard furniture.
Pan Ping Yu uses media associated with feminism such as needles and thread to comment, without participating in feminism’s
claims of oppression. Nevertheless, Pan wishes to avoid categorization as a
feminist because she is interested in deeper questions such as the relationship
between myth and contemporary life. Her
art recalls the artist’s childhood spent at the seashore. Pan creates from fabric
a three dimensional free-hanging sculpture in the shape of a seashell; the use
of material and the fact that it is hollow gives the piece an immeasurable
weightlessness.
Children are a popular subject in this new age of reassurance.
Shiau Da Yi also works with fabric, a conscious choice on his part because of
the associations between textiles and tradition, previous agrarian generations,
and nostalgia for the motherland. Even his work showing flowers printed on the
face of a child harks back to the floral images so frequently gracing
traditional textiles. At the same time that these pieces comment on the
indelible influence of the past on the future, Shiau complicates his message either
by an irreverent grin on his subject’s face or by the overabundance of multi-colored
flowers.
Hidden Garden
Hidden Gardens can be inside the city, where people
enjoy life in private spaces. Large
cities are full of gardens, a landscape that lies beyond nature. To uncover its
multicultural art is to discover the secret gardens of the city, and find the
city’s heart. Asian artists rely on
multiple perspectives to create a startling landscape of the mind. Global cities
are full of culture, containing new and old, rich and poor, passion and
coldness, constancy and change.
In the city jungle, artists suppress ordinary views
to express secret gardens of the mind and private apartment space.
Japanese artist Karoruko Nakano’s
female images illustrate a mixture of ethnicities, some of which use collages of
Japanese fabric and Nakano’s drawing. These collage paintings borrow liberally
from comic and cartoon characters and stylize all fashion female images. Recalling
Klimt’s paintings, the artist uses decorated illustration to relate stories of the
intimacy of urban girls. Still clinging to her younger stardom in Japan, the
artist has predominately chosen to depict scenes from Tokyo. Recently, she has broadened her scope
to other urban areas. Nakano’s female figures reveal a desire to show their
bodies in front of each other without any shame. Some of the images picture a
third person who talks about another girl’s private stories, or maybe directs a
male gaze at the girl. But the females in the paintings are very relaxed,
enjoying their situations. Either in color or in black and white, these
paintings sport a very decorative line. Sometimes the pattern applied to the
hair of women in the paintings is kimono fabric; the delicate lines provide a
direct exotic and erotic appearance.
Liu Shih Tung makes pleasant amusing art by cutting paper images, gluing
them, and applying paint. Flower grow up
on the pig head is a hilarious red paper cutting that has been glued to
canvas. The combination seems very tentative. Will
it amuse you or is the artist poking fun at himself or the
audience by employing (Piere Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel DuChamp,
106) randomly-chosen but very serious details, making a structure and gluing
it. Tung chosen life is cutting and grouping and gluing He uses materials from
folk life, such as decorated flowers, dishes, fragmented figures or faces, and
his final collages from a distance look like a
flat cloth that earlier times. But when the viewer contemplates it carefully,
a colorful pattern emerges to reveal a face, and a image with decorated format.
One painting describes a legendary immortal in a bottle carried by immortals.
It symbolizes treasures inside. The flying line and decorated floral and bright
color, seduce the viewer to enter the hidden garden.
In the ancient legent book, a fox pixie admires the talent of a scholar and visits him in a dream. Thus starts a
tragic fairy love story between man and animal. Ancient pornography painting has
increasingly been revealed and studied, just as night club, denizens are fallen
into the eagerness, fame, and sexual desire of the urban landscape. Yao Jui Chung studied ancient x-rated books
and intimate pictures from inside palace gardens or the private gardens of the wealthy
In Chung’s gardens, a literati studies in his library alone, or a number
of the literati meet; they paint, play music, drink tea or wine, and get drunk.
Another story begins with an accidental meeting with the daughters of a rich
family, from which unfold affairs unacceptable to their parents. It might be
the concubines of a secret garden that find the lonely imperial life
unbearable. Therefore the secret garden became the setting of much immoral
desire and secret affairs that led to many subjects for the storyteller.
Yao imitates the
pornography found in ancient pictures of mythical love stories. Even the colors
applied are typical of the Chinese Northern style and Jie Hua.
[11]
In a city back garden, the hardships of immigrant labor replace the
relationship between human beings and nature with the relationship between human
labor and mechanical power. Chen Ching Yao conflates the past – as represented
in Tian Gong Kao Wu
[12] a
traditional book about the coordination between human beings and nature and
cooperation between labor power and natural power - with current personalities to
make digital books. The artist observed the dramatic changes of industrial
structure in
Taiwan
and the superabundance of imported workers from
Southeast
Asia. In
Yao’s
book, workers and farmers are replaced with foreign workers from
Southeast Asia wearing Ming Dynasty attire; while traditional
industries also have been transformed by the changing industrial structure and
labor power in
Taiwan
in the 21
st Century. In works of the Tian Gong Kao Wu series, the artist
cited the general prejudice that foreign labors or brides in
Taiwan typically
engage in nursing, babysitting, factory work, walking dogs, or cooking. A funky
combination with a black mockery and these ambivalences are revealed.
In this garden theme, we are not trying to entertain the guest and obtain
their pleasant attentions, but pointing to a broad metaphysical strain in the
works. The ultimate issue in the work is to provide a trace and patina of the
time. The various paintings and installations expose the endless cycle of
consumption and reproduction of city garden. By ultimately looking over all the
work, we see gardens transcending economic and political issues. Just as nature
is always changing, the species that play a major role in the drama, like characters
and actors are eventfully rotated. A truth of the universe - humans are in
transit in the city and in the world. Stories left in the garden can also be
distorted. In other words, in the secret garden celebrity doesn’t carry any
weight. The flowers blossom and fade, then re-blossom and the sprout is reborn
again in another spatial resolution, and so imaginary entry into it again. The
cycle revolves and changes like daily incantations, we offer an eloquent
meditation on cities daily movement, with mutability and eternal rhythms.
Three figures:
1. Pollution Solution
2. Georgia O'Keeffe “Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue”
The statement of her Endless poem is “Engaging in too
much to drop for our life, live and survive with endless word.”
