Hsu Chia-Wei’s films are often characterized by “ low temperature,” or a calm treatment of composition and objects. The viewer quietly listens to their narrations, which unfold with a slow and patient attitude. This kind of contended maturity is unusual for an artist only 30 years of age. Hsu is among a young generation of Taiwanese artists who have been described as inhabiting a political space without political potential — their expressions could only be channeled through the fetishization of objects and the past. According to this point of view, beginning in the late 1990s, the cultural scene in Taiwan moved toward a state of isolated monologue, which in contemporary art has translated into a sate of fatigue, leading to “Art of Frustration.” Hsu Chia-Wei considers the above-mentioned view too narrow. The absence of artworks’ engagement with political history does not mean that artists are unable to translate their desires into action. On the contrary, young artists have been effectively transforming the way memory and history is represented today.
WHEN HISTORY CANNOT BE RE-PRESENTED
THE STORY OF Hoping Island (2008) can be seen as Hsu Chia-Wei’s response to the Art of Frustration. The film is shot at a boat factory on Keelung’s Hoping Island. the island formerly served as Japan’s southern base for military shipbuilding. After the war, the ship factory also played a significant role in Taiwan’s economic development. By surviving two political eras, the factory contains multiple histories, depending on the narrator’s national identification. In The Story of Hoping Island, Hsu Chia-Wei employed several different elements — the real ship factory, dialogue with his grandmother, electronic music, and floral patterns — to create a highly complex narrative reading. With this deliberately designed approach, Hsu hopes that the audience can wander through the real ( the historical factory site), memory (the dialogue with his grandmother), and an overall dream-like presentation. Narrative films have long explored the meaning of narration, the ways of narrating, and its cultural function. The Story of Hoping Island uses a chaotic, multi-layered way of storytelling to blur the distinction between dream and daily life, a separation that the medium of film innately creates.
Confronted with a history that cannot actually be re-presented, Hsu Chia-Wei creates and alternative narrative method to address the distance between the past and present, thus creating a new reality of his own. He considers this process an action, and furthermore, an action that defeats issues of re-presenting. To re-represent requires a departure from reality. Hsu uses the narrative function of film itself, as well as the off-screen presence of real people, places, and things, to draw out the contours of the fictional narrative of the film and to reveal the structure of the narrative itself. In Hsu’s latest work Marshal Tie Jia (2012-2013), the concept of the off-screen is again considered to create a structure that seems real and illusory at the same time.
In Marshal Tie Jia, a dialogue between man and god initiates the artists’ quest for cultural memory, setting up the relationship between the narrative and production of myth and film. In 2010, Hsu encountered a small island called Turtle Island, not far from Beigan Village in the Matsu Islands. the contour and size fo this island gives it a fart-tale like aura. Hsu immediately chose Turtle Island as the filming location for his writing and research project about island memory. Prior to the shoot, the artist was told that he must gain the permission of the island owner Frog God, locally known as Marshal Tie Jia (‘ Ironclad Marshal”). The elaborate rituals and quantity of research led the artist to understand the very different historical fates of Mastu and Taiwan, though both now belong to the same authority. Matsu is located across the Taiwan Strait from Fujian. When Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuominmntang army moved to Taiwan, Turtle Island became an important strategic point between China and Taiwan. Over time, its military significance faded, the fortifications were abandoned, and Marshal Tie Jia regained authority of Turtle Island. It is said that the Frog King’s Temple idd not originate on Turtle Island. It was initially founded on China’s Wuyi Mountain, but moved to the Matsu Islands after its home temple was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
Hsu Chia-Wei's Marshal Tie Jia debuted at the 2012 Taipei Biennial. For its presentation, Hsu re-created the original Frog God Temple, projected on a green screen erected onto the actual island. The frame slowly zooms out to reveal the borders of the green screen and the island’s contours. This deliberate panning transforms the filming process into an act or performance. In front of the green screen, an old man sings Marshal Tie Jia’s favorite song. During exhibition, this film was pretend adjacent to a full-scale replica of the Frog God Temple and a letter correspondence between the artist and the Marshal.
DECONSTRUCTING AND REASSEMBLING NARRATIVE
AS MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY, Hsu Chia-Wei has consistently employed the use of multiple narratives in his work. Through a multi-layered installation setup, he seeks to reveal the production process of film itself, while at the same time actively engaging the work with the exhibition space. What the viewer sees presented is not only a group of related sculptures, texts, and images, but a designed atmosphere as a new form of representation. Hsu describes this process as continuously deconstructing and reassembling narrative at the border of reality and fiction, allowing both sides to blur into each other.
