Home / News / ELYSIUM – THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY OF YAO JUI CHUNG & SU HUI-YU

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ARTIST(S): YAO JUI CHUNG, SU HUI-YU CURATOR(S): WU DAR-KUEN Elysium: The Spiritual Journeys Undertaken by Yao Jui-Chung & Su Hui-Yu Over the past three decades after the lifting of martial law in 1987, the dwellers on this island released their previously suppressed emotions like flood discharge. The consequence has become apparent in the rapid efflorescence of diverse art forms, foremost the Little Theater Movement, Taiwan’s New Wave cinema, and Taiwanese contemporary art. Today, the threat we face has evolved from the party-state authoritarian regime into the plunder by neoliberal globalization, which can be construed as a brand new “terminal stage.” According to artist Yao Jui-Chung, “a terminal stage is not necessarily negative. It implies regeneration and metamorphosis, or, to put it another way, interim collation of historical contexts.” With few exceptions, all forms of religion equally embody “human desires” for happiness and meanwhile promise to bring people spiritual growth and salvation, though their approaches may diverge. To attract followers and solidify teachings, symbolic objects or materialized images tend to be necessary commodities in addition to scriptures, sermons, incantations, instruments and rituals. The total of more than 12,000 temples in Taiwan shaped the sui generis temple culture that has become the most enigmatic and multifaceted field in the Chinese world. Most temples serve to address ordinary people’s earthly needs of all stripes and offer them inner sustenance. On a more specific basis, people expect to gain real interests, restore physical health, or satisfy their spiritual yearning for the next life with the assistance of transcendental powers, and the supply-demand issue has ensued. The colossal statues of deities or the temples consigned to oblivion are ergo the eternal recurrence incarnate in different times — they are the relics left by the endless cycle of emergence and disappearance of the mortals’ desires. For All Theists and Atheists Launched in early 2016 and photographed within one and a half years in an intensive manner, Incarnation, a photographic project by Yao, covers more than 230 temples, cemeteries, public gardens and amusement parks around Taiwan, featuring the statues of deities created by ethnic Chinese by reference to their self-images — some of these statues were toppled and beyond recall, while others remain standing within sight. Carefully observing these statues comprised of the projection of human desires, we can further collate the endemic political relations in different geographical spaces. Generally speaking, no sooner did human figures appear in the scene, than narratives were woven into the composition. Therefore, Yao deliberately hid “human figures” behind the scenes and orientated this project towards typological landscape photography rather than folklore photography. What he captured were not so much unusual cases as normal patterns, so he excluded human figures, and meanwhile evaded events and disasters, assuming an objective, cool-headed and detached posture. In addition, the targets he photographed were neither religious architecture nor folk festivals and rites, but the “cult objects of believers’ psychological projection” beyond the scope of what mentioned above; to wit, the statues of deities. Yao received many spiritual messages during the shooting of Incarnation. This period of being along with deities also prompted him to launch his new project Hell Plus, for which he visited multitudinous temples in Taiwan and photographed the scenes reminiscent of people suffering in the eighteen levels of hell. Serving the purposes of awakening, cautioning and persuading people to do good deeds, these scenes nevertheless feature exotic flowers and fruit of all the colors in profusion created by amateur craftsmen. This new series is intended to embody the peculiar folk aesthetics of depicting heaven and hell in a down-to-earth manner, which is beyond the reach of Taiwan’s higher aesthetic education. Resuming the Licentious Expedition Different from Yao who tends to take photographs in bulk and apply the aesthetics of scale to field survey, Su Hui-Yu has in recent years conducted extensive investigation into anecdotes and created numerous erotic images through antique text-based re-shooting. For example, Su’s video work The Walker deconstructed three plays, namely Mary Scooter (1993), Asshole Man (1996) and Our Top Horny Novels (2000) by the Taiwan Walker Theatre, and then ingeniously used these elements to reconstruct his wild imagination about history, the extreme dimension of pop culture addressed in Artist Films, and the sub-cultural modality of the Other. This work not only represented amateur actors’ spontaneous improvisation used to feature in the Taiwan Walker Theatre’s performances, but also, in an elaborate disguise of reconstructing (pseudo-) history, restored the ethos of cultural de-colonization embedded in the physical impulses during the efflorescence of the Little Theater Movement in the 1990s. In sum, this work reviewed the insatiable human desires, made imaginary addenda to history in an old apartment bristling with items of no value, and imitated the Taiwan Walker Theatre’s creative approach; that is, recruiting amateurs from all walks of life to improvise with professional