HOME Chen Chieh-jen Chien-Chi Chang

HOME Chien-Chi Chang Chen Chieh-jen

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

HOME Chien-Chi Chang Chen Chieh-jen

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Sydney

in association with National Art School Gallery Sydney

Opposite: Chien-Chi Chang China Town, 1992–2011 (detail) Digital film still Tang Z. Family, New York City, 1998 (dyptich/detail) Mr Tang arrived in New York in 1997. He was reunited with his family in 2001 and all currently reside in Philadelphia.

Image courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery and Magnum Photos Pages 4 and 8: Chen Chieh-jen Realm of Reverberations, 2014 (detail) Digital film stills Blu-ray, B/W and colour, sound, four-channel video installation, duration approx. 25:00 minutes Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2014 Images courtesy the artist Pages 5 and 6: Chien-Chi Chang The Chain, 1993–99 (detail) Silver gelatine photographs 157.8 x 107.3 cm each Images courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery and Magnum Photos Page 7: Chien-Chi Chang Side Chain (still), 1993–2014 (detail) B/W and colour, sound, duration 6:24 minutes Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2014 Image courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery and Magnum Photos

HOME Chien-Chi Chang Chen Chieh-jen

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in association with National Art School Gallery

–

24 May 2 August 2014

Contents

SCAF Project 22

13 Preface

Gene Sherman 17

Shock and Awe and Rice Deborah Levy

27

A Question of Place: A View from the Margins Sophie McIntyre

33

An Interview with Chien-Chi Chang Natalie Seiz

39 41 89 1 05

Colour Plates Chien-Chi Chang The Chain Side Chain China Town

129 137

Chen Chieh-jen Realm of Reverberations

169

Artist Biographies

172 Contributors 173 Acknowledgements

11

Preface Gene Sherman Chairman and Executive Director Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Creativity and serendipity are easy bedfellows, as any research scientist, writer or visual artist will attest. Creativity implies failure, as well as perseverance and the capacity to follow unexpected paths that chance and fickle coincidence throw into a pre-planned mix. Top-tier curatorship and the production of cultural events rely on intuitive judgement, improbable-to-imagine collaborations and instinct as much as they do essential research and managerial skills.

HOME, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) Project 22, is no exception. In fact, it was born, in part, through error.

As with all of the Foundation’s projects, the genesis of this dualsite exhibition goes back substantially in time.

The 2001 Venice Biennale was one of the fourteen I attended during my twenty-eight years of professional gallery life, providing stimulation for the mind, food for the soul and ideas for future curatorial or commissioning endeavours. Each iteration of the biennale yielded specific memories. Works blur when over eighty national pavilions and the Arsenale-sited, increasingly monumental, single artistic vision exhibition compete for viewers’ attention.

However, certain high-impact artworks, maybe a handful out of hundreds and perhaps thousands, stay in the mind. They settle in and, given a particular impetus or trigger, resurface and become part of something new and different.

So it was with Chien-Chi Chang’s The Chain, which my husband, Brian, and I contemplated with awe almost thirteen years ago in one of the Venice Biennale’s Palazzi,1 co-opted over many years by Taiwan as the nation’s showcase for contemporary art. Chien-Chi Chang happened to be in the pavilion when we arrived and a brief conversation took place.

The powerful, near life-size images in The Chain became etched in my mind. Chained together in pairs, mentally impaired inmates of a so-called (Buddhist) sanctuary (which, in reality, operates commercially as a huge chicken farm manned by unpaid workers) face the viewer. Dressed in the poorest of illfitting garments, bent over or proudly upright, these members of a usually unseen community symbolise the human condition at its most elemental. Life is suffering.

Suffering is life. We are chained to one another and to our mortal selves until death separates us permanently. My reading, perhaps? Then again, a positive interpretation of these glowing-in–the-gloom images would be hard to imagine.

The years rolled by, during which many other visual experiences laid themselves over the artist’s work and my memory of The Chain receded.

Later, and during the course of multiple viewing experiences in the museums and galleries of the world, in catalogues and art magazines and via internet explorations, professional recommendations and the international art exhibitions that now flourish in what were once considered marginal contemporary art centres – Gwangju, Guangzhou, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Taipei – I encountered the work of another increasingly admired Taiwanese artist.

13

1.

Venice’s Giardini precinct reached its capacity of thirty pavilions long ago. Each year, however, the number of countries participating in the Venice Biennale increases. The dozens of additional countries, including Taiwan, rent venues across the city.

Taiwan, once a western world factory for the production of parts relating to new technologies, had gradually been ceding its place to China, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and other countries, where lower costs guaranteed higher corporate profits. This artist’s filmic work capturing women in their former workplaces – now abandoned factories – made a huge impact on me. High quality artistic direction coupled with images of once-productive, now-marginalised, groups compelled me to contemplate other worlds and to imagine other experiences. Of course, we see these types of images and hear and read about these stories daily in the media. However, in the hands of an accomplished artist, they tend to resonate differently. At least for me they do, and I know I am not alone.

Mistakenly, I imagined I was seeing work by the artist who created The Chain, which so moved me at the 2001 Venice Biennale.

My good friend, Rudy Tseng – art collector, fellow Tate Asian Art Acquisition Committee member, accomplished curator – explained my error.

I had, in fact, been in awe of the work of two different artists, Chien-Chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen: almost identical in age, both born in Taiwan and both concerned with sociocultural issues relating to marginalised communities.

Chang had left Taiwan for the United States after undergraduate studies; Chen had remained. Chang had worked as a photojournalist and earned an invitation to join the exclusive and highly prestigious Magnum Photos cooperative, for which selection is governed by peer recommendation and endorsement.

Chen’s professional journey took longer to mature. His shy temperament, deeply internalised passions and modest command of English curtailed perhaps the early development of his international profile. Finally, his distinct talent, integrity and deeply felt compassion won the support of curators and museum directors worldwide. His reputation is solid and his work continues to grow in stature and gravitas.

As discussed earlier, errors can, and often do, enhance our thought processes. I took the opportunity offered by my mistake to invite both artists to the SCAF table.

Chen Chieh-jen has been commissioned by the Foundation to produce a new work – a series of fruit vendor-style wagons made out of battered, pre-used wood embedded with video artworks. In the videos, four women from a former leper colony relate their experiences of home in these tight, roughly created, environments.

Another element of the work is a series of interviews with marginalised women, visitors to The Wayside Chapel in Potts Point, Sydney, who share their personal experiences on the theme of ‘home’. These audio components are also presented in small wooden wagons, with audiences seated or forced to lie down. Four distinct vignettes come aurally alive in the small spaces. The same stories, re-envisaged by the artist, are presented by SCAF in thirty-minute segments and screened in clusters from July through to the end of the exhibition.

Chien-Chi Chang’s The Chain will be presented in its entirety (forty-five images) at our much-loved partnering institution, the beautifully appointed National Art School (NAS) Gallery. NAS Gallery’s recently arrived and hugely experienced Director, Michael Snelling, immediately embraced the two-site HOME concept and endorsed our preferred distribution of work. Judith Blackall, long-serving Head of Artistic Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and now NAS Acting Curator and Gallery Manager, took up the reigns from Katie Dyer and developed our partnership with great enthusiasm.

Chien-Chi Chang has also produced a new work for the show, Side Chain, through which his connections with the Lung Fa Tang Temple and its

14

inmates are explored more widely. This will be presented alongside China Town, which brings our attention to the plight of illegal Chinese immigrants to New York whose living conditions and decades-long exile make us shudder in shame at the comfortable lives we enjoy. HOME is clearly not an easy exhibition. The issues are uncomfortable, the images are unsettling, the people represented share our humanity but not our good fortune.

Deborah Levy, whose brilliant novel, Swimming Home, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker prize, has written a poignant and apt short story commissioned specially for this HOME catalogue. Thank you, Deborah, for rising to the occasion and for fulfilling my wish to mirror another short story/art catalogue collaboration: JM Coetzee’s masterful, disturbing fictional piece, ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, which was an integral component of the catalogue for Berlinde De Bruyckere’s majestic work, Kreupelhout – Cripplewood, in the Belgian Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Thank you also to Sophie McIntyre for her thoughtful, exceptional essay on the Taiwanese contemporary art scene, which is impeccably contextualised within the turbulent history of this nation within a nation. Catalogue readers will be grateful to Sophie for the clarity with which she approaches her long-researched subject.

