Enigmas of the Absent

There was once a wooden shack full of trash on the rooftop of Yeh Wei-li (葉偉立) and Wu Yu-xing (吳雨心)’s studio in Treasure Hill (寶藏巖), Taipei.

The illegally built shack was filled with all kinds of remains and collected objects by its original owner, a retired soldier who left for China after obtaining his pension a few years ago. As if peeling the layers off a giant cabbage, Yeh, Wu and some of their friends spent four months removing the entire structure and its accompanying debris from the rooftop. Some of the trash was burned, some was removed to the other abandoned house in front of their studio, and more was just placed in between two fences behind the house. The trash remains clustered, scattered or disappeared “just within two or three meters of this house,” said Wu Yu-xing.[i]

During the process of cleaning up the shack, Yeh and Wu found many objects of the original owner kept in good order. They came across a military diary, which records the house owner’s life after he left the military service and started working in the city. To Yeh and Wu, this diary is the most precious item found in the shack.

Remains

In a general understanding, trash never has the characteristic of being self-supportive, but more as a vocabulary waiting to be crossed off. Its only recognizable condition is no more than being objects ready to be left behind. Trash, as the humblest name of all remains, covers its enigmatic inners for departure. The best example I could think of is probably an electronic file being dragged into the recycle bin on a Microsoft operating system. You cannot open it; its filing route however tells how it was left.

Yeh Wei-li's life on Treasure Hill began with trash. In the first year of the project, Yeh and Liu Ho-jang came to Treasure Hill to participate in a community-based artist residency and collaborative documentary photography project organized by GAPP. Yeh and Liu reconstructed the current studio space in two weeks, transforming it into the base for the Treasure Hill Tea + Photo (THTP) project. They invited local residents and other visitors for free portrait shooting through informal teatime conversation. They also created written records of their interactions and exchanges with the visitors. During the eight-week period of THTP Phase One / Portrait Project (February to April in 2004), they took about four hundred portraits, and turned a private studio into a public space for social contact and service. In THTP Phase Two / Delineations, Yeh and Liu continued to expand the functions of THTP by transforming the space into a teahouse, a photo studio, a photography resource center, a darkroom and a living space for Yeh. In the meantime, they took series of photographs exploring the space, objects, people, and varied happenings inside and outside their studio. The works from this phase later were printed into posters in massive quantity, and exhibited in the 2004 Taipei Biennial: Do You Believe in Reality?

THTP Phase Three is a collaboration between Yeh Wei-li and Wu Yu-xing begun from the shack— home of the found objects atop on their studio. “Trash as the remains” forms the center of its meaning. With its passive slowness, its materiality and its aura revealing past touches of history, trash shapes this project and indicates its relations to the world. It does not intend to go away; it remains right here.

In addition to exhibiting inside the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the project will also be showed in the THTP. For the artists, the latter takes the more important role: the house itself is the “real work” that includes the social and artistic realization[ii], and is the fundamental keystone for THTP Phase Three.

Appendix

Wu yu-xing told a story that fascinated me.

…once we heard about a resident in that house passed away. A long time later, we walked by the house and found a pair of underwear had been hanging there, as if still waiting to be sun-dried.

I think these are meant to stay here, or are not worth being taken away; they are merely abandoned. This concept forms the core metaphor in Yeh and Wu’s project. “Trash” within quotation marks becomes more than a useless abandoned object. On the contrary, it becomes an appendix, a connection evoking historical events. In my first visit to the THTP, piles of found clothes were stacked inside the house. Some hanging on the wall were also the subjects of photographs. The simple action of hanging, like a means of nomination, magically turns the anonymous clothes into a kind of appendix.

“Sense of time has been an important matter to me,” emphasizes Yeh. The sense of time inside these images lies on a visible subject, as this abandoned trash house and its remains refer to the past identity of their owner. On the other hand, through the theatrical arrangement of objects, the artists unveil their existence by exposing the artistic form (although most arrangements are so subtle they're almost traceless). These two layers of existence are not mutually exclusive, but imply the events, possessions and refuse of a certain time: a glimmering historical quality. The artists interweave these organic historical beings together by repeating the limited scenes and objects restlessly.

Yeh and Wu gave me a poster of Yeh’s solo exhibition Three Places (2005). Both sides of the poster depict the same interior space from the same angle: No. 24, Lane 191 shows its untouched look, and Marguerite Duras reveals its altered state after the artists cleaned up the space and placed on a shelf Yeh’s entire collection of books by French author Marguerite Duras (1914-1996). Duras is Yeh’s favorite writer, as well as the title of the work. These interrelated images, though technically frozen in a two-dimensional expression, do not serve as a witness to any specific space-time.

