Text by Cheng-zhu Weng

Free/Responsible－Free/Responsible—Chi-Chang, Hsieh's Artworks Exhibition is about a representation of the artist’s spirit and soul.

Introduced by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), postmodern French artist and thinker, the concept of the fold is about the unceasing changes of life that is akin to countless folds on a piece of fabric; and the existence of life seeks similarities among all variations, like the connection between the artist and his work. The exhibition Free/Responsible will guide its audience into the core theme of the artist’s creation–which is his representation of mind and soul. Life with unceasing changes is like repeated layering paint, for in a creator’s perspective, the artist’s life journey corresponds to the creative process of his work. Thus the works are presented to the viewers according to the artist’s transformation of life. To an artist, one of the fundamental issues about creation is about perspective on the past while seeking and making a difference. To viewers, the choice application of multiple media in the works ushers in a deeper sense of meditation on life, rather than just a discussion of the variations in media. Take the distinction between on paper and on canvas for example: paper easily absorbs the paint although it doesn’t support repeated layers on paint, and canvas is the opposite. The difference between these two kinds of medium can also alter the pace in a creative process, constructing some comparable development to life in different seasons and environments.

Viewers may recognize the signs of transformation of human life, marked by the time and the space, from the paintings in this exhibition. The unique symbolic trademark of the artist’s creative style may evoke the unintentional drawings in our daily experiences and recollections of life. On the other hand, human life experience has in fact tinted the life of painting, the flow of paint on each painting implies the artist’s body movement as well as unpreventable gravity, just like the spirit of freedom in the artist. Hence an artist can demonstrate the rhythm of life via his creative deeds, and so lead us to meditate: on the connection between life and art, also on how time and space may induce art and life of a man. Like the exhibition of Free/Responsible at two art sites, inviting an audience to come and thus experience appreciation and contemplation in a heterotopia.

This End Versus That End discusses the interconnection between seeing and being seen in photography. It is about how photography—providing an entrance to culture and male/female gaze—as one of the most direct creative languages, produces both images and the reference of how they are perceived. It is also about how images can form an imagination of genders that is like a kind of index, and an introduction to its cultural context. As for its visual presentation, this end of image is frankly displayed for its audience, while that end refers to a particular visual realm that belongs to the author, and thus represents an intuitive and diverse language of imagery with the posture of a producer in the creative context.

In this exhibition, to guide viewers into Chou’s diverse world of image in a way that is similar to reading an index, we particularly selected a series work.
In Red Sleep Bed, an item from older generation becomes a symbol and a metaphor through her direct closeup shot. Being more than a feeling of nostalgia for old things, it is a study of her life experience through these things and items. Thus the artist has created the diffêrance of image with her intuitive memory and nostalgia via photographic montage.
In the conceptual narrative language of Reflection/Nothingness, the drifting image displays a bizarre and slightly rootless background, rewriting our external visual experience of reality with a pragmatic approach; like a film festival with structure. As an experimental work, it is more like a kind of backtracking and denial of the era of information explosion and anxiety.
The Other End of the Red Cord demonstrates an imagination of marriage by unmarried women—the wedding dress becomes a mirror, while happiness is the narcissistic wish. This piece is a fictional depiction of the repression of women from a culture with prejudice. A wedding dress may symbolize women’s desire for marriage; it can also be a sign of invisible restrictions and irony. Perhaps this series may stimulate viewers to contemplate that the term “Leftover girl” signifies description of a single state as well as sexism.

As the photographer penetrates through a cultural perception via her image, clicking the shutter button takes more than a moment of time; it requires the photographer’s presentation arrangement of the image. Using photography as a meaningful tool in the world of representation, Chou represents another kind of cultural language through photography. In her creation, all the motifs and themes are in mutual referencing connection under the arrangement via her viewing window. It is seemingly her intention to detach her image from stereotypical historic point of impression. The text structure of her artistic expression places the metaphor out of sight via photographic techniques; her work wanders at the boundary of the invisible, roaming about the distinction between seeing and being seen, whether it is about a visible body or a metaphorical gender issue.

Chou’s images present a rearrangement of the existing world through photography, which provides her work a characteristic of self-reflective ideal. Her photographic work is like a message without a code, in Roland Barthes’s words. Fro her, photography is like a way to quest for self, on a creative journey that provides a free yet steady artistic expression through which she can unpretentiously express in a visual language of her own. The meaning in her work is not limited within the visible; its weight of memory and consciousness brings us to contemplate, and hence, to create a kind of imagination—an interrelationship between gender, material, and society.

The title Behind the Image signifies an innovative concept and its continuation throughout Liu Yao-bin’s work over these years as a photographer. It suggests the misconception of visibility in the core of photography, as a confirmatory experience to a present viewer, the authenticity of image does not suggest representation of reality but the way which the photographer interferes in the world of reality. The title also suggests an invisibility, which responds to the reoccurring motif of female as maternity and primitive memory, and thus implies the existential truth of a desire behind the symbol of female body through a sophisticated glimpse. The invisibility of image refers to total transparency of every image at the presence of its subject, it echoes the photographer’s interference to meaning, although coming across a representation, the contemporary digital images demonstrate a pastiche of the mind of its creator.

The representative characteristic in Liu’s photographic work surpasses the visible reality, presenting his grasp in image themes with an invisible posture; as a response to contemporary art feature and its irreversible destiny, these works stand on the edge between producing and feigning. The 3 series In Bloom, Not a Flower, Bóng-tshī and Zhao Di, Hiding is no Equal to Forgetting are selected on display in this exhibition, for a series of work contains the developing context of how the artist created a connection between art pieces and himself in the images. The gaze upon affection and gender has always been the core essence of exploration in his works. Rather than merely an aesthetic judgement in the perspective of direct phenomenon of sex and desire, his photography skillfully applies a visual language with profound cultural meanings in his allegories of image; it wanders between the realm of intuition and of reality, in it exists a dual-affection of a subconscious subject with desire on female as a kind of maternal attachment and dependance, albeit dreamy. As the photographer wrote in his artist statement: he wishes to elaborate his own ideas and concepts via a language of images… for one must wear his mask and cope with his workplace in the world of reality, while seeing is not equivalent to understanding.

As Roland Barthes proclaimed, vision is the most mysterious among all senses, it is on the other side of the spectrum from knowledge, because magic lies within vision. Liu transferred from the career path of being a professional pharmacist to the role of a photographer, and having been through losing his mother he begun to ponder the sexual attachment of maternity. He reviews his personal history and memory through creative process, and thus constructs this kind of Lacanian lack of his own interpretation in the world of photography. Hence he constructed a paradox of seeing and being seen through the seemingly in sight character of image, and thus demonstrates that the moment a viewer sees an art piece, they see their inner truth.

I see value in Liu’s photography, not only for his representative ability in emotional expressions, but also for his capability to see things via a viewfinder, allowing viewers to connect with the truth of his memory and the perception of seeing through his image creation while being aware of the invisibility character of photography himself.