Sincere thanks to Natalie Seiz for her engaging interview with Chien-Chi Chang, which explores the artist’s methodology and his personal response to the lives of his subjects.

Thank you, as always, to the inimitable Sam Meers and the Nelson Meers Foundation. Their continuing and hugely appreciated support allows us to offer interpretive, fun, educational and social activities (culinary experiences, panel discussions, book launches and children’s workshops) that expand our understanding of the artists’ work and the issues they raise and explore.

Finally, and most importantly, grateful and heartfelt thanks to Brian Sherman – my husband, lover, and partner of over forty-five years – without whom SCAF and the work we do for art, artists, culture and the community would not be remotely possible.

15

Shock and Awe and Rice Deborah Levy

A short story commissioned

by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

❧ I had been thinking about the difficulties of returning home.

I was thinking about it that night in the destroyed city of B, July 2004, while I watched the palm trees shaking against waves of smoke in the sky. I was sitting on the roof terrace of the hotel on a broken yellow recliner positioned on the edge of the empty L-shaped swimming pool. The pool had been drained ever since I arrived with my film crew.

Two men sat with me. An American oil consultant and a Spanish doctor who was drinking a strange green liquid from a long glass. I had met the doctor briefly the week before but could not remember his name. Spectacled and grave, about my age, forty-four, he told me he spent his day stitching up the limbs of children who had been injured in the bombings.

I told him I was a journalist, a war correspondent for a British news channel. The oil consultant wanted to talk to me about the pool in the garden of his Connecticut home. It was a nightmare, he said.

What was a nightmare?

Maintenance. The chemical balance of the water. The water had to be pumped in a continual cycle through the filtering and chemical treatment systems and then back in the pool again.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s a lot of trouble. I don’t really use it myself but my children like it. I’m not even sure it adds value to my property.’ After a while he shook my hot damp hand and said what a pleasure it was to talk to an attractive woman – he was surrounded by men all day and now he must go and find his bodyguard who was taking him off to meet an engineer from Texas.

The consultant, short of breath and sweating, wished me a safe journey. I had told him I was returning with my film crew to Manchester in the morning. The last thing I noticed about him were the thick woollen socks he wore in the 43-degrees-Celsius heat and the shine on his polished black shoes as he made his way down the marble stairs.

The Spanish doctor sat on a straw chair sipping his green drink, staring at the empty pool. It was dusk, a sickle moon just visible under the smoke from buildings that had been smouldering for days. Below the hotel, troops were cutting down palm trees and laying them side by side until they began to resemble a mass grave.

I asked him what he was drinking.

19

‘Licor de Hierbas.’ He had brought with him to the city of B, a bottle of herb liquor from Galicia, which he diluted with the bottle of water he kept in his briefcase. He said it kept him going. It was made from aniseed, chamomile, rosemary, liquorice, a recipe from the European monasteries where the monks made herbal remedies for various mild ailments.

It cooled him down, numbed him after a day working at the hospital.

He leaned forward and asked if I’d mind him saying something he’d noticed about me.

I was surprised to be asked this question and even more startled by what he said next.

‘It looks to me like you’ve got typhoid fever.’

It was true that I was feverish and had a rash on my throat, which at first I had thought was sunburn. I told him how that afternoon I had filmed three soldiers poking holes with their rifles through an elderly woman’s last sack of rice. She was poor and harassed but she was calm, looking up at the sky, then at the sandals on her feet, silent and still, waiting, breathing, waiting some more. The soldiers said they were looking for hidden weapons. They did not find what they were looking for and rice poured through the holes into a puddle of sewage by the woman’s feet. After they had gone, she pointed to my head and said something I didn’t understand. When I put my hands up to my hair I remembered I had tied it back that morning with a yellow clip in the shape of a rose. I had bought it in a cheap chain store in Manchester and somehow it had travelled with me to the city of B, its cotton petals sprinkled with glitter that was supposed to represent dew.

I thought she wanted it so I offered it to her. She shook her head and then she grabbed my hand and guided it to my face.

There was blood on my fingers. At first I thought it was her blood but then I realised my nose was bleeding. She was searching for something in the pocket of her black dress and when she found it, I saw she was holding a white linen handkerchief. It was washed and ironed, perhaps even starched, the linen folded four times to make a neat square. She gestured to me to place it against my nose. The crew were waiting for me in the car, thirsty in the afternoon heat, shouting at me to hurry. I could not bring myself to take that precious square of linen from the woman, the cloth she had washed and rinsed and washed again and placed on a rock in the sun to dry and then ironed and folded and folded again. I could not take it. So I just stood there in my flak jacket, waving away the flies with my right hand, the rose hair clip clenched in the fist of my left hand. Somewhere nearby I could hear the cries of desert birds and then a goat bleating, the birds and the goat speaking to each other, perhaps a conversation about war, its fumes and toxic smoke and the way the wind blows – and then I felt a blast of wind and the whip of hot sand blowing against my cheeks.

Everything had slowed down, as if the world was unravelling like a ball of yarn, the same yarn that had made that white linen handkerchief, which I could now feel on my face, cool and rough. The woman was holding the cloth against my nose, her brown fingers pinching, trying to stop the flow of blood as my bewildered crew tapped the windows of the car, calling my name.

20

Under the desert sky that afternoon, my name meant nothing to me. Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing.

After a while I knelt down in the sewage to gather what remained of the rice and returned it to the woman. She did not thank me. Instead she took the rose clip from my hand and pinned it back in my hair.

The Spanish doctor told me that a nose bleed in the present conditions could be another symptom of typhoid fever. Above us helicopters circled the orange sky. We could both feel the vibration of the engines shuddering inside us. We were standing now, looking down from the roof terrace onto the street where the owner of a café that had been bombed earlier was sweeping up a pile of cracked crockery and light fittings with a big old broom. The doctor was saying something but the helicopters kept drowning out his words. I heard him in fragments under the drone of the war machines.

‘We can’t cope with the flow of the wounded. Some days superficial shrapnel wounds. Other days very serious. Incredible numbers of children.

Many of them three years of age losing legs and arms. It really is very difficult to believe this is happening.’

I walked towards the drained swimming pool and crouched on the edge. The Spanish doctor followed me and somehow his fingers touched my hair. At the same time, the yellow rose hair clip sprang open and we watched it fall into the grey ash that now filled the pool. He asked if I wanted him to climb into the pool and return it to me. No. That rose had humiliated me all day long.

Journalists in a war zone do not wear flowers in their hair.

He passed me his bottle of water and explained they were chronically short of medicines, his priority was the children, he could not give me the antibiotics he kept in his briefcase. And then he sat down on the edge of the pool and told me about a four-year-old boy at the hospital who fed his pet parrot with Pepsi from a little glass dropper. The parrot slept in a cage by his bed and when he woke up in the night, he reached out his hand to touch its green feathers. The doctor had found a green feather, the same colour as his herb liquor from Galicia, inside the child’s hand when he finally fell asleep. It was something to remember, he said, the need to be attached to the life of another being, the pleasure in texture and colour whatever the circumstances, the ability to communicate without words, to find a point of recognition, yes, the boy wanted the comfort of connection more than he wanted anything else. Certainly more than he wanted war or oil or to live in a mansion and even more than he wanted chocolate ice-cream. When he had stitched up the child’s forehead he found a little pile of seeds and nuts under his pillow to feed the parrot. It was a hopeful sign, the Spanish doctor said, for an injured child to want to take care of something else, someone else, to be thinking ahead, to put himself into the future when the lights of the present had all gone out – literally; the electricity was down and the doctors often worked in the dark.

His right hand seemed to be stroking my wrist while he spoke. He said I needed to cool down and he thought the water in the hotel, which had been switched off most of the afternoon, was back on again for a couple of hours.

When I did not reply he asked if I would like him to wash my hair.

21

I don’t think a man has ever offered to wash my hair. It occurred to me that perhaps he just wanted to do something ordinary.

