Yung-hsien Chen Interviewed by

Chris Mullen

Chris Mullen: Tell us why you are working here in England?

Yung-hsien Chen: I have wanted to be an artist ever since I was a child. During secondary school in Taiwan, I took courses in graphic design, painting, printing and photography, and after studying art in Taiwan, I decided that I needed to experience art education in a different country. I toyed with the idea of Spain or France, but opted for London because it is a world centre for the arts. The art scene here mixes the traditional with the modern, and as I wanted to combine my ideas about the human body with various different media, it seemed to offer me the most opportunities. The three years that I have been living and working in the city has been a challenging time, but that's been important because it is helped shape my ideas both in terms of understanding the technologies of film and video as well as helping me define concepts of human beings in a physical sense. London is a good place to people watch and has a variety of art in galleries to inspire ideas.

CM: I get the feeling that many of your ideas came before you really started thinking about Buddhism and were not of a spiritual nature. Would that be fair?

YC: Essentially, yes. Even when I was studying art at school I was more interested in painting and drawing people: I like to capture how they behave or react in any given circumstances. I started developing an interest in Zen Buddhism in 1994 when I met a master of the philosophy, Humin Bhikkhu. He was the first person to teach me the practice of Zen meditation, even though I doubted at the time that it would give me anything I needed. He set me a series of meditative exercises and gradually I found myself being drawn in as I discovered increasing layers of meaning. Since then, Zen has become an important part of my life and has infused my work. In 1998 I had a solo exhibition, 'Gazing', in which I presented a Zen idea of contemplation and serenity in an installation to argue the case for the symmetry between silence and stability.

CM: Were your parents religious?

YC: They are not religious Buddhists, however, they generally follow Buddhist ideas in day-to-day life. It is Buddhist-like behavior rather than strict religious observance. Occasionally we go to the temple to pray, but usually that is more to clear the mind rather than to become better followers of the Buddha.

CM: Describe the moment when you went over to meditation as the natural way of thinking?

YC: It took me about six months of studying with Huimin Bhikkhu before he started to teach me meditation. In the meditation group we were taught exercises that first encouraged us to relax and then open up the head, face, shoulders and legs. Later on, we were taught meditative positions that kept the belly, heart, lips and nose in a straight line and then taught how to count the breaths in and out. After that, I started reading books on Zen Buddhism and was able to question Huimin Bhikkhu when I didn't understand things. It wasn't a realisation that Zen was the natural way of thinking about things, it was a gradual understanding that Zen is not just a moment of exercise, but also a means of exploring bodily experiences and daily life.

CM: There is a paradox here because you and I have talked about Chinese cultural attitudes to the body and I do not associate the Chinese culture with the glorification of the body. There is something quite austere and a reluctance to look at the structures of the body. So when you meditate in what way are you looking at your body? Is it like making it an abstraction or do you really feel it is a machine that is pumping blood, something to be gloried in? Do you feel there is a paradox?

YC: I do not perceive a paradox because I do not agree with your conclusion that Chinese culture is reluctant to look at the workings of the body. In China, explicit medical texts depicting the body have existed for centuries before similar medical texts were devised in the West. However, there is a different attitude to the body in Chinese Confucian thought. In Confucian thought, the body belongs not to the individual but to the individual's parents and so you do nothing that will bring shame to your parents. So what I am doing does not glorify the body, it is better to say it is a way of understanding your body. If you listen to your body, it will talk back to you. In meditation you become aware of your physical being, then you begin to count your breathing and you become less aware of your body because you are focused on the breathing. You don't become separated from your body, it is merely that it is not your prime concern. Eventually, you reach a state of emptiness, a state in which you forget about the past as well as the here-and-now. When you finish your meditation, you remember what you did in it Ð it may be an image, or dialogue, or a different way of structuring your thinking. However, at no point have you become divorced from your body. Your body is there as much as you are.

CM: I have not seen your paintings. Can you describe how you first tried to realise your thoughts in painting?