This approach is seen in Hsu Chia-Wei’s latest work Huai Mo Village (2012-2013). The work tells the story of an orphanage in Huai Mo Village, Chiang Rai, Thailand. In 1949, when the kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, it stationed a unit of soldiers at Chiang Rai’s Mae Salong, located in the Golden Triangle at the border of Thailand and Myanmar. They were positioned in preparation to fight the Mainland. Due to international circumstances and the disagreement between China’s Communist Party and Kuomintang, the unit was finally forced to separate from the Republic of China, essentially becoming a group of men without national identity. As the Golden Triangle evolved into a refugee area, the abandoned soldiers won their residential rights by aiding the Thailand government in its was against Myanmar. They also illegally grew poppy flowers and transported drugs for living.
In an exhibition in Bangkok, the artist chose to present two films shot during the project’s research stages. The first tim consists of three scenes that the artist had accidentally filmed with his cellphone during his first visit to Huai Mo Village. the second film is a planned scene of a priest telling the story of his life before a group of children. A strong beam of light is directed on the priest’s face, while the lens slowly zooms out to reveal the professional arrangement of filming lights, cameras, tripod, and tracks, awakening the viewer from the priest’s story of the past and into the reality of the film set.
History is an accumulation of individuals and events. Historical contexts are created through a mixture of time, identification, imagination, and memory. Hsu Chia-Wei considers his creative process an act of challenging the construction of history as a context for space and time. The arousal of the viewer’s own fundamental memories completes this combination; an awareness of the present, past and what is currently becoming the past is provoked. The future will soon become the present and subsequently the past.
Godard once said the one can do anything apart from the history of what one does. History cannot be reproduced lit can only be reviewed. Although Hsu Chia-Wei does not maintain that his work transforms historical events into images, the way different generations understand reality produces historical gaps. As it is impossible to fill in nonexistent memory, through the action of filming, Hsu seeks to inspire dialogue and produce new events; to challenge the process of image production; and to repeatedly excavate stories and extend their potential.
The debut of Marshal Tie Jia at the 2012 Taipei Biennial was a prelude to the second exhibition of the same work at the Venice Biennale in 2013. In between the two presentations, Hsu visited the birthplace of Marshal Tie Jia on Wuyi Mountain, Jiangxi, to further his investigate the myth’s origins. Similarly, Huai Mo Village was also pretend in two stages. After the projects debut in Bangkok, Hsu revisited Huai Mo Village and studied the arts and crafts of the local young people, using a quilting technique he learned to re-create an old photo of the Kuomintang intelligence officers taken in the village in 1973. In the image, an old soldier stands in front of a house, of which Hsu creates a full-scale replica. When Hua Mo Village was exhibited in Shanghai this September, the presentation consisted of the reproduced building, the quilted photo, and the film of the priest.
If art is an imagination of the relationships between the people, politics, and social power, then in the process of art making the artist must face his own political position in relation to the narrated object. Hsu chia-Wei’s film are often take people as their subjects, the interaction between the characters inspiring new events as the films proceed. Through multiple narratives, Hsu tries to lay out an organized system of material which includes the context and origin of the event and the stories told by the subjects themselves. The presentation of Marshal Tie Jia involves film, a novel based on a series of dialogues, a map of Jiangxi and the Matsu Islands, and letter of correspondence between the artist and the Frog God. Through this arraignment, Hsu attempts an equal relationship between the multiple narratives. At the same time, these separated layers disrupt the flow of narration, as the different forms and mediums communicate different perspectives. Such diversity augments the works’ dynamics, yet it also runs the danger of over-complexity. Does the artist’s attempt to blur or accentuate content by employing multiple tracks of narration aid the completeness of the work? these questions are worth keeping in mind in our future observation of Hsu’s artistic production.
Only just having gotten started at 3- years old, Hsu Chia-Wei’s practice is unusually vigilant the genuine. It is a response to the present reality, and to the gaps in history. In the future, the story of Huai Mo Village will continue to be written, and the myth of Marshal Tie Jia further brought to light. As Herta Muller once said. ‘ as long as you’re moving, you haven’t arrived. As long as you haven’t arrived, you don’t have to work. Riding… gives you time to recover.” With time, Hsu- Chia Wei’s actions will begin to reveal their effects. His desire is not to avoid working, but simply to keep moving on, and to know what he has done.
[this article is published in LEAP24 http://leapleapleap.com/issues/leap-24/ ]
[1] Lin
Hong-John, “Speaking of Art of Frustration in Taiwan,” Abstract: Look At This
Symptom, ARTCO, March 2007, p. 125
Ed.
Note: This young generation of artists has not participated any major political
events, nor did they experience Taiwan’s martial law period. The artworks they
produce lack a political dimension, mostly lingering in a self-absorbed state
of monologue. According to Lin, their feishization of obhects and the past constitutes
the imagined political space of these artists.
[2] See “ Esther
Lu in Conversation with Hsu Chia-Wei,” The 55th Venice Biennale ‘
This is Not a Taiwan Pavilion’ catalogue
[3] Ibid
[4] Herta
Muller, The Hunger Angel, 2009
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