Then We Swing

Written by Wu Shang-Yung

My previous works focused on elaborating the interactions of time and spaces, or the coexistence of event and objects. Recently, instead of social observing in a wide scale, I gradually focus on dialectical logic. I would like to deconstruct the normal phenomena and their inertial patterns in daily lives. I stand in a non-linear, shifting position to discover the uncertainties of essence and the relative connections.

I don’t know how it began, but I find myself starting to gather objects around the sea shore. The beautiful shells or corals didn’t attract me, on the contrary, the flood wood with weird shape, stones with special textures, or things I don’t even know way they are fascinated me. Most of them are abandoned furniture, living wares, and building materials. Those artificial wastes are abandoned into nature. After interactions with the rain, river, sea, sun and sands, those man-made products become pieces of nature again. It’s a cycle, these items keep on changing their identities and forms through time. I am very interested in the circulation of “cognition” and “identity”. I am wondering the embodiment of identities and cognition to something is like the concept of “now, past and future” – a concept that is defined by the person who observed them.

When it comes to unknown things, it’s normal for us to look around and gather information that we may know. Then use logic and inertia to analyze and conclude these information to finish the readings to the unknowns. When there is lack of information, we tend to use the self-experience to find the associations and connect possible text. Hence we can simulate and construct the system contexts. This process of exploration, cognition, and deduction conveys an idea that people are giving meanings and values to things in daily lives. However, the patterns will be quite different due to the individual experience, and the growing backgrounds. For example, when it comes to the public affairs, people from different parties use their own patterns to deduct the perfect solutions. Those solutions cannot always convince all of the people and always fall apart with time flows away.

The dichotomy is a usual way to observe the world: right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, black or white. However, it’s easy to ignore the complicate relations between time, spaces, and ideologies. Joachim Peiper, a German officer of World War II, once said that, “History is always written by the victor and histories of the vanquished belong to a shrinking circle of those who were there.” This quote is a reference of fact and truth. It’s relative. There is no truth. There is only the fact that every individual observer in a specific circumstance. Stories are told different depends on the person who’s talking. Therefore, technically, the things have no meanings, for the meanings are temporally defined and relative. Meanings are shifting in the different time and spaces. The truth and fact that last forever are merely a hypothesis for people to understand this world easier.

Without any doubt, to the entire world, human beings are subjects with the most powerful right to speak. Human beings consider themselves as the spokesmen of this world, defying all the meaning, value, even the logic of the world. The whole world is defined by human; it’s defined for human. It makes me wonder maybe if we stand aside and use the non-linear logic, or even without logic to think, to deconstruct, to reassemble all of the values that are developed or defined by human, we can start up a whole new connections and conversations between human and objects. In the meantime, the deep-rooted systems of values, the unbreakable patterns of thoughts and the complex ideologies will be shattered in a second, and then become subtle or even meaningless.

In this solo exhibition, the subjects of my paintings will demonstrate in simple abstract constructions seem like silhouettes. I would like to create an ambiguous image that seemed “readable” to guide viewers’ minds step into the route of cognition and analyze under limited information. My paintings would interweave a vague conversation with some dialectical videos, in which images are not what they meant, and some ready-made installations. The point is not to clarify any specific idea. What I want to do is to expand viewers’ imaginations about the essence of things, the time, and the spaces by the connections between multiple figures of my works and viewers’ minds.