Illusion Laid Bare

Wu Chi-Tsung, Rain, 2002 © Wu Chi-Tsung

“This is only what the camera sees.”

In 2002 Wu Chi-Tsung (吳季璁, b. 1981) finished his work Rain. In this thirteen minute single channel video recording, the artist used a digital camera to record the view through his home window. The Guandu Bridge which spans the Danshui River is centered in the picture frame, with Guanyin Mountain in the distance and Dadu Road, Guandu Bridge Interchange and the Danshui line of the MRT (Mass Rapid Transport) in the foreground. This is a typical rain scene in northern Taiwan and at first glance it seems like an uninspired home video, but close-ups of the raindrops appear to be unusual. Under the extremely fast 1/8000 second shutter speed that the artist used to make this recording, the quickly moving raindrops no longer appear as streaks and are instead cut into non-continuous fragments of movement. Each little globule of rain seems to flutter chaotically in front of the ordinary scene, creating an effect a little like montage. But in reality, this short video hasn’t been edited and doesn’t use special techniques, and is merely created by the artist’s single camera focused on a definite place documenting an actual event.

‘It’s simply that they’re two worlds,’ said Wu Chi-Tsung describing this photographic reproduction of a rain scene and how it differs from what is seen by the naked eye. The video seems to have been made with little effort, however, the appearance of the eerie and strange raindrops creates a disintegrating world as one tries to reconcile the completely different feelings of time in the distant scenery and the close-up. This break in continuity makes it impossible for this merely to be a ‘landscape’, instead the audience is reminded that ‘this landscape is simply what the camera sees,’ as Wu Chi-Tsung has said. Although an overcast and rainy scene is still emotionally expressive, Rain certainly wasn’t intended to be an indulgent appreciation of beauty. By presenting an experience of this landscape that differs from what can be seen by the naked eye, the artist was seeking to initiate a critical reading of the image. The work is permeated with threads of vigilance, intrinsically woven into the video by the image technology that slices the flow of time into segments.

Illusion - Something to be considered

The relationship between video technology and the real world, and the influence the ‘status of the video’ has on our reality, has been a conscious concern in Wu Chi-Tsung’s work all along. As an artist who received his initial academic training in Taiwan, Wu Chi-Tsung started utilising new media in his work as a result of taking a video art class with Yuan Guang-Ming (袁廣鳴, b. 1965) in his second year of college. This course allowed him to shoot a large quantity of video, and at times he shot four or five pieces a week. ‘That was a very important time,’ Wu Chi-Tsung remembers, ‘because I had to shoot so many things in such a short period of time I had to process a lot of images, which allowed me filter out many common presumptions about video art.’

Wu Chi-Tsung, Wire II, 2003 © Wu Chi-Tsung

At present, it seems obvious that Wu Chi-Tsung filtered out some kind of ‘unrestrained illusionism’ prevalent in video art. According to him, illusion isn’t a fundamental manifestation of video but rather something to be considered. How do we revive our vigilance towards video technology and the space between us and the subject, while viewing the video? This remains an important mission[1]. Around the same time he was making Rain, the artist used a hand held camera to shoot wallpaper installed on the Windows Operating System to create Landscape (2002). The artist compressed the film in a post production stage which made the image quality very crude. Because of the movement of the hand held camera, the small tropical island in the video, which is standardised by Microsoft for mass production, seemed as if it were real, but the scanning lines that appear when a computer screen is recorded on video, created an effect whereby the illusion had to be cast off. Just like Rain, it had a mesmerising effect, but also one where viewers couldn’t trust what they were seeing. It merged ‘the creation of illusion with its self negation’ in one turn, as the illusion hinted at its own self exposure.  These strategies became ones commonly used by Wu Chi-Tsung and established an appropriate distance and viewing position for his work. 2003’s Wire I and Wire II clearly laid bare Wu Chi-Tsung’s complete set of concerns for his work and creation strategy.

