A Proposal about the Ontology of Painting in the Face of Absence – A Reading of CHI Chien’s Solo Exhibition Passing Through The Post-Garden

Written by Chien Tzu-Chieh

Art critic / curator / Adjunct Associate Professor at National Taiwan University of Arts and Taipei National University of the Arts / Taishin Arts Award Nominators

As what Chen Kuang-Yi mentions in the article “The Truth of Painting – A Discussion on CHI Chien’s Prima Facie Exhibit: Park,” CHI Chien’s artworks reveal his search for the “truth of painting.”  However, following the contemporary philosophical trend which moves from the discussion of ontology to the exploration of concreteness, CHI Chien also “avoids the boring philosophical discourse and return to his life experiences with thoughts about form as he explores the truth of painting.”[1] It leads to the question: what kind of “thought about form” is realized in his recent solo exhibition Passing Through The Post-Garden?  If we look at the context of CHI’s works, we will remember that Chen Chih-Cheng, CHI’s graduate advisor, has brought up the concept of “Corps de la peinture,” a theory based on Western modern and contemporary art history.[2]  As the concept is absorbed into CHI’s artistic practice, what does the idea of form and the exploration of the truth-of-painting become when the artist takes a step closer to the daily life?

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Indeed, Passing Through The Post-Garden offers a great number of form-related traces, but what maps out the form here is not the concept of Formalism as how modern art in last century has explained it. Similar to the idea of “Corps de la peinture,” defined by Chen Chih-Cheng as a complex concept which includes physicality and media’s material quality, the form represented in Passing Through The Post-Garden also points to the subjective statement mixed with certain space experiences.  In the artist statement of the exhibition, CHI Chien mentions that the concept of “garden” originates from his life experiences when walking around the urban space: “on my way to the studio, I always pass through these narrow alleys – which are made narrower by the bonsais on the both sides. These bonsais create an image of a ‘garden.’ It is where reality, form, and cultural measurement battle for space – to demonstrate and to occupy.”

Therefore, CHI Chien exhibits several cement-cast traffic cones, which should be in orange plastic in real life, with wheels fixed to the bottom to move the cones more easily. The bonsais scattered around the exhibition space are actually copper-cast plants and cement-cast pots.[3]  In the installation-based works of “Dust Series,” images usually signify certain daily experiences, such as the traffic cones and bonsais for those viewers who always have to find parking spaces in the alleys.  More importantly, although the images evoke the mundane gloominess shared by all lives on the island, these man-made objects in CHI’s exhibition appear to be appropriate to the space, for that they have already become the “form” – the charming remains when all the content is removed. As viewers see what the objects used to be, they also avoid the unpleasant situations such as walking along an alley.  It is like the “garden” in CHI’s definition.  Although the objects are based upon the private barriers scattered around the public space, they are given a different order and form when being exhibited.  It is true that they are not simply visual form appealing to sensory significance, but compared to real bonsais, a sense of bizarrerie still infiltrates the copper-cast plants of eternity.

The bizarrerie is also noticed in the unknown object penetrated and suspended by wire rope in front of the floor-to-ceiling window at the gallery entrance. The work is titled “Break Brick,” while its inside is brick-built with two faces more intact than the others.  One maintains the roughness of the cement wall and the other, the varnished one, is surprisingly smooth after being carefully polished.  At this point, we come to realize that the object – the remains of a brick wall facing both inside and outside – is more like a piece of meat hung above at a butcher’s stall.  Its nakedness helps create a “materialized” artificial distance from its original state, like how an “art form” creates a distance from the content.  However, the strong sense of materiality revealed from the remains meanwhile highlights the past service of the object.  Compared to the context of its function which has already disappeared, they become the “double” without a master.  The form of “Dust Garden” is like the unintentional double image of one’s life experiences.  In an ordinary situation, we can pretend they do not exist, but once we notice the intimate relationship between form and reality, we can no longer get away from our suspicion.  What we suspect is not merely the real identity of the objects in front of our eyes but the identity’s form displayed in art history.