The water trickling out of the shower was brown. After he rinsed my hair the basin was covered in sand and rice grains and small black flies. He turned off the shower and threw me a towel.

‘You know what I think?’

I did not know.

‘That hair clip … how strange to arrive with a fake rose in a country that has so many fresh flowers. I think you put that flower in your hair because you wanted me to notice you.’

That rose was my humiliation but it was also my messenger.

He told me he was doing the night shift at the hospital. He would have to go now, but all the same, I should know that he wanted me to notice him too. He insisted I see a doctor as soon as I returned to Manchester. He laughed because he was a doctor but we both understood that in a war I was not his priority. That is what my former husband had said to me: ‘I know I am not your priority, your attention is elsewhere.’

I did not need to be the Spanish doctor’s priority but I had noticed him and he had noticed me. He wrote his email address on a scrap of paper and placed the bottle of Hierbas on top of it. I asked him where he lived in Spain. He said he lived in his email inbox because his job meant he was always travelling.

Home was the box into which his electronic mail was delivered and I must be sure to remember that his name was case sensitive.

The next morning when I was checking the equipment with the crew, I learned from the American oil consultant that the children’s hospital had been bombed at 4 am. He said it was a mistake and then he said something about precision bombing, how it shouldn’t have happened. But it did happen. There was so much that shouldn’t have happened, yet it happened, and then it happened again. The hospital was now a hole in the ground. So many holes in the city of B. How would history write up these holes? The holes that were visible – the hospital, the university – small holes like the graves of children, even smaller holes like those in the sack of rice, and the holes that were invisible, inside every citizen, every soldier, inside me.

The cameras were now packed and our driver was waiting to take us to the airport. I was thinking again about the difficulties of returning home.

Departure is always easier than return. So much can happen between departing and returning, it is possible to become another sort of person in the gap between. It is hard to push time backwards and find the person we used to be. My children would sit on my lap and I would feel the shock and awe of my love for them as they speak to me of another sort of life. They would say, ‘we passed our swimming test, we have a new science teacher, the cat’s ear was bitten by another cat, the dentist told me I need braces, we had roast chicken for supper, my feet have grown and now my shoes are too small, we went rowing on the lake, I’ve got three books from the library, I need a faster computer, Gran helped take a splinter out of my thumb, Dad took us to see a film about two astronauts floating in space, I can’t find my coat, there’s a spider behind the taps in the bathroom.’ These kinds of things are what life is like without too

22

many holes in it. But I must speak to my children too. Shall I describe the boy in the hospital who fed his parrot from a glass dropper filled with Pepsi? They will ask me the name of the parrot and how old was the boy and why was he in hospital and did he get better? Where will my story start and where will it end?

I can tell them about the kindness of the old woman who gave me her linen handkerchief, but can I tell them how the soldiers looked at her? As if she was not there, as if she was already dead, as if she was worthless.

Can I tell them that the contaminated water in the city of B might have made me sick and shall I give them a little information about the Spanish doctor who lived in his email box? Will I show them the bottle of emerald green Hierbas from Galicia? I have tried to contact him and I have made sure that his name is case sensitive, but so far he is not at home. ❧

23

結束

A Question of Place: A View from the Margins Sophie McIntyre Curator and Visiting Research Fellow Research School of Humanities & the Arts Australian National University

With the rise and spread of globalisation, the meaning of home (jia 家) (defined in English as ‘our native land’, and in Chinese as ‘family’ or ‘household’) has become increasingly blurred. Global mobility and advanced digital technologies have radically altered fixed notions of identity, community and place that have traditionally defined our sense of home. Images and narratives of travel, migration, the diaspora and dislocation permeate the global media, and have become part of our everyday lives and consciousness. In Australia, as in other parts of the world, the refugee crisis dominates the media as politicians endeavour to ‘turn back the boats’ and detain those seeking refuge. What does home mean for these people who do not have a country they can call home, or a place to which they can return?

In Taiwan, once described as the ‘Orphan of Asia’,1 the term home opens up a Pandora’s box of complex issues relating to Taiwan’s history, identity and national status. As a postcolonial non-nation nation-state, the quest for identity and international recognition is among the most important and widely debated issues in Taiwan. With China’s increasing economic power, and the strengthening of crossstrait relations, the very idea of home stirs up nationalist sentiment among many of those Taiwanese who fiercely defend Taiwan’s de facto independent status and their democratic rights. As politically and socially engaged artists, Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁) and Chien-Chi Chang (張乾琦) delve into these identity issues on a deeply personal level, exploring ideas of home in relation to the human condition. Their work transcends national boundaries but is better understood within the context of Taiwan’s historical trajectory, which also sheds light on the complexity of issues relating to the idea of home in Taiwan.

For centuries, Taiwan has served as a strategic landing, trading and military base for successive western powers, including the Portuguese (who named the island Ilha Formosa or ‘Beautiful Island’), the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as the Americans during the Cold War. The island has also been colonised by the Japanese, who ruled for fifty years, from 1895 until 1945, when Chiang Kaishek and the Chinese Nationalists (known as the Kuomintang or KMT) retreated to Taiwan after their defeat by the Chinese Communists in the civil war. During the first decades of Nationalist rule, the government implemented a programme of indoctrination and authoritarian control, and in 1949 martial law was introduced.

The thirty-eight years that followed are described as the ‘White Terror’ period; antiCommunist propaganda was widely propagated by the government and political opposition and freedom of speech were suppressed and controlled. Taiwan’s local inhabitants, comprising aboriginal people and Han Chinese/Taiwanese (that is, those who migrated from southern China to Taiwan prior to 1895) who had lived through the period of Japanese occupation and learnt Japanese language and customs, were expected to re-adapt and conform to the policies and regulations imposed upon them by their new rulers. Against this historical background, it is not surprising that for these Taiwanese, and their descendants who were born and

27

1.

This term is based on a book of the same name written by Wu Chou-liu (also referred to as Wu Zhuoliu) who discusses Taiwan’s complex identity in relation to Japanese colonisation and the Nationalist takeover. Published between 1943 and 1945, it was originally written in Japanese and translated into Chinese in 1962.

2.

Chen Chieh-jen, interview with the author, Taipei, Taiwan, 1998.

raised in Taiwan, the term home can engender a range of complex and conflicting emotions, from belonging to marginalisation and dispossession. However, for the Chinese Nationalists who came to Taiwan after 1945 as political refugees, the island was initially regarded as a temporary base. It was assumed they would re-take China, which many regarded as their home, although most never returned.

When Taiwan (Republic of China) lost its United Nations seat to China (People’s Republic of China) in 1971, there was a paradigmatic shift in the consciousness of the Taiwanese people, from China-centred to Taiwan-centred.

Although the Chinese Nationalist party in Taiwan maintained its claim as the representative government of China, there was a growing awareness in Taiwan that its destiny and identity were no longer defined by China. There emerged a strong sense of national consciousness and pride, exemplified by the Native Soil or Homeland (xiangtu 鄉土) movement in which writers and artists turned their attention to the realities of Taiwan and its environment. During this decade, Taiwan underwent a period of rapid economic modernisation and political and cultural liberalisation, which laid the foundations for democratisation and the lifting of martial law in 1987.

Born in Taiwan during the 1960s, Chen Chieh-jen and Chien-Chi Chang have both lived through Taiwan’s dramatic transformation from a Chinese authoritarian party-state into a democratic society. Their work bears witness to these changes by responding in meaningful and often oblique ways to Taiwan’s history of colonisation, martial law, and geopolitical marginalisation, as well as to the socioeconomic effects of globalisation. The artists explore these issues from a local and global perspective by focusing on individuals, such as factory and migrant workers, the unemployed, and sufferers of mental illness who have experienced the effects of political repression, as well as on economic and social inequality and marginalisation.

For Chen and Chang’s generation the concept of home is generally associated with freedom, equality and human rights and both artists have critically and consistently engaged with these key themes in their artwork over the past decade. Although their artistic approaches differ, the artists share an interest in the human condition, which they explore in relation to society and the institutional mechanisms that govern and regulate our lives. Their work is at times confronting, but they are not, as some critics have suggested, voyeuristic or sensationalist representations of the underprivileged.

Rather, they are highly expressive, insightful and compassionate images that reveal the harsh realities that some people face in society.

