Before the electronic media and the Internet gained popularity, printing had been the dominant means facilitating the spread of knowledge, which resulted in the classification and specialization of academic disciplines, and influenced modern art in terms of the emphasis on the essential feature of the medium, purity and uniqueness. In contrast, nowadays, as the electronic media enables information to communicate at a high speed, and the data of all sorts to juxtapose, creating an information mosaic which integrates our perception and cognition, art undergoes a new transformation that conveys more interdisciplinary linguistic messages than material messages. How will the genre of painting evolve with the openness of art forms and media? And how should we see a painting?
To Paint or Not to Paint
In retrospect, all of the students of arts colleges receive training in sketching and painting when they learn to make art. But how do the students choose their creative medium? It is not only a matter of personal choice, but also a matter of the changing trends in art education. Take myself for example, I studied in the Department of Fine Arts in National Taiwan University of Arts from 1995 to 1999. The university was then at the critical juncture of change in art educational concepts. A few teachers who just came back from their studies in France introduced some brand-new ideas of art, such as the installation and video art, had exercised new influence on our art education in those days. This made me, a student back then, to contemplate on the scope of fine arts education beyond the convention of art education since the Japanese colonial era. At that time, these new ideas provided a cutting-edge perspective on art creation that defies the convention of painting. However, a myth seemed to emerge in the midst of this trend, which may lead us to question if the contemporary art creation can be reduced to such a linear, progressive history, like Darwin’s theory of evolution?
However, observing the development of art abroad for nearly past twenty years, not everyone agreed with this unitary linear thinking. For example, the advocates of “Transavantgarde International” in the 1980’s argued that the art should not be limited by the ideas introduced by Marcel Duchamp. They stated that “transavantgarde means artists stop relying on the combination of trends and languages in a boundless realm, and insist on restoring internal reason through the formation of ontologically-centered artistic attitudes and philosophical viewpoints.”[1] They also believed that “the art form that has just faded away took part in social changes by exploring new processes and seeking new materials, hence parting with the static time of painting and work. Contemporary art (transavantgarde) tends to forsake illusions that exist outside themselves and return to its own path.”[2] In brief, the concept of transavantgarde emphasizes a kind of introspective art creation that comes through pondering and rumination with internal reason. Rather than using machines, this kind of art is expressed through painting which is closer to our true selves.
Positive and Negative Views on Painting
Impacted by the invention of photography and notions of modern art, painting had undergone a lot of twists and turns in the development of modern art. One of the more obvious negative viewpoints is that painting represents old traditions and systems of art, which resulted in modern artists’ resistance and thus caused the disjunction between the avant-garde art movement and the tradition of art. They believed that painting may easily degenerate into a kind of “retinal art” concerning aesthetic judgment and visual pleasure, and submit to the reification and commodification of the bourgeois art form, failing to fulfill its social functions and responsibilities.
By contrast, the positive view focuses on the autonomy of art, namely, "art for art's sake". Another positive view suggests that art is a communication and representation of human mental activities or subconscious behavior. It emphasizes the purposelessness of art, standing in contrast to the functions of social intervention and influence. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, believed that paintings could still deeply portray the Being of mankind. He considered that through artistic creation, artists embed (setzen) the truth in their artwork (since the artwork is able to vividly express the Being of things, thus it corresponds with the Being of things[3]). He once took A Pair of Boots by Vincent van Gogh for example to further emphasize that van Gogh’s description of a pair of peasant women's boots lively expresses the being and existence of the peasant women, making a pair of boots more than a pair of boots.
The Italian curator and art critic Gianni Romano also pointed out that after the ideological trend of “end theories” faded away, many paintings are still on exhibit in contemporary art shows. He quoted Judith Nesbitt, a curator at the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, as saying, “Painting has been attacked and subverted but it has never gone away.”[4] Romano believed that the artists who chose painting as their principal medium in the 1990’s did not express prejudices or concerns about the past traditions. Instead, painting was then considered to be an all-new medium. [5]
The Contemporary Change of Painting
As Romano stated that the painting had been regarded as an all-new medium, since it has already broken away from the burden of conventional painting. Whether concrete or abstract, a painting can be anything:
TV, pop music, comics, pulp fiction, soap opera, horror flicks, porn, glamour, furnishings, gossip, graphics, trash, computer games, mail order catalogues. And this is nothing new: for centuries now, the various arts have been defining each other (ut picture poesis), and now the media have joined in, making for a vicious circle of citations and reflections bereft of any hierarchical distinction[6].