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Compared to “Dust Garden Series,” where we see traces of reality included in the form, “Garden” – another main series in the exhibition Passing Through The Post-Garden – directs the discussion about form, through which the painting exists, to the art-making process – in spite of its apparent revealing of the painting’s form: the theme of the painting “flowers” is not hand-painted, but the “painterly product” through a series of manufacturing procedures. These flowers are the pre-existing patterns on the fabrics.  CHI Chien first purchased fabrics printed with floral pattern.  He later covered the flowers with a layer of paint through various techniques such as screen printing to create a background.  The quartet continuous floral pattern vector originally existing on the fabrics is thus no longer the decorative elements but the object of painting. In other words, the “painting” here is emphasized as a borrowed concept or a readymade.   Similar to the form which has been removed from the context of the objects’ function in “Dust Garden,” a painting style like this not merely differentiates itself from the traditional practice of hand-painted images, but accentuates certain gap within the ontology of Painting through a series of procedures unrelated to the traditional practice of painting.

However, the creator-and-created relationship between image and painting is not a one-way street. Take the diptych “Reproducing garden,” the No. 19 work in “Garden Series,” for example; the painting on the left follows the exact procedures which transform the fabric pattern into a painting, but in the painting on the right, the hand-painted pattern on the sackcloth is the imitation of the fabric pattern. It thus creates similar but continuously differentiating discrepancies, minute but undeniable.  The similarity brings intimacy, but the continuously differentiating discrepancies counteract the sense of intimacy.  It looks similar, but they are indeed different.  It is what we expect, but it also surprises us, like how Sigmund Freud defines his concept of “the uncanny,” where the existing subjectivity of an art form is one step away from animism.

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If the reproducible images from the industrial age can be taken as painting, the question raised by “Garden Series” is thus more like a discourse based on the misplaced art history: it shares some similarity with Pop Art with criticism on the system. Pop Art liberates the connection between the signifier and the signified to reverse the hierarchy where elite culture is the only dominance.  As a consequence, every contribution becomes worthless – such relativity still plays a crucial role in the forming of our localness.  In comparison, CHI Chien’s Pop-Art expression decides to reshape the ontology of painting as if he were dealing with an iconography.  Meanwhile, the absence engraved in the relativity mentioned above helps CHI to bring his practice of painting to the height of ontology.  What “Garden Series” attempts to reveal is not any Modernist illusion which “promotes” reproducible images to the status of painting.  Instead, CHI avoids the painting technique he is good at, but makes a great effort to create the painterly effect, re-weaving the narrative of his ontology-of-painting in the mundane measurements of commodities.  Compared to his solo exhibition Prima Facie Exhibit: Park last year, he no longer bases his practice on the concept of forms which need to be examined by post-colonialist theories – after all, when we talk about form, its validity still depends on whether the city where the artist lives has sufficient access to the world’s capital culturel. It further reveals the bizarre state of Passing Through The Post-Garden which emphasizes the existence of form through a non-form approach. The discourse woven within the exhibition becomes a methodological proposal in the face of absence.


[1] See Chen Kuang-Yi, “The Truth of Painting – A Discussion on CHI Chien’s Prima Facie Exhibit: Park,” published in CHI Chien’s catalogue Prima Facie Exhibit: Park for the exhibition at Crane Gallery in 2014 under the same title (Xinbei City: CHI Chien Artwork, 2014) 21.
[2] “Corps de la peinture” originates from Chen Chih-Cheng’s studies when he was in France. Its basic definition is “the genealogy of the main substance of the qualities of painting within art itself (briefly defined as Corps de la peinture): idioms of painting, while in addition to the materials’ preexisting qualities, the main substance of painting can also be seen in those artworks with bodies on-site.”  See Chen Chih-Cheng, “Idioms of Painting: Pictures Degree Zero in Contemporary Pluralistic Paintings,” Proceedings of International Conference on the Studies of Painting in Contemporary Art (Taipei County: National Taiwan University of Arts, 2005).
[3] These orchid bonsais and rose bonsais are the casts of real plants by professional workshop.


This article was originally published on “Taishin Artalk – Latest Critiques by Taishin Arts Award Nominators” on the website of Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture (http://talks.taishinart.org.tw/juries/frq/2015091704)