It’s not just Ink Painting in a Machine Age

These two projection installations employed lenses and irregular wire netting to project altered and enlarged reflections and shadows on the wall. The light and shadows also followed the changing mechanical movements of a projector.  In Wire I images were altered by a magnifying lens that continually moved back and forth within a 10cm range thereby changing the focus. Wire II used a fixed lens and a spool of wire revolving back and forth, which created a similar varying effect.  Even though the mechanical movement was different, the poetic quality of the projections was the same. The two projectors made by the artist had a very shallow depth of field and the images were raw and grainy, so that it was impossible to reproduce a subject faithfully. Yet for the same reasons, this enabled these projectors to become highly expressive mechanisms through a kind of transparency of the production’s media. The images move freely between precision and obscurity, rise, fall, regress and rotate, as well as contain subtle variations in light and shadow, ‘[…] producing a kind of abstract and indistinct impression that is associated with landscape (painting).’[2] The work was also regarded as akin to the rich traditional Chinese ‘simulation’ aesthetic[3] by curator Chia Chi Jason Wang (王嘉驥). Wu Chi-Tsung, who studied ink painting from early on, acknowledged that the spatial composition for these two pieces initially came from ‘scrolls’ of traditional ink painting, and it could be described as close to styles found in Southern and Northern Song Dynasty ink painting.[4]

But just like the artist’s previously photographed rain scene, where indulgence in the beauty of the image may foreclose a deeper reading, we cannot undervalue Wire by regarding the illusion projected on the wall as merely ‘machine age ink painting.’[5] Exposing the projection equipment in the exhibition space, rather than concealing it behind a false wall (or even placing it in a dark corner of the room) seems even more purposeful. This is a design choice that exposed the mechanism and the projection location, enabling the work to dismantle the illusion while it was being created. The artist juxtaposed the image’s source, mediating devices and result by placing all of the projection equipment in the open. This thereby presented an illusion within the context of its construction mechanism, and produced an effect whereby the work withdrew itself from pure aestheticism and achieved an intellectual power.

How does one use equipment Improperly?

In Wire, Wu Chi-Tsung used an uncoated lens with a grainy quality to produce a scattering effect.  This crude image was no doubt considered regressive as far as video technology is concerned, but its roughness curiously catches our attention and even attains a kind of telling effect. Wu Chi-Tsung emphasised, ‘when an image is reduced to its most primitive state, which is how it is presented here, then it can be perceived more directly.’ In his opinion, the video equipment that we currently use is sold as a package, operates like a black box, and prescribes movements and logic for its use.  These rules, implicit in the design of the equipment, have however been hidden; ‘their existence is comprehensible, yet not perceptible.’  In his opinion, ‘the proper use of equipment,’ is not only weakening the expressive power of new media, it is even isolating us from our sense of our own bodies:

Just plugging in a projector is much simpler than making one myself. But the problem is that when you use this prepackaged and overly designed equipment, gains in simplicity and speed cause us to forfeit not only other possibilities, but also our awareness toward the equipment itself.[6]

When awareness of the body is washed away, the medium is ‘deadened’, and in Wu Chi-Tsung’s opinion, this is the main trend in digital media technology.  But he also says, ‘that medium still exists, it’s only that we are unaware of it.’[7] His work attempts to restore people’s consciousness toward media, and renew and realign this aspect of our existence, which calls attention to a greater concern in his creative work:

In a world shaped by electronic images, ways in which the body experiences things have been transformed or lost, and this is where my interest lies. It involves human being’s innate connection to objects, and a kind of imperceptible speed and sound.

He attempts to ‘misuse’ media, or to enlarge the way it skews our reality,[8] and transforms it from a kind of transparent vehicle into something we can perceive. In Rain there is quality of segmentation indicated by the non-continuous movement of raindrops, but in Wire, it is the process of creating an illusion while exposing it, and the coarse and grainy images. ‘I fully exploit a medium,’ says Wu Chi-Tsung referring to his intention to offer the audience this experience. To him, these are the things within us that are being stripped away by electronic technology.

The Depth of an Image

The Self Portrait of 71 Frames (2003) is a video the artist made by photographing himself in a mirror. From these still images he selected 71 shots to create a dynamic 2 minute video. The artist utilises post production duplication, overlapping, speed alteration, reversals and extensions to gradually change this image of himself from clear to indistinct. The significance of this 71 frame self portrait isn’t a portrait, but is a record of the power of image manipulation, and satirises the position of ‘the self in the mirror’—a classical representational medium relationship. Mirror Reflection becomes some kind of handmade high speed ‘instantaneity,’ and is filled with the feeling of protracted time. Long Time Exposed Landscape (2004) is no doubt the artist’s idea of the dual concept of ‘instantaneity / protraction’ put into pure practice.

