The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

72 Chen Chieh-jen On going Chen Chieh-jen’s guerilla-style performance art in 1980s Taipei demonstrated early the artist’s sense of urgency to highlight subjects often hidden or off-limits in Taiwan’s mainstream culture — from the inequity of power to its history of colonisation. Chen’s acts of resistance during Taiwan’s martial law period, which had been in place since 1949, conflated his role as artist, culture jammer and activist. By taking performance art into the streets, Chen critiqued social and political abuses, but also served to openly testify to the belief in personal and artistic freedom of expression. He enacted this through the body, facing a serious risk of personal danger in doing so. When martial law was finally overturned in 1987, however, Chen retreated from making art. It was not until 1996 that he resumed work, this time on a project that stridently questioned the nature of selfhood in contemporary Taiwan, an inquiry inextricably linked to its colonial past. In the digitally manipulated photographs Chen produced from the late 1990s, his body takes the place of Taiwan, becoming a site of depravity and the grotesque within scenes of horror — simultaneously victim, perpetrator and historical accomplice. On Going 2006 can be seen as the culmination of several films by Chen which reveal Taiwan’s once-thriving structures of industry as ruins. In the works Factory 2003 and Bade Area 2005, he reveals the complex implications this has had for people left unemployed and displaced by the loss of industries, which have moved out of the country in search of higher profits. 1 Chen recognises the indifference of mainstream media in respect to these issues; these people have no voice, and Chen describes their situation, like others in Taiwan, as ‘being shrouded’. 2 The coping mechanism of the amnesiac, which compartmentalises the past, becomes a feature of On Going , where silence heightens the presence of a cloaked consciousness, in insistent, surfacing images that refuse the shroud. The new edit of On Going , shown for the first time in APT6, considers the role of political ideologies in Taiwan, hinging past and present. On Going opens with a slow gliding camera shot, circling the interior windows of a high-rise office block; the central atrium and its vacant floors establish a palpable sense of void which permeates the film. Next, an abandoned factory becomes a dark theatre which shelters a solitary anti-imperialist and his beaten-up truck. 3 Fluorescent lighting describes the edge of this stage, over which numerous fire extinguishers and bundles of flyers are littered. The man slowly shifts some fire extinguishers onto a pile and loads bundles of papers into the back of the truck. Chen’s 35mm film absorbs the nuanced gloom of the factory, suffused with detail and deep colours — red, blue, greenish grey — as it tracks through the scene, graceful and seemingly luxurious in contrast to the content on stage. In the rear of the truck the man is surrounded by framed portraits of leftists who have been executed in Taiwan. Ageing pamphlets lie strewn on the floor, along with a copy of The Communist Manifesto . A black car emerges from an invisible entrance. It is adorned with stickers calling for Taiwan to become the 51st state of the United States. No contact is made between the anti-imperialist and the driver of the car, both of whom seem distanced from reality as if their coexistence in this stage is a coincidental crossing of parallel dimensions. The driver makes no attempt to get out, and in a moment we see that the interior has filled with smoke, and he can no longer be seen sitting upright in the driver’s seat. Excerpts from a black-and-white documentary about the US military stationed in Taiwan during the Cold War take over the screen. In government parlour rooms, deals are toasted, while bombs detonate and machine guns strafe the night. Returning to Chen’s film, large pieces of ash float in from the dark. The location in the factory has changed to a similar grey room now populated by defunct machines. The back of the truck has been burnt, but from behind a red curtain the man produces a suitcase housing a small screenprinting set, and begins printing manifestos on unused dot-matrix printer paper left under the factory’s machines. Televised media returns to screen in which news clips talk about arms procurement in Taiwan. The man gets into the driver’s seat, and backs the truck out of the factory room, leaving it lit but deserted, stage open, and in a state of suspension. About On Going , Chen writes: I understand that the abstractive expressing form and the political problems in interior Taiwan are not easily understood . . . If we leave aside the political situation in Taiwan, I do hope the viewers just see the film as ‘image poetry’ and experience the state in the film. 4 Naomi Evans Endnotes 1 Chen Chieh-jen describes his work ‘as an act of connection, linking together the history of people who have been excluded from the dominant discourse, the real- life situations of areas that are being ignored, and “others” who are being isolated. In this way, I resist the state of amnesia in consumer society’. ‘Chen Chieh-jen’, Artes Mundi 4 , <http://www.artesmundi.org/artistProfiles/artistProfileChieh-jen.php> , viewed 29 October 2009. 2 Chen Chieh-jen, email to the author, 21 October 2009. 3 Chen, email to the author. Chen describes the actor in this film as a member of an anti-imperialism group: ‘The group only has two or three members and their claims have never been followed with interest’. 4 Chen, email to the author