Weak Painting-Prints over Sensation in Time by Chang Ching-Wen

Weakness: Sensibility

“Weak Painting" is not my idea but when Su Yu-An and Chiu Chien-Jen told me about this idea and invited me to co-curate an exhibition at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, I immediately realized that this title fits my own observation of Taiwanese artists born after 1975(most of them are trained in academic system). Their art shares a common vagueness that is not easy to describe, which I believe is related closely to the lifestyles and images they choose. Such a viewpoint is derived from the connotations contained in their paintings instead of exterior factors these artists are facing.

I believe that in today's world, painting hardly attracts discussions but will sustain since paintings have been the most tradable artworks. Young artists never cease painting and the audiences never lose their interest. Nevertheless, in an era with numerous competing media, is painting still able to communicate between the painter and the viewers through a two-dimensional plane? I have no answer.

This generation of artists concern different issues and are different in terms of the themes and styels of their art. They never manifest any statement or standing, they don't share any particular value, thus it is impossible to label them with any terminology. However, they do demonstrate a distinctive attitude and approaches compared to artists belonging to older generations. They have dramatically transformed art forms categorized by art history without breaking away from its legacy that they inherit in academia. Under contemporary conditions, they have been greatly influenced by their mentors but explore, debate before establishing their own path in the given time and space. Similar to their predecessors, they apply oil paints among other media to paint "sensible" figures or objects, they create portraits, still lifes and landscapes that reflect or even mark their era. They are driven by different forces to probe the possibilities of canvas, paints and pencil strokes. They never get tired.

As a viewer, I can only try to understand their art by catching every trivial movement in their paintings as subtle as breathing. I ponder on what in a painting stimulates or inspires the audience by looking at them repeatedly. As I identify some traits from their paintings, I realize that they disperse all over the gamut without composing a uniformed tone. This inclination can be observed in the art of the participating artists in this exhibition, and several foreign artists about the same ages are invited to test out if such a phenomenon exists across borders.


Weakness: Being and Imagination

Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe shares his literature viewpoints and writing discourses in his book The Method of a Novel(1978). Tremendously influenced by existentialism, Oe applies the framework of existentialism to analyze his lifetime reading experience and writing skills. He thinks that the structure of a novel represents the author's knowledge of the world, the author's attempt to introduce the mentality of his time and the paths toward knowing his time. A successful novel is structured with great imagination as the author integrates every element and gives them lives. A story is the interface between the author and his readers, and each reader creates the story again through her/his reading. A writer is obliged to express his imagination during his writing. Oe quoted Gaston Bachelard: "Up until now many people still mistake that imagination means the ability to produce images. Imagination should be the ability of transforming images deduced by our sensibility. Imagination emancipates us from basic ideas and further empowers us to change basic ideas...the value of an idea comes from how much imaginative it can be. Imagination has an open nature, it disappears easily...compared to other performance of human beings, imagination features the characteristics of our minds. Like what William Blake pointed out: 'Imagination is not the state of the existence of human beings, it's the existence itself.' "

A novelist represents the being and consciousness of humans with words, a painter describes various phenomena of our time with paints and vocabularies somewhat estranged from our everyday life. The media they apply are traditional, still they carry out art language uniquely belonging to our time with variant expressions. Though their tools are estranged, they bridge art and everyday life by responding to existentialist issues with their close and sharp observation of everyday life.


Weakness: Sense of Marginalization, Figures

I once talked with Huang Hai-Hsin about her series of small paintings. It's easy for the artist to accomplish each of painting with these sizes. The figures and venues she features are from newspapers, magazines, TV news and online news. The once very presentable characters or occasions under her brushes somehow are twisted by the murky oil paints, showing a sense of barrenness, deterioration. The scenes of her paintings include two men with suits shaking hands in a meeting room, a man trying to hang the portrait of the national leader, a master demonstrating how to blow a melody with a leaf, a dismayed super star covering his face while arrested for drug using, the profiles of law enforcement, a group of politicians bowing to apologize...These stop motions of news events are only the tip of the iceberg-- an iceberg of information. They attract the attention of the audience for several seconds before they click another link or turn to another channel. The frames Huang picks are insignificant but all together they frame the indescribable atmosphere in Taiwanese political arena. This indescribability comes from Huang's art form as well as the content. From these paintings, we learn how people perceive the world in given time and space, or at what angles the public apprehends the news events and the messages the events carry.

Huang's another series about the work of paramedics and physical therapists presents an almost undetectable frustration. In the paintings is the the sadness that is forgotten by the society.