Two vital issues arise here. One is that the use of media and the loss of hierarchical system may lead to the lack of critical standards in painting. The involvement of media entails change of contemporary painting in many aspects, including the involvement of media in the process of art creation, and the interplay of different visual languages, like “photo painting” or “the involvement of painting in the media.”
The contemporary painters do not necessarily depict real objects in front of their eyes. Instead, they look at image in the media, such as the camera, overhead projector, electronic screen, the Internet, newspaper and magazine. They observe the image and then compose the picture: the artist uses the lens to enlarge and capture the scene, and shoot all kinds of human movement as well as objects from a variety of angles. Afterwards, they paint from the photos. Some artists even paint directly from the electronic screen because the image can be enlarged freely for inspection of specific details. Some artists use computer illustration software or images on the Internet to help them compose their painting, while others use the slide projector or the overhead projector to make drafts. With the involvement of media, these paintings are endowed with a sense of the photographic image.
With regard to the interplay of visual languages, the work of the Japanese artist Taguchi Kazuna is characteristic of multiple, alternate and trans-disciplinary use of painting and photography. She begins by depicting a lady’s portrait which is a mixture of her own imagination and images cropped from magazines, and then she takes a photo of the finished painting. The completed work is a work of photography. Another case is the English artist Julian Opie who turns his portraits, which are famous for simple lines, into electronic screens, animations and advertisement images.
About “Weak Painting”
The present situation of contemporary painting in Taiwan is polarized. First, at Taiwan’s important official exhibitions such as the Taipei Biennial, the mainstream is photographic images and installation art, while painting has become marginalized. The Taipei Biennial was first held in 1992, and exhibits of paintings accounted for 40% of all exhibits that year. In 1996, when the Taipei Fine Arts Museum formed a curatorial team to host the biennial, the number of paintings reached the apex with the percentage of 60%. However, since 1998, when the museum began to invite international curators to organize the Taipei Biennial, from 1998 to 2008, the paintings averaged only 6.5% of all the exhibits in the total of six Taipei Biennials.[7] The Taipei Biennial is a large-scale international art exhibition organized by the state. Therefore, the works exhibited in the biennial serves as a significant indicator, and is more or less representative of how the state shows and educates its citizens about contemporary art.
If we take a closer look of the experience of artists participated in the Taipei biennial from 1992 to 2008, we will see a changing model of the state-held painting competitions in the past 17 years. The trend showing that artists won awards from national and provincial art competitions to recent Taipei Arts Award presents an interesting changing structure of the art evaluation system, in which we see a transition from the category-based provincial art competitions to the non-category-based competition of the Taipei Arts Award. Moreover, in contrast to the fact that the majority of winners in the provincial competitions are students from the long-established normal universities and arts colleges, most winners of the Taipei Arts Award are students from the recently established Taipei and Tainan National University of the Arts. It not only signals a trend that modern art’s emphasis on the essential features of the medium has shifted to contemporary art’s openness towards art forms, but also reflects the evolution of art educational ideas in Taiwan.
On the other hand, as we look into the composition of jurors in the Taipei Arts Award, we will find that the jurors’ expertise and research fields influence their judging standards. From the following list of jury members of the Taipei Biennial 2001-2008, we can see the panel is mainly made up of artists, professors of arts colleges and universities, as well as art critics, and these three identities may overlap. For example, Yao Jui-chung is both an artist and a critic. Since, jury members have different specialties. In my view, the panel of jury members of the Taipei Biennial should involve experts of different fields, so as to objectively interpret and judge contemporary artworks in various forms. However, if we look at the list of jury members closely, we will find that juries recruited over the past two years (2007-2008) are mainly experts on images, installation and conceptual art, few are painters or critics on painting, which has resulted in the sharp decrease of the percentage of paintings selected in the total amount of works compared to previous years. Therefore, the painting is marginalized in the Taipei Biennial, which stands as an important and significant indicator of the mainstream contemporary art in Taiwan[8].
