11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Compound eyes of tropical (stills) 2020–22/2024 / Single-channel 4K video installation: colour, sound, 16 minutes, ed. 6/6; wire, newspaper, glazed paper, paste, plastic beads, accessories / 5 puppets; 5 bases: installed dimensions variable / Purchased 2024. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art BORN 1988, TAIPEI, TAIWAN LIVES+WORKS INTAIPEI Zhang Xu Zhan’s Compound eyes of tropical 2020–22/2024 is a dizzying proposition: a darkly comic cross-cultural, cross-species analysis of mythological archetypes drawing on Chinese folk dance, Indonesian and Taiwanese percussion and Eastern European puppetry, and presented as a propulsive stop-motion animation — with accompanying dioramas. While on a residency in Indonesia, Zhang Xu encountered the Malay fable of the mouse-deer and the crocodiles. This story of a small, clever animal tricking larger predators into helping them across a river was repeated throughout Asia, Africa and Europe, with corresponding narratives in Mediterranean, Indian and West Asian proverbial traditions. The mouse-deer has analogues as a fox, monkey, rabbit, zodiac rat and even as a gingerbread man, while the crocodile might also appear as a fox, water buffalo, giant crab or hippopotamus, with variations made to represent local fauna. Zhang Xu found that this kind of adaptable narrative is known as morphology in folklore studies — authoritatively catalogued in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of folktales — and he set about creating his own kind of meta-mythology. The protagonist of his story is a hybrid — or, to use his term, ‘remix’ — creature, combining characteristics of a mouse-deer and a fox, who stars in an animated dramatisation of the tale. The video amps up the action, using cinematic devices — including a crocodile’s-eye view that is at once ominous and hilarious — to place the small creature in considerable peril. Descending to the water to drink, the mouse-deer-fox is attacked by a crocodile and forced to clamber across its back to escape. As the action intensifies, the protagonist transforms into a rabbit and back again, the crocodile likewise flashing between the forms of buffalos and crabs. The cultural transits and juxtapositions (not to mention breakneck pace) of the video are amplified by its dramatic, percussive soundtrack, played on-screen by gamelan and Taiwanese folk drum orchestras made up of a host of tiny creatures. As the animals momentarily reveal human dancers supporting them, it becomes apparent that the entire scenario is an elaborate costumed performance. Here, Zhang Xu references Chinese dragon and lion dances, Japanese marionettes and the animal-costumed yi zhen troupes of Taiwanese temple festivals. This conceit is extended through the character of a fly, whose movements derive from the Pearl of Wisdom— the ball that leads dragons through their dances, and on to knowledge and truth. The enlightenment that the fly invites is represented by its titular compound eye, which for Zhang Xu provides a fractured yet totalising perspective. This fracturing is mirrored when the mouse-deer-fox, on the verge of escape, suddenly shatters into a shower of glass fragments. Even the form of Zhang Xu’s cheekily grotesque stop-motion puppetry pays tribute to cultural traditions. While his animation style is inspired by the darkly surreal creations of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, the puppets themselves are constructed from joss paper pasted onto flexible wire frames. Zhang Xu’s family runs the popular, century-old Hsing-Hsin Paper Sculpture store in Taipei, which continues an age-old craft of creating elaborate joss paper houses, effigies and flowers to be burnt as offerings at ceremonies, especially funerals. His adaptation of this technique gives his puppets their unique texture, while the proximity of death and its rituals to his family business infuses his work with its philosophical aspect, as well as its black humour. In this sense, for all its comedy and drama, Compound eyes of tropical plays out as a single narrative in a cycle of predation and trickery, of pursuit, flight and faltering, utterly compelling in its specificity, yet open to retelling in infinite forms. REUBENKEEHAN ZHANGXUZHAN ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 214 — 215