YC: The first time I meditated, it was a weird experience. Suddenly, in my mind a number of face and eyes appeared. At the time, I was scared and wondered what had happened. Huimin Bhikkhu explained to me that this was normal for many people and suggested that I ignore the faces looking at me, but I still felt uncomfortable. However, it inspired me to look beyond the carnal and look for the spiritual. I began to think about eyesight, and the relation between seeing and being seen. I began to question whether what I could see could be seen from different viewpoints. I began to combine my own experiences and the feelings they brought about with tales, legends and myths from China. From this, I began to create symbolic paintings expressing clear faces and eyes without a sense of sorrow, happiness, uncertainty, disapproval, defense and resistance. I wanted to explore the faces from various angles and examine what they expected to see and whether they thought they would be seen themselves. All this became the subject for my first solo exhibition of paintings 'Gazing'. With the faces spreading over the canvas, and the eyes watching through the paintings, I investigated Ning Shui (from the Mandarin, it trasnslates as The Gaze) in Zen thought. It was all about eyesight, seeing, being seen, mood, surroundings and life. The audience contributes as a part of the work, as they try to interpret what is going on, they in turn are watched to se how they behave. This also relates to Zen Buddhism which holds that even if you are in an empty space with nobody else there, there is always something that is watching you. On the other hand, there is also the fact that if you concentrate your gaze at something, then there is the feeling that it will gaze back at you. With this as a starting point, I decided to paint a genderless figure with many eyes because Buddhism teaches that everyone has the possibility to be a Buddha.

CM: And then came the step to film?

YC: Absolutely.

CM: Many artists have found film a very useful medium. What attracted you to using film or video?

YC: I am still interested in painting and installations as art forms. However, I also wanted to include the dimensions of sound and time and space in my work Ð and discovered the best media for that was film and video. Additionally, if I wanted to explore my own body and my own experiences in life, it was a perfect medium.

CM: With regard to the installation in the Kauhsing International Container Arts Festival that you recently mounted very successfully, can you tell us how you were first asked to do it?

YC: The first I learned about the exhibition was from a student on the curating course at Goldsmiths College. She told me to look up the web-site, which I did, and then I sent off an application. I decided to use as my starting point the basic text of the Heart Sutra. The nearest Christian equivalent would be a psalm or prayer. For the catalogue of the Arts Festival, I wrote: "Although the title of this work is 'Heart Sutra', I am not trying to present a stern and serious religious message. Instead, I want to use this material to rethink people's sense organs and sensory perceptions in these strange and fickle times. Visitors enter the work in a free and relaxed manner and immediately start to use their senses of touch, vision, hearing and smell. By the nature of the work, it is the only way they can experience it, and thus awaken the power of their senses. As for the difference between direct perception and what can be expressed in words, I am afraid you will have to actually enter the work if you want your body to reach a conclusion." In short, in this piece of work, I wanted the spectator to become a visitor into art itself. I wanted to create something interactive that would engage all their senses and break down the dispassionate experience of a piece of work that sometimes marks the installation. Also, I wanted this interaction to be fun. Visitors to the installation could not help but feel they could play with it. Although the piece's starting point was a sutra, for the visitor it would not be obvious until they entered the container and saw the video. For some visitors the curtain of beads could be reminiscent of the beads found across a shop doorway and the smell of the sandalwood the precursor to an adventure in a perfume store. Visitors would only be able to formulate a view of what I was trying to do once they were fully engaged in the experience of the installation. Even then, the soft lighting and massaging action of the beads could have suggested a merely sensuous experience. At any point until the visitor watched the video, the narrative of their experience would be open ended, but still largely enjoyable.

CM: You presumably saw it not just as an opportunity to show your work, but to develop new ways of expressing yourself with materials. Had you worked in a container space before?

YC: That was my first time using a sea container as a space. The container was filled with strings of sandalwood beads that hung down from the ceiling, no more than 10cm apart. At one end of the container was a video screen showing a film I made exploring the Buddhist idea at the core of the Heart Sutra. At the other end was the entranceway, hung with a dense curtain of bead strings. The lighting inside was a low-level red, to suggest the inside of a Buddhist temple. The visitor would have to push aside the slightly heavy bead curtain, and while his or her eyes were adjusting to the lighting inside, make his or her way forward to the video screen to see depictions of the Heart Sutra dealing with both the physical and spiritual aspects of the sutra. Once visitors had seen the video, they would navigate back through the strings of beads to emerge blinking into the daylight. The beads, of which there were more than 120,000, were made from sandalwood and gave off a pungent, pleasant aroma that was not only strong within the container, but could be smelled from some distance away. Many visitors to Heart Sutra literally followed their noses through the festival until they found it. As the interior of the container itself was very hot, I occasionally revived the wood with a sandalwood polish that restored and intensified the smell. Because the strings of beads were close together, it was impossible to move through the work without touching them and as they swung to and fro, the sensation of contact with the bead strings was for some people like a gentle massage. The lighting inside the container was kept deliberately low not only to mimic the effect of a temple, but also to ensure that people outside the container could not see what was going on inside. The visitors' natural curiosity encouraged them to step inside. Inside, sound was provided by the clacking of the beads against each other and from two speakers that relayed a repetition of the mantra sound 'Omm', which got progressively longer and louder, rising and deepening in pitch. The films displayed on the video monitor examined various aspects of the Heart Sutra in Buddhist thought, taking in both the physical aspect (through the display of the acupuncture points on the head) and the spiritual (through the sutra itself written on my own skull and face). Some visitors to the installation would realise that the actions they took to reach the video monitors were themselves an acting out of aspects of the Heart Sutra itself. When I created the installation I was not particularly bothered if visitors understood the spiritual nature of its basis or the deconstruction of a religious ritual that made up the experience of entering the container. I hoped that viewers of the video would recognise at least one line from the sutra and know that it was the Heart Sutra, but I was not setting out to explain the Heart Sutra to them. In fact, I was keen that visitors would leave with the impression that coming across the Heart Sutra in an unexpected situation did not automatically make the experience a serious one. Although I was working from a base in Buddhist thought, the visitor to the installation did not have to; I wanted people to recognise that there were religious elements in the work, but I did not want to preach religion or philosophy at them. People could take whatever they wanted from the experience.