However, in another aspect, the situation is contrasted with the trend mentioned above. A group of young artists born in the 1970’s and 1980’s chose painting as their creative medium after they have experienced the trends of installation and video art. While many new galleries have sprung up one after another in Taiwan in recent years[9], and the art market has quickly absorbed artworks produced by many young artists[10].
After the trend of installation and video art has existed in Taiwan for 20 years, its innovative and avant-garde character has gradually faded away. Meanwhile, a group of young artists who are now in their 20s and 30s, after witnessing how their peers struggling between paint and not to paint, consciously chose painting as their major creative medium from among all kinds of art forms and expressions. In this Information Age, they also freely browse the Internet for artistic information, and purchase art materials online.
This portfolio is a collection of works by ten young Taiwanese artists. It is published with the hope that the art circle in Taiwan will pay more attention to painting and its current development against the mainstream of image and installation art in recent years. Furthermore, this portfolio also includes works by groundbreaking artists from the U.S., Japan and Korea, thus endeavor to present various dimensions and new perspectives on contemporary painting.
These young artists present paintings with different perspectives through their own practices and explorations. The paintings of Huang Chia-Ning (Taiwan) and Wang Liang-Yin (Taiwan) may be seen as a series of experiments on daily food consumption, as they tried to turn the visual experience into the tactile and taste experience. In Huang’s paintings, the greasy Taiwan lunch boxes remind people of the humid heat and the sticky smell of the summer days in Taiwan, while Wang’s work Shaved Ice with Kiwi depicts the sweet and sour taste of the melting ice with fruit through the mixture and dripping of colors. Besides, in her latest painting series, Huang shows her reflections on painting from photos. She boldly painted the reverse side of a photo to share her reflections with the viewer that what we see might just be a photograph.
The sketching lines speak more directly about the author’s emotions and thoughts. It represents a kind of directness and temporality. The works of Wang Tzu-Ting (Taiwan) and Tian Bao-Chang (Taiwan) both strongly and straightforwardly express their personal feelings and ideas. For example, Wang’s Secret subtly depicts a man who is reclusive and confined in his own world as always wears a box on his head whenever he walks or thinks. As for Tian, he sketches and jots down his daily thoughts in a notebook, showing the freewheeling and amusing nature of the sketch.
Some artists, including Tsai Yi-Ting (Taiwan), Huang Hwa-Jen (Taiwan), Chiou Chien-Ren (Taiwan), along with Rob James Kolomyski (U.S.A) and Yuhi Hasegawa (Japan), tend to observe people around them and reveal a sense of freedom, fluidity, imagination and diversity of expression of painting in their works.
Other artists, including Hsu Yin-Ling (Taiwan), Fan Yang-Tsung (Taiwan), Huang Hai-Hsin (Taiwan), Benjamin Swallow Duke (U.S.A), Samuel T. Adams (U.S.A), and Choi Nari (Korea), make observations about the society and transform them into painting through personal experiences and imaginations. For instance, Benjamin Swallow Duke’s Awakening series raises the issue about whether people’s cognition or understanding of the world is the reality? Do we truly make observations of the objects or do we see them with given ideologies and ideas? On the other hand, Hsu Yin-Ling’s work exudes a sense of deficiency and anxiety through the dreary composition and the portrayal of lonesome rooms on the picture plane. The figures in the house seem to be oppressed and engulfed by their surroundings. Hsu adeptly conveys s a sense of uneasiness in her painting, which reveals one’s sense of insecurity aroused by the instability of life, future and society.
Fan Yang-Tsung pays special attention to the transitional urban spaces. These spaces include gas stations, airports, etc., in which a large number of people come and go. He spreads the paint on the canvas to create an urban-style piece of artwork like Choi Nari. Choi’s painting presents her daily observations and experiences about relationships between men and women with a sense of humor, while Adams enjoys painting images vacillating between concrete and abstract and wavering between meaning and imagination. He said, “I do not believe paintings should have a fixed meaning; they should reflect the flux of being in this world. I am interested in the discomfort, incoherence, and, most of all, the absurdity that can characterize the painterly experience and experience in general[11].” Huang Hai-hsin sensitively observes the rigid, fake and monotonous facial expression of politicians in photos released by the government. She uses a relaxed and casual style of painting to perform this stereotypical and ritualized photographic culture.