It is rather a progress of composition in extending the context of such space-time. The artist does not intend to manipulate an imagination via rhetorical shifting. Quite the opposite, I believe the significance lies in a special naming process—it is not about a specific writer or a specific room, but the series of true stories uncovered by this visible formation. 

Sphere of Dream

One noticeable point about Yeh and Wu’s visual compositions on these particular experiences is that they do not slip into the documentary genre
,
despite the fact that the remains of the specific site have always been the subjects of their photographic works.  On the contrary, because the remains always appear anonymously, they retrace in an imprecise manner that creates a vast blankness for countless enigmas. Since they cannot evoke all the mysteries about the absent, these images are kept in a dreamlike state: bunches of symbols lying under the sub-consciousness are re-formulated in different contexts over and over again, and their narratives approach the enigma in their unhurried pace.

The artists' intention in building a sphere of dream can be read through the exhibition format. In the 2005 exhibition Three Places, at the National Central University Art Center, Yeh adapted a labyrinthine spatial design to allow open passageways for viewers by placing photographs on canvases in organic positions. For the free perspective, images from artist’s three residential places (Muzha, Yangmei and Treasure Hill) would be reconfigured into varied versions of memories according to the viewer’s random visit. The more one circled around the exhibition space, the more completely these three places were interwoven into one experience. The Trash Project continues this display format, rearranging the filmed[photographed?] scenes without sequential order in order to overlap diverse memories so that we encounter the mise-en-scène as if in a dream.

For Yeh and Wu, The Trash Project is a conclusive collection of the THTP project running from 2004 to the present. Nevertheless, this is not a documentary report for the THTP, project. The artists do not intend to present proof of historical existence, but rather the possibility of narrating their “captures of the historical beings.” In other words, who wore those abandoned clothes is never an issue. The significance is rather about how the artists hang these old clothes in order to protect this anonymous person within the enigmas of the absent and allow our repeating gazes to keep pondering those enigmas.

Reality

Yeh states, “The THTP has been undertaking a kind of recording, or rather, a strange research. The Trash Project, for me, might exemplify the methodology of this strange research, and redefine the efficiency and possibility of ‘local art practice’ and ‘community-based art practice.’” These have been tied up with Taiwanese cultural policy since the 90s, despite the fact that this redefining act is exemplified by the struggles that THTP has been experiencing in reality[iii].

It is clear that Yeh resists taking thoughtless shots of the marginalized scenes of Treasure Hill, or of a bohemian lifestyle fantasy approach to modern society. Yet he does not regard his art practice as community work, even though he has been living and working there for almost three years. He tries to build his studio as a working base for art practice, not a window for showing how he practices (as most of Taiwanese railway artist villages do). Yeh emphasizes:

A big part of my practice is very personal…I am just interested in where I live. Our work may seem like community work, but in fact the subject of our research is only one house.

Due to Yeh’s “(strange) research methodology”, to research one house does not mean to reveal less than doing research about an entire community. The intentions beneath the artists capturing the remains of the absent ghost and the way the artists deal with their relationship with the community are almost poetic. The Trash Project transforms two years of the THTP history into the context of works. Through the lens, the artists do not just witness. It is more like they practice a psychoanalysis to portray the history of one house and the unique spirit of the Treasure Hill community—a site full of traces of the absent. 

---

[i] All the words quoted from the artists come from records of the writer's interviews with Yeh Wei-li and Wu Yu-xing dated March 5, March 27 and April 6 of 2006.

[ii] The direction of THTP project has been very clear to Yeh Wei-li since the beginning. It is a photography resource center and a base for a long-term documentary practice. He emphasizes, “It has its functional part and creative part. For me, art that engages with community is the only workable context for my practices.”

[iii] Yeh Wei-li admits that the THTP’s original aims of becoming “a photography resource center” in the community have yet to be carried out. “It becomes an installation, a concept, a model, and a retained status. Its development up to present proves its failure, but it also reflects the reality of this place.” In his opinion, this reality includes two false hypotheses: one is to imagine the future of Treasure Hill as “an artist village without equipment and resources” and believe it is doable. The second is to assume that the traditional community life in Treasure Hill must sustain a close interactive relationship among the residents. For the first hypothesis, Yeh believes that an artist village without equipment and resources could only supportartists doing nothing. Its short-term residency program makes community interaction even farther out of reach. Yeh argues that the urban renewal plan of the Taipei City Government for Treasure Hill has been stalled for years. The residents of the community are held in total uncertainty about their future, not knowing if their home will be removed or preserved, therefore there is no interaction among people here, not to mention that the different property rights and resource of residents certainly increase the distrust among people in Treasure Hill.