Wu Chi-Tsung, Wire I, 2003 © Wu Chi-Tsung

Wu Chi-Tsung’s reversal of the sense of speed in ‘instantaneous media’ and in a process of drawing out time, expressed various traces of the struggle and cooperation between people and art materials, and may impel people to look back to simpler relationships, like the one between a painter and his/her paints. Wu Chi-Tsung regards painting as a kind of creative prototype and believes, ‘a painter’s grasp of the medium and pursuit of technique does not necessarily end as wished, but while awaiting that uncontrollable accident, the artist might paradoxically transcend their own limitations; and all of this can be immediately perceived and is not separable. Maybe that will happen at the moment a paint brush comes into contact with a canvas.’ What is important is that this kind of sustained organic process can be distinctively recorded and make the painting more than just a physical and flattened image. Through the action of accumulation the painting becomes thickened, and the resulting image suggests the entire production process and imbues the object with a feeling of depth. The artist attempts to utilise media with unusual methodologies, and revive the ‘status of painting’ in media art, to separate it from the ‘status of video’, which is based on flat images, elimination and simplification.

Pursuing the ‘status of painting’ allows us to make distinctions: Wu Chi-Tsung’s work, even if it sometimes seems to be imbued with some qualities of painting (for example Wire with imagery reminiscent of ink painting), still isn’t considered to be some kind of simple visual expressionism.  The emphasis ought to be that, much like in painting, the artist retained various traces of operations from the image creation process, and this deep sense of time and process distinguish the piece from those quickly circulating and easy to understand flat images. Furthermore these various threads naturally come together into a single viewing experience.

There is another thing to rescue these videos from becoming mere fragments in the dynamic between illusion and reality. As in Wire where Wu Chi-Tsung attempted to present an ‘advancing’ video image to create an ‘entering’ feeling for the viewer with a stationary projector.  Commenting on this he says, ‘We seem to be constantly drawn into the world of images, but occasionally become suddenly alert, and then discover, however, that we are just spinning around the same spot through no choice of our own.’ From falling into illusion to perceiving a distance from illusion, Wu Chi-Tsung’s work describes something mystical, and demystifies it at the same time. This poeticism rises not from the creation of visual illusions, but from his hesitation before them.

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[1] Wu Chi-Tsung describing digital media’s ‘critical use’; this attitude was probably influenced by Yuan Guang-Ming (袁廣鳴, b. 1965).  He also believes that this tendency can be clearly seen among several important contemporary new media artists in Taiwan, such as Chen Chieh-Jen (陳界仁, b. 1960), Gao Chong-Li (高重黎, b. 1958).

[2] Quoting from Chia Chi Jason Wang and Yao Jui-Chung’s jury comments for the 2003 Taipei Art Awards, and included in the exhibition catalogue (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2003). Wire I deservedly received one of the three first prizes.

[3] Chia Chi Jason Wang, ‘Simulation—the Poetic of Imaging in the Technology Age,’ included in the exhibition catalogue (Taipei: Chew’s Culture Foundation, 2003), p. 6.

[4] Wu Chi-Tsung, Artist statement, 2003.

[5] Actually, Wu Chi-Tsung is avoiding these various cultural theory reductions derived from ink painting. He tends to conclude that the completely obvious Chinese traditional ink painting aura and aesthetic in Wire is an aspect of the work that ‘cannot be discussed.’ It ‘cannot be discussed’ so as to prevent the work from being easily conceptualised, and used as an unlimited means to raise the work to a higher plane. In his opinion our perception of ink painting was extensively and indiscriminately consumed by image culture long ago, and so ‘it was reduced to a diagram,’ as Wu Chi-Tsung has said.  In his opinion, the two missions in art of resisting naïve illusionism, and refusing visual culture’s crude reduction of things to diagrams, are inextricably linked together.

[6] References to personal statements in the article with no particular indication of speaker are quotes from a recording of an interview with the artist made by the author on December 30, 2005.

[7] Wu Chi-Tsung quoted by Hsu Wan-Chen, ‘Gathering the Secrets of Light Machines—Wu Chi-Tsung vs. Wire,’ Artist, 349 (June 2004), pp. 363-364.

[8] Refer to Yuan Guang-Ming’s identical point of view expressed at the ‘Media Cramp’ (2004) curatorial discussion: ‘We cannot solely depend on the media to illuminate art. Where the flash shines should be somewhere in between the media and the arts; the two either exist individually, or permeate each other in an ambiguous state. In creating media art, artists must doubt the media to a certain extent. In the creative process, it is best for the artists to quit media and to abandon the familiar and acquainted tools and skills. Or, the artists should use media in an untypical and illicit way.  When none of the methods works out, the artists may simply stop thinking and let the media and skills reveal themselves automatically,’ Artco 143 (August 2004), p. 70. Wu Chi-Tsung also participated in this exhibition.