When I first met Chen Chieh-jen in Taipei in 1995, he was living in poverty and obscurity, having withdrawn from society and from the public art field for eight years. Prior to this time, during the early 1980s, Chen had participated in several collaborative guerrilla-style happenings performed in alternative, marginal and forbidden spaces, including derelict buildings, military barracks, and on the streets. Inspired by the rise of democratisation and the growth of social movements in Taiwan, Chen sought to challenge the official limits of expression and began to explore the possibilities of performance as a vehicle for political activism. One of the earliest and most well-known of these performances was Malfunction I, II & III, in which Chen and five artist-friends staggered in a line through the streets in Taipei’s crowded Ximen district, with their heads bowed and covered in executioner-style cloaks. This impromptu happening, which lasted twenty minutes, took place in May 1983, four years prior to the lifting of martial law and when public demonstrations were still illegal. At the time of this performance, the government had temporarily lifted restrictions on street gatherings and freedom of speech during an election campaign. The artists nevertheless remained cautious and ensured their identities were concealed. Recalling the effects of martial law, the artist explained that ‘what we protested against [in this performance] was not aimed at a political authority, but at our very selves and our oppressive existence’.2

28

In 1988, a year after the lifting of martial law, Chen began researching his family history as well as aspects of Taiwan’s history that had been censored, suppressed or forgotten during the martial law era. In the late 1990s, he produced the series Revolt in the Soul and Body, 1900–1999, which marked a critical turning point in Chen’s career, catapulting this relatively unknown artist onto the international stage.3 In this series, which comprises large black-and-white digital photographs, the artist seeks to question and destabilise our understanding of history, authenticity and truth. Drawing from a vast archive of pirated historical photographs portraying scenes of civil war and colonial domination in China and Taiwan, Chen digitally inserts and superimposes his own image over selected figures that originally appeared in these photographs. In doing so, he questions and subverts the concept of the ‘original’ and rewrites history, blurring distinctions between fact and fiction. Power, pain and suffering are central themes in these works, which explore Buddhist and Daoist notions of hell and purgatory, and draw attention to the role of the state and the media in shaping our views of history and reality.

Chen endeavours to develop an alternative account of Taiwan’s historical grand narrative and in more recent works he explores Taiwan’s history from a global perspective. In the early 2000s he began producing a series of films examining the effects of post-Cold War politics and economic globalisation on people’s daily lives, and the institutional mechanisms that monitor and control our freedom and movement. In Factory, 2003, for example, Chen focuses on a group of unemployed women in Taiwan who silently re-enact the menial tasks they had once carried out in a garment factory where they had worked for twenty years or more, before the factory closed down and relocated to China. Interspersing archival footage with new material, Chen seeks to capture the passage of time and highlight the impact of economic globalisation on ordinary people’s lives. Although the film is set in Taiwan, it has international significance as manufacturing industries in many countries, including Australia, are moving offshore to China and to developing countries where labour and production costs are cheaper.

Empire’s Borders I, 2008, explores issues of mobility and migration, and how international and bureaucratic power structures actively marginalise certain individuals in the global community. Specifically, it takes aim at the border policies implemented by the American Institute in Taiwan and Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency. This two-part film recounts the stories of women from Taiwan and China who were denied non-immigrant visas to the United States by the American Institute in Taiwan, or who were discriminated against by the National Immigration Agency. The first part of the film was inspired by Chen’s own encounter with the American Institute in Taiwan, which rejected his application for a shortterm visa to the United States because it was alleged that the artist was seeking to immigrate illegally to America. Chen subsequently established a blog, entitled ‘The Illegal Immigrant’ (http://ccjonstrike.blogspot.com), which attracted numerous responses from people in Taiwan who had had similar experiences of exclusion and shared his frustration and humiliation. The film exemplifies the ways in which the artist subtly but powerfully relates his own experience of living in a geopolitically marginalised nation-state to broader issues concerning Taiwan’s history and its relations with America and China. It highlights the complex issues underpinning the concept of home on both a national and international level.

Photographer Chien-Chi Chang also engages with the idea of home, which he explores in a global context and from the perspective of the outsider.

Unlike Chen Chieh-jen who has travelled widely but resides in Taiwan, Chien-Chi Chang left Taiwan semi-permanently in 1990 to complete a Master’s degree in the United States. After graduating he became a professional photographer, working for several newspapers in America, and he subsequently carried out photographic

29

3.

Several images from Chen’s series featured in the exhibition Face to Face: Contemporary Art from Taiwan, a collaboration between Gold Coast City Art Gallery with the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which toured Australia in 1999 and was curated by the author.

4.

In addition to the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial, The Chain has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe. It also toured to New Zealand where it featured in the 2005 exhibition Still Present: Exploring Psychiatric Institutions in Photography, which was curated by the author. This is the first time this series has been shown in Australia, and in its entirety.

assignments for international magazines, including Time and National Geographic.

In the mid-1990s, Chang was invited to become a member of the highly prestigious Magnum Photos photographic cooperative, ranking him among the top professional photographers in the world.

Perhaps because of his background in photojournalism, some commentators have described Chang’s artwork as social documentary, but this is misleading as it belies the artist’s intent and the significant amount of time he invests in each photographic series. Chang has been creating art since the early 1990s. His photographs resonate on a deep emotional and spiritual level and demonstrate the conviction of an artist who strives to reveal the complex nature of the human psyche. The artistic merit of his work has been widely acknowledged by the international art community. His series The Chain, 1993–2000, has featured in two of the world’s major art expositions, the 2001 Venice Biennale and the 2002 São Paulo Biennial, where the series was critically acclaimed.

Chang’s photographs reflect with profound insight upon the human condition, and on the economic, social and personal ties that connect and bind us to a particular place and community. Given his own experience as a Taiwanese immigrant living in the United States and now Austria, it is not surprising that many of his works explore themes relating to home, migration and exile. These themes are examined from the viewpoint of migrant workers and migrant brides who, for mainly economic reasons, have left their countries and families in search of a better livelihood. The series China Town, which evolved over a period of almost twenty years (1992–2011), captures the sense of dislocation experienced by Chinese migrant workers living in New York’s Chinatown. This two-part photographic series, which is filmed in black and white as well as colour, reveals the harsh realities experienced by migrants working in menial jobs to provide for their families in China. Their sense of dislocation is accentuated in the second part of the series, which is filmed in China, in colour, and focuses on these migrant workers’ wives and children who appear to live in relative comfort.

In Double Happiness, 2003–05, Chang explores the migrant experience from a different angle. He examines the marriage industry within a socioeconomic and cross-cultural context. Specifically, he focuses on a Hanoibased marriage brokering business that matches relatively wealthy Taiwanese men with women from Vietnam’s poorer rural regions. In this series Chang visually chronicles each stage of this process, from the arrival of these hopeful men (some of whom are accompanied by their mothers) through to the wedding day. Chang sensitively captures the anxiety, curiosity, fear, disappointment and resignation experienced by both the groom and the bride, the latter of whom generally has to leave Vietnam to live with her husband and his family in Taiwan.

The Chain was one of the first photographic series Chang produced and it is arguably his most well known.4 The series comprises a sequence of forty-five black-and-white life-sized portraits of men and women at Lung Fa Tang Temple in the southern city of Kaohsiung in Taiwan. Between 1993 and 1999, Chang visited this temple, which operates as both a psychiatric institution housing some 700 patients and a working chicken farm. Many of its patients have been diagnosed as mentally ill, while others have suffered from drug abuse. In a country that is generally reliant on the family unit to provide social welfare support, Lung Fa Tang is a refuge for the mentally ill whose families are either unable or unwilling to offer assistance. In these images, the patients are depicted with shaved heads and bound together by steel chains around their waists. Rather than offering their patients medicine or other forms of treatment, the caretakers prefer to use chains to attach a more ‘stable’ patient to a ‘less stable’ patient so that they effectively become co-dependent. Naturally, this unorthodox practice raises some serious ethical

30

questions. Chang sensitively captures the empathy and tenderness revealed in the patients’ demented and half-dazed facial expressions, and in their gestures towards the other. According to Buddhist belief, the chain is metaphorically associated with worldly desire and it is integral to the concept of karma and rebirth and, within this context, could be considered to have transformative qualities.

