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Yung-hsien Chen's Images of the Absolute. |
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I. Many cultures have sought to tell the great truths in ways that transcend the spoken word and the written word. Be it the theatricalities of ritual or the mechanics of the picture, the telling of truths by the path of the Visual is a challenge demanding of great power and ingenuity, particularly, as we are told, we are today awash in a sea of images. "The esoteric doctrines are so profound as to defy their enunciation in writing. With the help of painting however their obscurities may be understood." The Buddhist Monk and Leader Kukai on his return from China (806 AD), quoted in Pierre Rambach, see beneath p.42. The great medieval cathedrals of Western Europe have been described as Paupers' Bibles, communicating the teachings of Christianity to the poor and unlettered. In fact this interpretation undervalues the extent to which programmes of images could be embedded in stone to contain values and narratives that the spoken or written word often found difficult to communicate. One ideal shared by several cultures was the Single Image in which the entirety of the World's knowledge could be layered and coded, to be glimpsed, assessed and used by the viewer as a series of revealed interconnected references. The single illuminated page might encode the Four Elements, Time, Space, Nature and the Four Humours, unblushingly ambitious and bold in narrative concept. The schema of the Great Pavement of Westminster of 1268 for Henry III of England aspires to an encyclopaedic reflection of the Universe, underlined in its complex geometric structures and Latin inscription in letters of brass, "If the reader wittingly reflects upon all that is laid down, he will discover here the end of the Universe". The tradition of the Image bearing a full load of meaning (often concealed, or explicable only by the adept) was continued in the Seventeenth Century by the Emblem Book which provided a set of pictorial constants, references to abstractions and combinations of abstractions that made it possible for a shared pictorial language to act as coinage between nations and the artists of nations. A common image hence chimed across cultures and generations, such as the notion of the Restraint of the Passions depicted in an image of a standing figure reining back a Leaping Horse. It was the time of an agreed comfort in the underlying resonance of the Image, the unspoken understanding upon which things were projected. Barbara Stafford has written of the tradition before 1800 of physical demonstrations of scientific phenomena before an audience, half Music Hall, half laboratory. The literature of the study of Memory shows how common it was to locate detailed information within the Image, within simulated buildings, spaces and on connecting paths. And how natural it became to use the image of the human body itself as a field of information - a framework upon which to hang objects to remind the viewer of the core tales. It was common in Western European art that your hand with its own markings and variables - commonly called "the Guidonian hand" - was a permanently accessible abacus to recall what had to be learnt - musical notes and intervals - grammar and other rules of language - geographical data and correspondences. It was a necessary part of a liberal education that this visualising from the body itself was developed and subsequently reached heights of sophistication.
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It is in this light, I believe, that the work of Yung-hsien Chen is best viewed, continuing the long and distinguished tradition in Zen thought of the peculiar power of the Image. His references and systems are not however esoteric or Žlitist but based on direct observation of the world as we all see it. He was born into a farming family. " Sometimes I watched the plants or farmer working, then the images come to my mind. When I was 9 years old, my first painted picture was of farming. After that, I painted a lot of pictures of the same subject." References to rice and bamboo are hence not mere archetypes but a direct response to growth, cycles, and their role in the lives of human beings. Perceptions of cycles of Time and the rhythms of Nature pervade his work, again not as generalities but as specific responses to, say the rise and fall of the Tide - the flux of surface and level against Humankind and its constructions. Coming from a culture wary of the physicalities of human flesh and its workings, Yung-hsien Chen has found his art in the systematic scrutiny of the Body Whole, beginning with the Head as a testing ground for the greatest of human issues - the nature of the Self - the elimination of the Unnecessary, the dispersal of superfluities, the eradications of worries. His work bravely seeks an audience to offer them a set of options. It deliberately refuses the didactic or ideological. In subtle shifts and using a personal and austere language of film, he allows those who can identify the specific Zen references to come to terms with his challenges, and allows those unfamiliar (usually a Western audience) to negotiate their way through the imagery towards their own meanings. It is a path of ambition and not without dangers. His work is capable of being misread - the sequential study of the Body through Zen-ding initially with the examination of the imagery of the Head, evoking Western cultural associations of Salome and Judith, the severed head for decadent contemplation. His recent video installation Heart Sutra in the Kaohsiung Container Arts Festival could evoke associations of the Buddhist Temple even within a mundane Container, but equally in its subdivisions of space with aromatic beads and TV screens beyond, it evoked the uncanny and disturbing. In his documentary coverage of his audience's responses, you can see children laughing and frightened in turn, whereas their parents were reluctant to commit themselves. Those who seek to locate him in the standard cultural matrix may find it convenient to quote Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1995) for the formal conventions of writing on the body. More direct is the Hoichi the Earless section of Koboyashi's Kwaidan (1964) but the convention is also part of the ancient conventions of Chinese Popular Art in the Almanac where the human face is analysed in detail as a sort of Mappa Mundi with the twin disciplines of physiognomy and palmistry. The sequence of films that began with Release in 2000 now nears completion with The Tide, in two parts Sitting in the Tide, and Standing in the Tide, intended for simultaneous projection. It is, I believe, an indication of a new threshold he has encountered, that Yung-Hsien Chen is working for the first time on location, testing his insights and his craft on location, a direct ingestion and synthesis of the World Outside, the Body Whole tested against the ebb and flow of the Tide, the rhythms of Time and the flux of Space.
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REFERENCES Richard Foster, Patterns of Thought. The Hidden Meaning of the Great Pavement of Westminster Abbey, Cape, London 1991 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1966 Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures, English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture, Longman, London 1994 Barbara Stafford, Artful Science, Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994 Pierre Rambach, The Art of Japanese Tantrism, Skira Macmillan London 1979 Martin Palmer (ed.) T'UNG SHU, The Ancient Chinese Almanac, Rider, London 1986 Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, A New Translation, Wildwood, Aldershot, 1972. Ryusaku Tsunoda, W De Bary and Donald Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume 1, Chapter VII, "Kukai and Esoteric Buddhism", Columbia University Press, New York and London 1958 Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self, Chinese Portraits 1600 - 1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992 |
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