In his book Oe mentions the artists of grotesque realism tended to focus on the physical regression of disable or deformed bodies rather than the noble souls in them. They strategically represented marginalized themes or vulgar things in order to reflect the decaying ages and the chaos before the doom. Oe takes the disastrous scenes by the Mexican engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada(1852~1913)and the malformed children portrayed by French artist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne(1533~1592) as examples. Oe explains that the artists recorded the states of things carefully by setting their eyes on the marginalized groups. At their times, the public also began noticing these people from low social class and the artists' work was to reflect the society as comprehensively as possible. Throughout the history, many artists have represented their times and their worlds by their sensitive perception and excellent painting skills.

The artists we include in the “Weak Painting” are not grotesque realist artists, but they also have grabbed a universal atmosphere of our time through the characters and occasions they depict. They are not interested in responding to the grand issues of nationalism, history or mythes, instead, they leave slight prints of personal experience in reality on canvas. They portray people around them, for example, Tsai Yi-Ting paints her own family life, both her birth family and her new family with her husband. The meticulously illustrated characters and their expressions are accentuated by the largely empty backdrops. Though their muscles and facial features are twisted, the scenes are not unusual occasions but on dinning table. Huang Hua-Chen draws out the contours of characters with saturated oil paints. These people are also her relatives or friends, and the intimation or alienation between them due to different reasons are showed by their facial expressions and gestures. Applying many simple lines, Wang Tzu-Ting outlines the emotions, sensibility or anxiety of her figures.


Weakness: Narration, Scenes and Objects

Blurred images constituted by dots, the artist Huang Chia-Ning challenges photography with her painting. Most of her works are from the scenes around her, but looking closely, the murky strokes contradict the realist landscapes. All Huang Chia-Ning's objects are insignificant, including the lunch boxes or rabbit excrement she painted earlier in the kitchen corner, studio corner, crashed snails, moonlight, the back of a photo and the egg shell of a cockroach she created in recent years. The artist chooses her themes from tons of living photos but discreetly avoids making her choice a major part of her creation. Thus the combination of themes and methods are unique in style. Similar to Gerhard Richter's effort in maintaining photography in painting, Huang also composes her works with both clarified and blemished drawing, but the latter has no intention to manage philosophical or historical issues. To Huang Chia-Ning, painting is a fascinating activity but not a tool to subvert the representation of convention.

Chiu Chien-Jen's paintings are also transformed from photos, but compared to Huang Chia-Ning, he zooms out to distance the audience while compiling images especially meaningful or emotional to him. He narrates the stories again with modified vocabularies and he covers up things not essential to the paintings with rough white strokes, such as the thickness of air or the emotions of the author. Hsu Yin-Ling's works also carry a sense of time thus they are narrative, but opposite to Chiu's measurement of the thickness of paints in order to decide the depth of existence, Hsu mirrors the society with deliberately purified scenes. These dramatic settings are rather like fables.Tien Bao-Chang masterly sketches his personal, fragmentary experience from daily life in three-dimensional spaces. On notepads he repeatedly adds texts or graphics that disclose one's frustration or determination through the stream of consciousness.

The scenes Fang Yang-Tsung selects are mostly transitional or temporal spaces in cities, such as the car wash place, night club or airport. The lucid contours of objects and flat coloring transform commonplaces into buoyant things at their ideal conditions. The desserts by Wang Liang-Yin are artfully brushed to create the vivid effects of dripping juice. While emphasizing the materials, the artist maintains the glossy appearance of the delicious food. The Korean artist Choi Nari characterizes objects by giving them roles, she attempts to restore world peace in a false domain through her ironic and parodying style. The American artist Benjamin Swallow Duke puts himself in urban scenes that obviously suffer from disasters described by sci-fictions, his work reveals his doubt about the relationship between himself and the world. The Japanese artist Yuhi Hasegawa and the American artist Samuel T. Adams also carry out their stimulated sensibility during chaos and confusion with a style of obscurity.


Weakness: Zeitgeist

It is not easy to clearly define Weak Painting, but surely it is easy to feel the weakness in the works of many artists. Such weakness is inexplicable since these artists deal with marginalized people and issues with a seemingly indifferent attitude, but the awkward style still shows slight sorrow, helplessness and frustration. Through their paintings, viewers see the bondage between common life and art, and an a typical zeitgeist is demonstrated by the representation of many insignificant things. The weakness has become a gesture implying the opinions of these young artists about their time. Furthermore, the weakness drives them to continue their work.