Chen Chieh-jen and Chien-Chi Chang’s artworks may confront, challenge and even offend some viewers. They take us out of our comfort zones, leading us to places and into spaces that we might not usually enter, and which we would not typically associate with the concept of home, at least in a domestic context. For these two artists, who have witnessed the effects of martial law and censorship, as well as the international de-recognition of Taiwan, home is analogous to individual freedom and national self-determination. It is about living in a democratic society in which people have free will and the ability to make choices and act as autonomous agents. By focusing on individuals whose freedom has been compromised, and whose bonds to society, community and family have been threatened or severed, these artists raise important ethical issues that concern all of us living in this global community.

31

An Interview with Chien-Chi Chang Natalie Seiz Assistant Curator, Asian Art Art Gallery of New South Wales

Natalie Seiz: I would first like to get an idea of how you became interested in photography. Taiwan has a rich history of photography, particularly from the 1950s and 1960s, when Cheng Sang-hsi and Chang Chao-Tang photographed images of life in Taiwan.

Much of their work recorded everyday life in Taiwan after the war.

Later, in the early 1970s, Taiwanese photography was very much associated with the xiangtu (nativist) movement of the time. Were you influenced by these early Taiwanese photographers, or were you more influenced by your practical photojournalistic experience while you were working for a number of newspapers abroad?

Chien-Chi Chang: I am not familiar with the photography landscape in Taiwan – hard to believe but true. Much of my photographic training and education started when I was attending Indiana University (Bloomington), during which time I had three part-time photography jobs. At some point, it became clear that photography was all I wanted to pursue in my life and, indeed, that was the only thing I did at the university. Later, a series of opportunities opened up at The Seattle Times, National Geographic and Magnum Photos; I stepped in, moved forward, and never looked back.

If your photographic training started in the United States, who were your major influences? What were you reading and which photographers were you following?

My major influences were, and still are, filmakers Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky.

I seldom read about photography. I read the I Ching (Book of Changes) and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Your earlier works, such as the photographs of Chinese immigrants in New York in 1998, express an interest in the lives of people in more uncomfortable circumstances than your own. Do you feel you always took these photographs from an objective perspective, or was there a sense that you also had something to say about your own immigration circumstances and your efforts to come to grips with living in a new country?

I do not believe a photographer can compose, focus and push the shutter objectively. Every step of taking/making a photograph is a subjective decision. For New York’s China Town project, the first picture was made in 1992 and it is still a work in progress after twenty-two years. When I was living with the men in 1998 and 1999, we shared two showers, four toilets and three sinks in a cockroachinfested tenement building subdivided into thirty-two cubicles containing some ninety men from the same village in Fujian, a province in China. I ate with them and slept on their floor. I helped them with telephone calls and completing forms in English, and gradually they allowed me to photograph them. To date, I am still

32

33

This edited interview with Chien-Chi Chang was conducted through email exchanges in March/April 2014.

documenting twenty-one divided families in New York and in Fujian. I feel the compelling quality of this project is its universality. It is about the essential human need to hold hope in your hands and about having the willingness to sacrifice your own immediate happiness to realise the dream of giving children a ‘better’ life.

Meanwhile, these couples live double lives: married/single, Chinese/American, legal/illegal. Together, yet apart.

The investigation of the ties that bind one person to another also draws on my own deeply divided immigrant experience, first in the United States and later in Austria. But deep down, I am a stranger and outsider anywhere and everywhere I go. In addition to trips to foreign states, being in foreign states of mind, at distances exhausting to access and more properly gauged in emotion than in miles, is something I will have to confront for as long as I live.

Your series Double Happiness, 2003–05, dealt with Vietnamese brides marrying Taiwanese men. A Taiwanese woman photographer, Lulu Shur-Tzy Hou, also photographed Vietnamese brides, but in Taiwan.

Her method was to interview her subjects, get to know them on a personal level and transcribe the interview onto the photograph itself. Do you advocate getting to know the subjects you photograph on an intimate level, or is there a conscious decision to not know your subjects and to approach them in a more objective manner?

I was in Ho Chi Minh City eight times while working on Double Happiness (between 2003 and 2009), first as a photography project, later as a video project.

Among the grooms and brides I have photographed, I have continued to document five families via both still and moving images. This autumn, I will return to Ho Chi Minh City for another Double Happiness video project. I feel I know the people I photograph, interview and film as much as they know me after all these years. I can pick up the phone and call them and vice versa. On the photographic practice side, what I have learned is that in the whole spectrum of photography, the definition of ‘documentary photography’ is ever-expanding and encompassing.

What took you to Vietnam to begin the Double Happiness project?

Could you explain more about what the work is about, where the photographs are situated, and why you have decided to do the series over a number of years?

From my research before I started Double Happiness, I knew this project could eventually be part of a larger project. So I made contacts with marriage brokers and off I went. The challenge was deciding on the methodology. As for why it took me a number of years, it’s simply because when I laid down all the photographs on the floor, it was incomplete.

Particularly interesting are the photographs you take of couples from what looks to be the point of view of the visa officer on the other side of the window. Could you talk about how you photographed your subjects in this series?

With permission from the Taiwanese quasi-consulate in Ho Chi Minh City (the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office), I was able to make photographs from inside, which was the most straightforward vantage point to see the couples who had probably only met two days before attending the visa office.

Could you tell me more about the photographic work The Chain?

The Dostoyevsky quote (from A Writer’s Diary) you use at the beginning of your book of the work is, I think, quite apt:

34

It is not by confining one’s neighbour that one is convinced of one’s own sanity.

Photographed at the Lung Fa Tang Temple in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, the patients/inmates are chained to each other in pairs. Their shaven heads, unkempt uniforms and the expressions on their faces divulge lives that are more complex than we can imagine. The asylum is also the biggest egg producing farm in Taiwan. What compelled you to go there and photograph the patients? What did you discover about the reasons for the chains? And how did you come to photograph the patients in such a way?

Between 1993 and 1999 I visited Lung Fa Tang Temple at least ten times; each visit was for three days to a week. Initially, I took a more in-depth journalistic approach.

Many rooms in the temple compound and on the chicken farm, however, were carefully hidden and impossible to visit. Every step I took, every direction I turned, I was always accompanied by minders; a few times I even rode in the temple’s BMW 5 Series vehicle! The so-called classic documentary method would not have worked. So I asked for permission to make the most straightforward portraits and the temple administrators agreed. (The temple has the guardianship of every mentally troubled patient there, which means it has about 700 votes when it comes to elections. This, in part, explains the political clout it has had over the years.) All in all, I probably knew too much about what goes on inside and, after the publication and the exhibition of The Chain at Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2001 – where ‘the supposedly sane viewers look at supposedly insane subjects’ – I was forbidden to enter Lung Fa Tang Temple again.

The Chain is undeniably a forceful piece of photography that in many ways makes the viewer uncomfortable. It is a mix of coming to an awareness while at the same time being shocked by that very awareness. How did you feel about the work itself after you did it?

How were the images received when first shown in Taiwan?

The portraits could not be simpler or more direct, but the subjects are not. The Taipei exhibition raised thorny questions about what society is able to cope with. The lifesized portraits, hung two feet above the ground, are so large that they dominate and insist that the spectators and the subjects confront one another.

Why did you choose to explore Lung Fa Tang Temple in the first place?

To see is not necessarily to believe, but everything I had heard back then about Lung Fa Tang made me want to see it with my own eyes. What I learned about the temple and managed to photograph or film is all in the video Side Chain, 1993–2014, commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

What led you to start doing film work?

Both photography and film function in a confined realm of storytelling and communication. I care for still images that are ‘moving’, and moving images that are truly moving, and they meet within a soundscape.

As a photojournalist, what sort of message did you think your images would convey to an international audience?

I think the term ‘photojournalist’ is misleading. I am more of a personal/social storyteller, first with a camera, later with an audio recorder and a video camera.

The Chain is pretty much a central metaphor in all of my projects. In addition to the

35

visible chain of connecting the patients, we all have some sort of invisible chains: worldly desire, a relationship, a social obligation and so on.