In addition to artworks by fifteen artists in this exhibition, this portfolio also includes three special units titled “Art Relay”, “Artists on Artists” and “Interview with Artists”. “Art Relay” invites fifteen artists to work in relays on a sketchbook. Because these artists live in different parts of the world, including the U.S. and Taiwan, the notebook have traveled by plane from Taiwan to Michigan, New York and then back to Taiwan in the end. “Artists on Artists” allows the viewer to see how these artists see each other’s work besides the art critics’ comment. The artists decided their commentators by drawing lots, and the comments include a variety of formats including texts and images.
Reconsider the Features of Painting
If the photographic image is something reproduced from a mold (A mold parallels the film or charge couple device [CCD]), then painting is the trace of man’s being in the world, like “footprints in the snow, breath on the window, vapor trails of a plane across the sky, lines traced by a finger in the sand.[12]” Painting is a direct activity of the mind. Contemporary artist Marlene Dumas used to consider the differences between painting and photography:
Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn’t travel with the speed of light. That’s why dead painters shine so bright…Painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard. The content of a painting cannot be separated from the feel of its surface[13].
When we look at a painting, we often cannot resist the sudden rush of emotions that came over us, whether it is some sort of sadness or surprise. At times, a painting leaves a deep impression on our minds, which is different from the effects of photographic images. However, aside from these immediate feelings, the American art critic Sobieski admitted introspectively that, Western art education may restrict them (Western art critics) from appreciating or truly understanding the (regional or psychological) diversity of contemporary painting. He said even when someone spots a painting for the first time and immediately recalls another piece of work, this painting could stem from different sources and diversified fields far beyond individual imagination[14].
Therefore, when we look at an artwork, whether it is a painting or any other art form or medium, shouldn’t we adopt a more open attitude and develop a more comprehensive perception rather than rushing to quick judgments? Since preconceived ideas or knowledge may preclude the opportunity to truly appreciate the artwork before us.
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[1] Achille Bonito Oliva, Transavantgarde International, trans. Chen Kuo-chiang et al. (Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Co., Ltd., 1982) 4.
[2] Ibid., 5..
[3] Heidegger interprets the essence of truth in terms of the correspondence with Being. See Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, trans. Sun Zhou-xing (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2004) 21.
[4] Gianni Romano, “Painting in the Internet Era,” Europe: Different Perspective in Painting (Italy: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 2000) 246.
[5] About theories on the end of various subjects, he cited Baudrillard’s “the end of art” and “the end of truth”, Lyotard’s “the end of ideology”, and Roland Barthes’s concept of authoritativeness. Ibid., 247.
[6] Barbara Casavecchia, “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Perspective in Painting (Italy: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 2000) 266.
[7] Percentages of paintings in all the exhibits at the previous Taipei Biennials: 1992(40%), 1994(30%), 1996(60%), 1998(5%), 2000(3%), 2002(6%), 2004(6%), 2006(17%), 2008 (2%).
[8] Since the annually published special issue of the Taipei Arts Award does not include the list of the selected award-winning works, for the convenience of calculation, the below figures are calculated on the basis of Taipei arts award and honorable mention-winning works. The percentages of paintings in these award-winning works are as follows: 2001(7%), 2002(33%), 2003(25%), 2004(27%), 2005(20.%), 2006(20%), 2007(33%), 2008 (0%).
[9] Such as the Main Trend Gallery (2000), Butchart International Contemporary Art Space (2001), AKI Gallery (2002), Piao-piao Gallery (2004), My Humble House Art Gallery (2007), Project Fulfill Art Space (2007), Impressions Art Gallery (2008), and Painting Repository (2009), etc.
[10] See “Neo Avant-garde/New Wave in Academic Painting: Contemporary Value,” ArTop 38 (2009).
[11] See Samuel T. Adams’s self-description.
[12] Emma Dexter, “To Draw is to be Human,” Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (London: Phaidon, 2005) 6.
[13] Marlene Dumas, “Women and Painting,” Perspective in Painting (Italy: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 2000) 250.
[14] He cited an incident once described by the American art critic Arthur C. Danto: On seeing his first Jackson Pollock painting, an English critic dismissed it as an immature rehash of Wols and Raoul Ubac. See Barry Schwabsky, “Paiting in the Interrogative Mode,” Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (London: Phadon, 2002) 10.
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