actors. The velocity, prime time, rebellion, physical pleasure and ethical bottom line referred to in the three plays were also interpreted via the non-linear narratives based on the montage-like match cut in this video installation. In his another work The Glamorous Boys of Tang (Chiu Kang-Chien, 1985), Su brilliantly transmuted Chiu’s eponymous original without sparking any criticism for parroting. In Chiu’s original, many scenes were either abridged or roughly depicted, or failed to reflect its radical and passionate yearnings owing to the censorship and the issue of public acceptance in that period. Three decades later, Su utilized new resources and innovative imaging techniques to make a comprehensive expression of the bodies and variegated sub-cultures in today’s pluralistic social context. In this sense, The Glamorous Boys of Tang (Chiu Kang-Chien, 1985) can be construed as a supplement or a new phase to Chiu’s original. Su’s “re-shooting” clearly implied additional remarks, remedy and mending. He is the spit of a restless conservator who not only highlights original details but also extends them along the temporal and spatial axes, thereby re-animating the enchanting yet ephemeral moments and revealing the previously ignored or veiled events. The imagery of Chiu’s original was thus transformed into liquid (i.e. sweat, water and blood) in Su’s work. Radiating an alluring aura as well as being wilder, bolder and more untrammeled than the original, The Glamorous Boys of Tang (Chiu Kang-Chien, 1985) is nothing short of the carnival-like LGBT Pride. As revisiting history becomes an imagery proposition, it not only indicates that contemporary image art has revived erotic works and the spirit of this genre at the periphery of Taiwan’s cinema history, but also signals the time for Su to resume the licentious expedition in the name of “The Glamorous Boys of Tang.” Rise of the Deities in the Eastern Elysium Generally speaking, Taiwan’s contemporary art has evolved in a pretty gloomy atmosphere throughout the past three decades. It has been rife with imagination about death and hospice care. The term “hospice care” refers to end-of-life care, which can be extended to represent a person in articulo mortis and the specific social phenomena or political complexions projected from such a state. The second commonly exercised imagination is about Bardo, meaning an intermediate, transitional or liminal state between death and rebirth. The third is about death, a concept of great significance to the development of Taiwan’s contemporary art. Civic culture had been frequently touched upon in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The rise of giant statues of deities on this island has an inextricable link with the Taiwan Economic Miracle and local factions. It may even be associated with Taiwan’s complex of inferiority. The Nationalist Government in Taiwan used to argue that it’s the sole legal government representing the whole of China. However, the Nationalist Government run by the Kuomintang (KMT; a Chinese political party) lost its “legitimacy” and ergo the acknowledgement from most of the countries in the world after its withdrawal from the United Nations in 1971. The KMT then used “establishing the revival base of returning to Mainland China” as a slogan for restoring its legitimacy on this island. The thriving export processing sector during that time further predisposed such a slogan to become the KMT’s creditable performance. The rapid economic growth of Taiwan in the 1980s ushered in a period when Taiwan was awash with cash and when tycoons colluded with politicians, which in turn offered a breeding ground for rampant political corruption. On top of that, the law authorized preferential treatments to religious groups in several aspects such as taxation and land-use. Misappropriation of state-owned properties by religious groups even became a common occurrence. All these phenomena made Taiwan an out-and-out “Elysium” for the portmanteau religious circle. Having persisted in Taiwan since the 1990s, these outrageous acts and absurd situations nevertheless constitute a fertile source of nutrition for Taiwanese artists whether in terms of the reflection of social status quo, visual arts or theatrical performance. By dint of the meaningful dialogue between the two Taiwanese artists par excellence that transcends the imagery and socio-historical confines, the exhibition Elysium precisely pinpoints the Leviathan behind the religious world; to wit, “human desires.” In the 21st century, people on this eastern pure land tend to find salvation in gods, and meanwhile cast the karma (produced by their desires) on deities. As religions metamorphose into the carriers of human desires, and as deities leverage the power of karma and continue to be reincarnated in multifarious colossal statues around this immortal island, Yao and Su have fixed their detached gaze through the lens of images on the endless, time-traveling absurdity in Taiwan that keeps summoning and transmuting the phantoms of history into a driving force behind the emergence of new deities in the future. By virtue of the artists’ discerning eye, this exhibition penetrates through the abyssal depth of human desires to the ultimate truth. BlackThursday Performance by Meuko! Meuko!＆NAXS corp https://vimeo.com/336545905/ff6d67a456?fbclid=IwAR04VXw5yptHSqP0pUETp7zF_Xz6J4bmnr_EHVqV2pAE5X7-UH_8IdG3WWM

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