Do you also see The Chain as a piece of art? Is each work an emotive portrait of individual characters who live in the asylum, or is the work more about exposing a certain type of mental health practice that may be occurring in Taiwan?

Art or not, it’s not for me to judge. All I know is the work is evocative and emotive and can stand the test of time. Many years from now, we may wonder who has the right mind to decide whether others are out of their minds. Who is more sane, those inside or those outside?

The Chain was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001. In the same year it was shown at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. How was it received in Venice?

The response in Venice was mixed. Some viewers asked if it was a performance while others murmured that it must have been in China.

You say that The Chain is a central metaphor in all of your projects.

Could you elaborate a little more on how is it expressed in other works?

I am ‘chained’ to The Chain, visibly and invisibly, literally and metaphorically speaking.

The power relationship between the inmates is also signified by their actual and literal chaining together. They have no way of being freed from another being and are always being controlled or controlling another. Did you ever feel that this could in itself drive the inmates to further psychological detriment?

Who can predict what will happen if you chain a patient with an anxiety disorder to a patient who is agoraphobic? Or a schizophrenic with someone who is bipolar? The combinations are many and the results are beyond prediction. The so-called ‘chain of compassion’ is simply a convenient excuse to control the patients.

Can you tell me more about your association with the Magnum group and how this has changed your photographic practice, if at all?

I was invited to join Magnum and voted in as a full member in 2001. It’s the freedom and the comradeship that I have cherished. Other than that, it has changed little of my photographic practice as most of my projects are self-assigned and selffinanced. By the way, Magnum Photos is an agency that fifty photographers want to leave and another five thousand want to join!

What are some of the current projects that you are working on?

I’m concentrating more on moving images than still images. I have one new book, Jet Lag (to be published by Hatje Cantz in 2015), and three video projects: Double Happiness II and III and On the Road. Aside from that, I stay home with my young children and when they are asleep I edit and mix sound in my studio.

36

Chien-Chi Chang The Chain Side Chain China Town

Chien-Chi Chang The Chain

Chien-Chi Chang The Chain, 1993–99 45 works Silver gelatine photographs 157.8 x 107.3 cm each Images courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery and Magnum Photos

Number 1

41

Number 1

43

Number 2

Number 3

44

45

Number 4

Number 5

46

47

Number 6

Number 7

48

49

Number 9

Number 8

50

51

Number 11

Number 10

52

53

Number 12

Number 13

54

55

Number 14

Number 15

56

57

Number 16

Number 17

58

59

Number 19

Number 18

60

61

Number 20

Number 21

62

63

Number 22

Number 23

64

65

Number 24

Number 25

66

67

Number 26

Number 27

68

69

Number 28

Number 29

70

71

Number 30

Number 31

72

73

Number 32

Number 33

74

75

Number 34

Number 35

76

77

Number 36

Number 37

78

79

Number 38

Number 39

80

81

Number 40

Number 41

82

83

Number 42

Number 43

84

85

Number 44

Number 45

86

87

Chien-Chi Chang Side Chain

Chien-Chi Chang Side Chain, 1993–2014 Digital film stills B/W and colour, sound, duration 6:24 minutes Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2014 Images courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery and Magnum Photos

89

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

Chien-Chi Chang China Town

Chien-Chi Chang China Town, 1992–2011 Digital film stills B/W and colour, sound, duration 19:23 minutes Images courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery and Magnum Photos

An immigrant spends his day off overlooking the Bowery. New York City, 1998.

105

An immigrant spends his day off overlooking the Bowery. New York City, 1998.

107

Immigrants sleep on a fire escape to avoid summer heat. New York City, 1998.

Delivery man with hogs walks through Chinatown. New York City, 1996.

108

109

Taiwanese loyalists celebrate National Day in Chinatown. New York City, 1998.

A martial arts group performing the Lion Dance during Chinese New Year, in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, the third Chinatown in New York City, 1993.

110

111

Jiang J. Family, left, Fuzhou, China, 2004. Jiang J. Family, New York City, 2008. Mr Jiang arrived in New York in 1992 and hasn’t seen his wife, who is still in Fuzhou, for eighteen years.

112

113

Tang Z. Family, left, New York City, 1998. Tang Z. Family, Philadelphia, 2007. Mr Tang arrived in New York in 1997. He was reunited with his family in 2001 and all currently reside in Philadelphia.

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

Chen Chieh-jen Realm of Reverberations

Aerial photo of Losheng Sanatorium before demolition, 2000

131

Aerial photo of Losheng Sanatorium after the construction of the Taipei Metro Xinzhuang Depot, 2011

133

Friend Watan: The Ritual of Film Screening, 2013 GiclĂŠe Print/Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique 85 x 150 cm

135

Chen Chieh-jen Realm of Reverberations

Chen Chieh-jen Realm of Reverberations, 2014 Digital film stills Blu-ray, B/W and colour, sound, four-channel video installation, duration approx. 25:00 minutes Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2014 Images courtesy the artist

Chang Fang-chi

136

137

Chang Fang-chi

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

Chou Fu-tzu

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

Liu Yueh-yin

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

Artist Biographies

Chien-Chi Chang 1961 Born Taichung, Taiwan 1980–84 Bachelor of Arts, English Literature, Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan 1989–90 Master of Education, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, US Lives and works between Taipei, Taiwan and Graz, Austria

Selected solo exhibitions 2014 HOME, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and National Art School Gallery, Sydney, Australia (dual-site exhibition with Chen Chieh-jen) 2011 China Town, Museum der Kulturen, Basel, Switzerland 2008 Doubleness, National Museum of Singapore, Singapore 2006 The Chain, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, US 2004 The Chain, Ffotogallery, Cardiff, UK; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, US 2001 The Chain, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan 1999 The Chain, The Alternative Museum, New York, US

Awards 2011 AnthropoGraphia Visual Story Teller of the Year: Multimedia, Montreal, Canada 2003 Best Use of Photography in a Book (The Chain), POYi (Pictures of the Year International), Columbia, Missouri, US 1999 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Grant in Humanistic Photography, New York, US Visa d’or Feature Award, Visa pour l’image, Perpignan, France 1998 Magazine Photographer of the Year, National Press Photographer’s Association, Durham, North Carolina, US 1998 First Place, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Books 2006 I Grandi Fotografi di Magnum Photos: Chien-Chi Chang, Hachette Livre, Paris, France 2005 Double Happiness, Aperture, New York, US 2002 The Chain, Trolley Books, London, UK 2001 I do I do I do, Premier Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan Magnum In Motion videos inmotion.magnumphotos.com 2011

Selected group exhibitions 2013 Fotofestival Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany Queens International 2013, Queens Museum, New York, US

Bongo Fever Burmese Days China Town

2012 Perspectives 2012, International Center of Photography, New York, US

2009 Escape from North Korea

2009 Making Worlds: 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

2008 Malaria No More

2003 Strangers: The First International Center of Photography Triennial of Photography and Video, International Center of Photography, New York, US

2007 Empty Orchestra

2002 Metropolitan Iconographies: 25th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil 2001 Plateau of Humankind: 49th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

169

Artist Biographies

2011 Chen Chieh-jen, Stiftelsen 3,14, Bergen, Norway

2011 Migrant Workers in Taiwan: Exhibition of Labor, Kaohsiung Museum of Labor, Kaohsiung, Taiwan VIDEONALE: Dialogue in Contemporary Video Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan The Walls that Divide Us, Apexart, New York, US Past Desire, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria Rewriting Worlds: 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, ARTPLAY Design Center, Moscow, Russia The Eye is a Lonely Hunter – Images of Humankind: 4th Fotofestival Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim & Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany Pandemonium – Art in a Time of Creativity Fever: 6th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Göteborg Museum of Art, Göteborg, Sweden Terrible Beauty – Art, Crisis, Change and the Office of Non-compliance: Dublin Contemporary 2011, EarlsfortTerrace, Dublin, Ireland

2010 Empire’s Borders I & II, Long March Space, Beijing, China On the Empire’s Borders: Chen Chieh-jen 1996–2010, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Empire’s Borders II: Chen Chieh-jen, REDCAT, Los Angeles, US