CM: If you look at the progression we have just talked about, there is quite a logical progression, working from graphic design which had its drawbacks for you, to starting painting, consistently exploring the visualisation of Buddhism from paintings moving into film, from film moving into installation. It feels a logical development. When you finally saw the work in place were there any surprises for you?

YC: It is not entirely a logical progression. In part, I was merely studying and using the artistic education I was given. It did not seem a logical progression, just the one that I happened to experience. When I applied to enter the festival, I had no firm expectations about how my work would be presented to the public or how the public would react to it. Although I have made installations in galleries before, this was the first time that I had to work in an enclosed space and present the work to so many different types of people. I think the interactive element of this piece was one of its most positive points. The combination of its lighting, smell, sound and tactile elements worked well together. This work received enthusiastic press reviews and mentions on local television, which generated even more visitors to it. On a personal note, it also let me show my family that I could produce work worthy of media interest, and allowed my friends to see how my work had developed over the three years since last they had seen my art.

CM: You and I have talked about visualisation in advance. It is one thing knowing it is a container and knowing its size and having ideas that you have sketched already about the colour, the approximation of a temple, but when you first had the idea, could you see it clearly in your head?

YC: When I submitted my plans to the festival for my work, I had already internalised the space I would have available, so there were no surprises when I faced the physical reality of the container. I had already completed the video that was the central part of the installation, so I was able to work back from there to include all the other concepts in the container. I did not need to learn the text of the Heart Sutra Ð I knew it by heart (so to speak) Ð I repeat it to myself when I get nervous or when I am sick. It acts as a spiritual protection. I had read it many years ago, but reading it again in London, which was such an alien environment, gave it new meanings. So I asked myself why shouldn't I use myself to present it. I had the bald head and hands to write the sutra on and decided that I should display how it protects both my body and spirit. Once I had completed the film, I wanted it to be part of something bigger than just appearing on a monitor screen. I began to think about other materials I could find and immediately I thought of beads because they are an important symbol Ð but I didn't want to include the beads in a way that would be construed as serious. The way beads smell is really important because it makes people calm down, so they are more relaxed and less inclined to worry about things. And, of course, a central idea of the sutra is that you do not need to worry

CM: So all the elements are filling in and connecting one with the other Ð I found the sound extraordinary as well because when you gave me the film of the installation I listened to the extraordinary range of the sound and even dropping these into the box of powder gives a terrific feeling. Can you describe arriving at the location, because I think I find the location more interesting than you do because the container units are usually seen alongside the docks and from the film you showed me the area itself is very interesting. Did you know anything about the location? Or did you think purely in terms of the container itself?

YC: It was the first time I had ever been to Khaoshung. I knew generally that it was a massive area for sea-containers, but even people who lived in the city hadn't seen the container area until the festival space was constructed. Before that, the whole place had been walled off as a ministry of defence space because it was accessible via the ocean and the government gave such places high security considerations. So all I had known about was the size of the container and I had to work with that. When I first went to Khaoshung I was surprised because I did not know how I would handle all the space around the container. However, the organisation was very good; the curators gave us everything we needed. I was given an assistant to do a lot of the groundwork preparing the container, which gave me the time to find bead manufacturers and other materials that I needed. I also liked the way in which the organisers put different artists and different countries together so visitors were able to experience a broad cross-section of work. As well as this, there was a stage for live performances near the containers, so visitors could see some of the installations, enjoy a music or dance performance and then go back and see more art.

CM: Looking at the catalogue and the way you have described the festival, I think you were being very discreet about how you felt about the other containers. Can you sum up the range of work that was not by you or the works which you thought were a good and creative use of the space?