2010 Rehearsal: 8th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai There is Always a Cup of Sea to Sail In: 29th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil The Right to Protest, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel 4th Artes Mundi Prize, National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK

2009 Empire’s Borders I and Military Court and Prison, Main Trend Art Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

2009 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia NS Harsha: Nations & Chen Chieh-jen: Factory, Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London, UK The 21st Century, The Feminine Century, The Century of Diversity and Hope: 2009 Internal Incheon Women Artists’ Biennial, Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, South Korea Foreign Affairs, 53rd Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion, Venice, Italy Hundred Stories about Love, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan A Factory, A Machine, A Body: Archaeology and Memory of Industrial Spaces, Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico Biennale Cuvée 09, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria Vacuumnoise, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, Hungary

Chen Chieh-jen 1960 Born Taoyuan, Taiwan Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan

Selected solo exhibitions 2014 HOME, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and National Art School Gallery, Sydney, Australia (dual-site exhibition with Chien-Chi Chang) 2013 Chen Chieh-jen, Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg

2008 Military Court and Prison: Chen Chieh-jen, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain 2007 Condensation: Five Video Works by Chen Chieh-jen, Asia Society Museum, New York, US 2006 The Route, Main Trend Art Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph, De Hallen Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands 2004 Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph, Claudio Poleschi Arte Contemporanea, Lucca, Italy 2001 Chen Chieh-jen, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France 1998 Revolt in the Soul and Body II, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan 1997 Revolt in the Soul and Body I, Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan Selected group exhibitions 2012 Encounter: The Royal Academy in Asia, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore Border Crossing, Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark Image Anxiety, PHotoEspaña, Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid, Spain Boundaries on the Move: A Cross-culture Dialogue, Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel

170

2008 Prospect.1: New Orleans Biennial, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, US Home: Taiwan Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan Corporeal / Technoreal: Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland Farewell to Post-Colonialism: 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China Memoria: Casting a Gaze, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto (CAMK), Kumamoto, Japan Tiefenrausch (Rapture of the Deep): Stream of Forgotten Memories, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria Crossing Values: Les Ateliers de Rennes – Contemporary Art Biennial, Rennes, France Biennial Cuvée 08, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria Encounter the Landscape – The Individual and His Self-formation in the Social Transformation, Palazzo della Esposizioni, Rome, Italy Under Pain of Death, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, US 2007 Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary – Optimism in the Age of Global War: 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey

Shooting Back, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves, ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany Geopoetics, Subject, Class and Identity, Centro Jose Guerrero, Granada, Spain The Screen Eye or the New Image: 100 Vidéos pour Repenser le Monde, Casino Luxembourg – Forum of Contemporary Art, Luxembourg World Factory: Resistance and Dreams, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, US 2006 Naked Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan Undercurrents 06, Göteborg Museum of Art, Göteborg, Sweden Equal and Less Equal, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel Liverpool Biennial: International 06, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Fever Variations: Gwangju Biennale 2006, Gwangju, South Korea Altered States, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Zones of Contact: 15th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Biennial Cuvée 06, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria 2005 Parallel Realities – Asian Art Now: 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2005, Fukuoka, Japan This Storm is What We Call Progress, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK Variation Xanadu, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan The Agony and the Ecstasy, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, UK The Experience of Art, 51st Venice Biennale Italian Pavilion, Venice, Italy 2004 Do You Believe in Reality? 2004 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Techniques of the Visible: 2004 Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China Work it: SCAPE Biennial, Christchurch, New Zealand Ruins and Civilization, Eslite Vision Art Space, Taipei, Taiwan Histories: Eyelids and Lips: Photo Espaňa 2004, Antigua Fábrica de Tabacos, Madrid, Spain 2003 Shifting Time/Space, Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zürich, Switzerland 2002 Great Theatre of the World: 2002 Taipei Biennial,Taipei Fine Arts Museum,Taipei Translated Acts, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico 2001 Floating Chimeras: Contemporary Asian Art, Edsvik Konst Och Kultur, Sollentuna, Sweden Translated Acts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; Queens Museum of Art, New York, US 2000 Sharing of Exoticisms: 5th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Halle Tony Garnier, Lyon, France Man & Space – Art & Human Rights: Gwangju Biennale 2000, Gwangju, South Korea 1999 International Photography Biennale, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico Close to Open, 48th Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion, Venice, Italy

1998 Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes: 24th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil Site of Desire: 1998 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan 1996 The Quest for Identity-Sexuality and Power: 1996 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Film festivals 2010 Cinema Project: Beyond Borders, Portland International Film Festival, Portland, US 2009 Fight the Power, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain arte.mov, Belo Horizonte, Brazil Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands Subversive Festival, Zagreb, Croatia International Film Festival Breda, Breda, the Netherlands 2008 Kaohsiung Film Festival, Kaohsiung, China Body Song, P.O.P Cinema, Taipei, Taiwan International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, Germany Image Forum Festival, Tokyo, Japan 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands 2007 After the Fact, National Film Theatre, London, UK 2006 Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh, UK Hong Kong International Film Festival, Hong Kong, China 2005 Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2004 Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Taipei, Taiwan 48th London Film Festival: Experimental Short Films, London, UK Vancouver International Film Festival: Experimental Short Films, Vancouver, Canada Image Forum Festival: Experimental Film and Video, Image Forum, Tokyo, Japan 2003 Vidéoart et Cinéma Expérimental de Chine Populaire et de Taiwan, Light Cone, Paris, France Awards 2009 Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation, 13th National Award for Arts, Taiwan 2008 PULSE Prize, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, Miami, US 2000 Special Prize, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea

171

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Dr Gene Sherman AM is Chairman and Executive Director of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. She has a specialised knowledge of art, literary theory and French and English literature and spent seventeen years teaching, researching and lecturing at secondary and tertiary levels. As Director of Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) she organised up to twenty-two exhibitions annually, including regional, national and international touring exhibitions. Gene and Brian Sherman have sponsored a Master of Fine Arts Administration student at the College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales (1997–2007), a studio at Bundanon and a contemporary Australian art-research room at the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library, The University of Sydney. Dr Sherman is currently Deputy Chair of the National Portrait Gallery Board, Canberra; a member of the Australian Institute of Art History Board at the University of Melbourne, the ARTAND Australia Advisory Board, the International Association of Art Critics and the Tate Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee; and serves as an Asialink Asia Literacy Ambassador. She regularly lectures to a wide range of institutions on topics such as gallery management, the art of collecting, philanthropy, private foundations, Australian and Asian contemporary art, and contemporary Japanese fashion. Dr Sherman was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government (2003) and a Doctorate of Letters honoris causa by The University of Sydney (2008). She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010 for her cultural philanthropy and her support of emerging and established artists.

Deborah Levy was born in South Africa and left with her family for the United Kingdom when she was nine years old. She trained in theatre at Dartington College of Arts and has always worked across a number of art forms. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and widely broadcast on the BBC, including her dramatisations of two of Freud’s most iconic case histories, Dora and the Wolf Man. Deborah’s acclaimed novels include the 2012 Man Booker Prize–shortlisted Swimming Home, translated into twelve languages, Beautiful Mutants (1989), Swallowing Geography (1993), The Unloved (1994) and Billy and Girl (1996). Her short story anthology, Black Vodka, was shortlisted for the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2012. Her recent long autobiographical essay, Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), is a unique response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay, Why I Write, and has been described as ‘feminist and political and an inspired work of writing.’

In 2014, Deborah’s book of poetry, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, will be published. From 2006–09, Deborah was AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at London’s Royal College of Art, where she taught writing in the Animation Department. She is currently Visiting Professor of Writing in Illustration at Falmouth University and lives in London.

SCAF sincerely thanks the artists, Chien-Chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen.

A special and warm thank you to National Art School (NAS) Director Michael Snelling, NAS Curator and Gallery Manager Katie Dyer (now on maternity leave) and NAS Acting Curator and Gallery Manager Judith Blackall, for their enthusiastic and professional approach to all aspects of our creative partnership.