YC: Artists came from Taiwan and fifteen other countries (UK, Yugoslavia, Jamaica, Austria, Sweden, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Germany, USA, Switzerland, Singapore, Portugal, Canada and France). Each container was different Ð there was no common theme or fashionable conceptual thought running through the exhibition. Several stood out for me. For instance, Albert V. Chong from the USA took his inspiration from the September 11th bombing of the World Trade Center and painted the interior of the container black and suspended small paper planes from the ceiling, each containing the name of someone who had been killed. Jian-xing Too from Canada built a ping pong table inside the container to reverse the idea of a French museum built on the site of a tennis court. David Mach, from the UK, twisted the metal of the container so that it looked as if a bomb had exploded inside it. Yoshinori Hosoki from Japan built a bus shelter along one side of the container and projected a video of a bus arriving on the other wall. Wen-chih Wang of Taiwan constructed a wickerwork entrance to his container that only children could enter. Joan Pomero of France filled her container with fixed moldings of external body parts and invited visitors to fit themselves into each separate part. When I think back to the festival, it is difficult to single out a favourite container because the way you feel about a piece of work is dependent on the mood you are in when you see the art and the length of time you have to look at it and think about it, but there was a lot of challenging and enjoyable work there.

CM: To go back to the beginning Ð I notice from the photographs of this exhibition that is was very wet and everybody was moving about with umbrellas and it was opened by the President so it was obviously something the Taiwanese government approved of. Have you been invited back, or do you think you might show again next year?

YC: It was the first time that a festival of this kind had ever happened in Khaoshung, and because the President of Taiwan opened the festival, I think they decided to treat it as a serious and high profile event. As far as I know they are going to develop a Container Art Bienniale but I do not know enough details yet. I do not know if I would be invited to another Festival or whether I would be able to go, but I enjoyed the festival and hope it becomes a permanent and important international arts event in the future. It was a good idea and the curators organised it very well.

CM: Looking at the audience response, there were a wide range of people going in Ð children, couples, nice conspiratorial glances as people are going around Ð they do not know how to respond to it and they do respond to it Ð some people found it scary? How do you cope with that?

YC: The whole experience was very good for me. It gave me the opportunity to see how all sorts of people from different ages reacted to the installation. For example, children found it to be fun. Even the shy ones who were worried about it being dark inside and not being able to recognise the bald man with strange writing on his head and hands, liked moving through the beads and the strong smells. They probably didn't understand any of the imagery, but they had enjoyed visiting a an art installation. The high school and university students probably understood more of the imagery in the Heart Sutra, but again, most of them seemed to enjoy the sensory aspect of the work. They really liked the way the beads touched their bodies and the way they had to force their way through to discover more inside. One woman who came to see the work said she had been attracted to it because she had smelled something strange and could not identify it. When she went into the container, she spent time sniffing the beads hanging from the ceiling and then sniffed the prayer beads she was wearing on her wrist. She likened the experience of entering the container as going into a forest where at first the beads are plants growing all around you so that you have to investigate further, but as get further into the container it is more like walking through a waterfall that constantly massages you. Before she would come to the Khaoshung festival, she had not been sure about different approaches to art, but afterwards she said how much she had enjoyed it.

CM: And you did write in the catalogue that you didn't want it to be a serious religious didactic message. It was something you wanted to do, to see how people responded and you had your own hopes for what they got out of it but you don't mind people coming away with no idea of what you were trying to say.

YC: As I said earlier, I come from a family that holds to Buddhist beliefs without being specifically a Buddhist family. And for me, my experiences of Zen Buddhism are something that I came to on my own. I find the way Zen Buddhism relates to the human body fascinating and that has fed my approaches to art. However, I am not a missionary for Zen Buddhism. The Heart Sutra is a central part of Zen Buddhism and if people who visited recognised it and appreciated my approach to it, then it is obviously rewarding for me. However, that wasn't my primary motive in the installation. I wanted to do something that meant something to me artistically and spiritually, but also something that would be enjoyable and fun for visitors. If people did not know what I was saying or even if they recognised it and disagreed with it, I wanted people to come away from experiencing modern art with a positive attitude that would make them want to experience it again. ÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ.

Interviewer's Short Statement

You asked me as an art historian about Zen Buddhism as a source of inspiration or imagery from within your work. I was interested in systems of belief that underpin sets of images, be they photographs, designs or paintings Ð and it is always interesting the extent to which an artist Ð yourself in this case Ð allows himself to be dominated by that system or whether that system is there for the greater enhancement of artistic expression. I think in certain parts of human history people have allowed systems to dominate and as a result they have degenerated into a form of propaganda. I think why I liked looking at your work a lot was because you seemed utterly relaxed about the way it was going to be interpreted.