We also thank the following individuals and organisations for their contribution and support: Fabian Dankl Roxanne Dunsmore and Rev Graham Long, The Wayside Chapel Rod Freedman and Lesley Seebold Freedman Ho Huiting Deborah Levy Magnum Photos Pippa McCarthy, A.M. Heath Sophie McIntyre Lauren Simon Barry Sechos Natalie Seiz Simm Steel Colin Tate Rudy Tseng Gotaro Uematsu Heartfelt thanks also to the Nelson Meers Foundation for continuing to nurture and support SCAF’s Culture+Ideas programme.

Our newly formed Patrons’ Circle amplifies our projects and provides us with inspiration.

Johnnie Walker’s ongoing guidance and regular on-site assistance remains a source of great comfort.

Sophie McIntyre is a curator, lecturer and art writer, with a background in Asian art and expertise in Chinese art. During the mid-1980s she lived in China, and in 1990 she made her first trip to Taiwan to study Chinese.

Since that time she has been regularly returning to Taiwan for curatorial and academic research. Sophie has curated numerous exhibitions that have featured art from Taiwan and China. These include: Penumbra: Contemporary Art from Taiwan, 2008; Islanded: Contemporary Art from New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan, 2006 (co-curated with Lee Weng Choy and Eugene Tan); Concrete Horizons: Contemporary Art from China, 2004; and Face to Face: Contemporary Art from Taiwan, 1999–2000. In 2012, she completed her PhD, which explored the impact of identity politics and cross-strait relations in contemporary art from Taiwan. Sophie has published widely and is currently working on a book of Taiwan’s art and curating an exhibition of Chinese art.

172

Dr Natalie Seiz is Assistant Curator, Asian Art, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and gained a PhD in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at The University of Sydney. Her research deals with the emergence of contemporary women artists in Taiwan, particularly from the late 1970s to 2000s. In 1998 she won the inaugural Gene and Brian Sherman Master of Arts Administration Award (COFA) and went on to do internships at Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. She has presented at conferences locally and internationally, including at the Association of Art Historians (UK) and the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. Natalie has published several articles and was guest editor of the 2008 Contemporary East Asia issue of the TAASA Review. Her recent essay, ‘How “re-entry” shaped the work of a contemporary woman artist in Taiwan’, was published in Asia Through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (Fuyubi Nakamura, Morgan Perkins, Olivier Krischer (eds), Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). She has a forthcoming article about the contemporary history of women’s art in Taiwan, in n.paradoxa (KT Press, UK), due to be published in July 2014.

Finally, and most importantly, we remain eternally grateful to Brian Sherman. Without Brian’s generosity and passion SCAF would remain an idea as opposed to a vibrant reality.

173

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

The National Art School

The National Art School (NAS) is situated in Darlinghurst, a lively hub of art and culture in Sydney, and is the oldest, and one of the most prestigious, visual arts institutions in Australia. The School’s values are informed by the ongoing debate about the place of art in contemporary society and the basic premise that drawing is fundamental to an understanding of visual language. The NAS Gallery was opened in 2006 and features an annual exhibition programme reflecting the vitality and complexity of the visual arts within a local and international context. The NAS Gallery encourages appreciation and critical perspectives of art and its role in society through direct engagement with artists and original works of art. Research, publications, public programmes and exhibitions featuring multidiscipline group and solo projects by Australian and international artists support the School’s philosophy of being profoundly aware of the past while recognising and engaging with the present.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) was established in April 2008 as a not-for-profit organisation to champion research, education and exhibitions of significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East. SCAF works closely with creative practitioners in commissioning new work and developing exhibitions that energise and respond to the gallery’s four-part complex comprising a large exhibition area, mini ‘out-site’ space, versatile theatre annexe and Zen garden. Extensive projects are developed through partnerships with public art institutions at a regional, state and national level while broad public engagement with contemporary art is fostered through publishing and forum programmes. In addition, Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR), located directly across the road from the gallery, offers a supportive environment and accommodation for visiting artists, filmmakers, architects, writers, curators and scholars. The experience of developing Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) as a respected commercial and educational enterprise within the international art world underpins the Foundation at both a conceptual and practical level. Dr Gene Sherman AM, SCAF Chairman and Executive Director, drew on her extensive international networks to establish the Foundation, and initiates and guides its activities in collaboration with an advisory board of respected peers: Andrew Cameron AM, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Sam Meers, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts and Michael Whitworth. SCAF is a member of CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art.

2011 Project 10

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge Project 11

Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure Project 12

Tokujin Yoshioka: Waterfall 2012 Project 13

Janet Laurence: After Eden Project 14

Alfredo Juan Aquilizan and Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan In-Habit: Project Another Country Project 15

Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture In partnership with National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 2013 Project 16

Fugitive Structures 2013 / Andrew Burns: Crescent House In association with BVN Donovan Hill Olafur Eliasson: The cubic structural evolution project, 2004 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Project 17

Exhibition History 2008 Project 1

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction In partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Project 2

Jonathan Jones: untitled (the tyranny of distance)

Collection+: Chiharu Shiota Curated by Doug Hall AM Project 18

Feel & Think: A New Era of Tokyo Fashion In association with National Art School, Sydney Project 19

Collection+: Sopheap Pich Curated by SCAF and Erin Gleeson

Project 3

Jitish Kallat: Aquasaurus

2014 Project 20

2009 Project 4

Fugitive Structures 2014 / AR-MA: Trifolium In association with BVN Donovan Hill

The View from Elsewhere In partnership with Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Project 21

Project 5

Project 22

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA

HOME: Chien-Chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen In association with National Art School, Sydney

Project 6

Fugitive Structures 2014 / Tomahawk // Archer Breakspear: Poly In association with BVN Donovan Hill

Charwei Tsai: Water, Earth and Air For project details and touring schedule, visit sherman-scaf.org.au 2010 Project 7

Fiona Tan: Coming Home In association with National Art School, Sydney Project 8

Brook Andrew: The Cell In association with Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane Project 9

Contemporary Art for Contemporary Kids In partnership with Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

174

175

HOME: Chien-Chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen 24 May – 2 August 2014 SCAF Project 22 Chien-Chi Chang: The Chain, China Town, Side Chain National Art School Gallery Forbes Street Darlinghurst NSW 2010 nas.edu.au Chen Chieh-jen: Realm of Reverberations Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street Paddington NSW 2021 sherman-scaf.org.au

Published by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street Paddington NSW 2021 ABN 25 122 280 200 www.sherman-scaf.org.au © 2014 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Copyright in the text is held by the authors.

Copyright in the images is held by the artist unless otherwise indicated.

The material in this publication is under copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. Where applicable, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and acknowledge the source material. Errors or omissions are unintentional.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: HOME: Chien-Chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen / prepared by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

ISBN: 9780987490919 (hardback) Subjects: Chang, Chien-Chi – Exhibitions. Chen, Chieh-jen – Exhibitions.

Photography, Artistic – Exhibitions. Video installations (Art) – Exhibitions.

Artists – Taiwan – Exhibitions.

Other Authors/Contributors: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

Dewey Number: 709.51249 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Chairman, Executive Director Dr Gene Sherman AM Associate Director Dolla Merrillees (until December 2013) General Manager Danielle Devery (from December 2013) Exhibitions Manager Michael Moran Communications and Events Coordinator Sophie Holvast Collections Manager Aaron de Souza Assistant Curator Emily Rolfe Gallery Assistant Olivia Gubala Executive Assistant to Gene Sherman Hannah Brunskill Advisory Board Andrew Cameron AM, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Sam Meers, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts, Michael Whitworth Media Consultant Michael Young Partnerships Consultant Bambi Blumberg Social Media Consultant Clint O’Hanlon National Art School Gallery Curator/Gallery Manager Katie Dyer (until December 2013), Judith Blackall (from December 2013) Design Mark Gowing Design Editor Fiona Egan Proofreader Marni Williams Printed in Australia by Ligare Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation providing a platform for innovative visual artists primarily from Asia, Australia and the Pacific Rim. All donations over $2 are tax deductible and will support our exhibition, educational, public and artist-in-residence programmes.

Culture+Ideas proudly supported by

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street, Paddington Sydney NSW 2021 Australia ABN 25 122 280 200 sherman-scaf.org.au

National Art School Gallery Forbes Street, Darlinghurst Sydney NSW 2010 Australia Phone +61 (0)2 9339 8744 nas.edu.au

Exhibition catalogue supported by