The most interesting area for me, as it always is, is the multi-cultural implications of this imagery that will excite, calm, inspire people from eastern cultures. Given the particular predicament of a society drenched in imagery how do you offer your work to western audiences? It is fascinating and I would be lying to say that I could offer you any particular advice on that, other than that I am almost the very reverse of you. If I went into meditation it would only be to double and redouble the images in my head as I am only really happy when there is turbulence and chaos in my head that I am then allowed to sort out. I take pride in kaleidoscopic patterns of knowledge, experience and ideas in my head. So that is why I can appreciate the direction in which you are going, but I think you are doomed in a society which is constantly bombarded with information and where people will require you as therapy Ð I can imagine that much of what you do feels therapeutic to a society that is drenched in imagery, but me personally, I fire off energy.

My energy comes not from an emptiness, but from piling things up so I can stand taller and feel bigger standing on my big heap of shards of imagery. It is always interesting that people will have different perceptions and reactions to ideas and the multi-cultural reaction to Buddhism is fascinating and we have talked about it and it is made a lot of difference to people, but it also helps me to identify what is characteristic about being western European and to understand at this particular time what sort of predicament we are in, but also the opportunities that are emerging. I feel myself to be very much a European and I am fascinated in opportunities to define myself against American culture. So, looking at your work has given me the opportunity to think through a lot of very rich, and in narrative terms, very dense material. It stimulates much thought in my mind and I bring to it a strong sense of European modernism and an admiration for magic, for talismans, and like developing that in your context. It is very nice of you to let me in and romp about in your systems of narrative without minding and without disturbing what you wanted to say to us all.

I will give you another thing, without you having to worry about another question. I am very interested in ways painters come to film. I think there are great benefits to people like yourself re-examining film as a medium and I think there are many things that you do not know about film that could benefit you. Looking at the installation and examining the future I spend many happy hours thinking about what it will be like in ten years. Given technological advances, given a bigger budget, I am intrigued whether the systems analysis part of you will end up with some huge epic in the landscape Ð because I do see that what you are doing has some larger implications than containers, dock fronts and films Ð it is possible to see your work in terms of bigger and more complex buildings, and you may in the future devise a series of rooms through which people pass in a sequence of images that leads to some conclusion, some convergence that you want people to enjoy.

YC: I am interested in putting the bodily experience in this piece. Have you found anything about the bodily experience in this project Ð I mean between the artist and the viewer?

CM: I am interested in inhibitions. I feel that as a culture, it is a culture of terrific inhibitions and the greatest and most interesting one is bodily. I am very interested in work that probes the flesh in ways that your culture would not automatically É About bodily functions Ð when you saw the book I have got on oriental medicine you seized on it as a series of representations of the body because it is not natural to Taiwanese culture. But I find that interesting, again on an eccentric and individual basis I am extremely inhibited and always have been along with many people of my generation of bodily processes because the English make so many jokes about what the body is and what the body does because so many of us are inhibited about it. I suspect that only in America and Rome do people flaunt themselves in such ways. I do share a fascination in the body, but as a plumbing system, and a work I did with Nigel Henderson Ð Henderson was one of the members of the independent group. I may have shown you some of his work where he cuts into the body, as a photographer he cuts into the sluices of the face and talks about the entrails and the bowels as being a vast landscape that we happen to inhabit. He found it Ð he told me Ð he found it very difficult to get people to talk about their bodies because they were so encased in suits and shoes and with hats on and they were just walking landscapes were they but to know it. So, I have always been interested in the tangible nature of flesh and I have never had any illusions about my own body. I have always been reasonably healthy, but pray to sudden bouts of hypochondria and always noticed that my body is constantly moving. When I look at my hand a strange tick will now appear on my finger. I love that because my ideas about art are essentially surreal and it is nice to feel that the corpse that I inhabit for the moment is equally a surrealist object and it does very strange things. I think that the idea of writing about art is interesting. I think that artists struggling with the need to communicate to other people what they do is so important, in writing and in speech and I think it is always interesting that the nerves one has before an event like this dissipate within a minute because you suddenly realise it is all about the art and if you purge the ego and the need to be incredibly articulate the art needs communicating and I think film is a magnificent medium because it addresses people where they are now which is on the screen. The idea of making documentaries of your own work and explaining, on screen, what that work is, is essential now for generations who won't automatically engage in art but get their information through the screen.

So I commend you.