I
With their structural lines and artificial colors, Chen Chien-Jung (陳建榮)’s paintings remind us of our familiar visual experiences. These features have never been overlooked by critics: 'They are artificial symbols of newspaper columns, buildings, machinery and etc.'[1] 'They symbolize wheels, steel sheets, engines and steel frames, the machine parts in a modern industrial city.'[2] Huang Hai-Ming (黃海鳴) further explains: 'His works now have more references to urban civilization: lines as sharp as those in construction draft, stripes as hard and rough as steel structures, shapes as bulky as gigantic concrete cubes. No matter how abstract they are, these elements convey the hustle and bustle of a big industrial city and present an echoing cacophony of violent energies.' Similar descriptions can be found in many other articles about Chen Chien-Jung’s paintings. As a result, his paintings are interpreted as pictures, the pictures of a modernized city.
How do we reflexively 'recognize' scenes of a modernized or industrial city in Chen Chien-Jung’s works? The main issue with the underlying logic of this interpretation is probably not the classic 'abstract vs. realistic' debate. The more important issue to explore would be how the very logic of interpretation efficiently helps produce humanistic readings of Chen’s works. Despite the fact that humans never appear in his paintings, the interpretation created 'the position of human beings' against the pictures of a city while the position is never occupied. The following is a quote from Huang Hai-Ming’s review of Chen’s pieces after Chen became a resident artist at the International Studio Program (ISP), New York:
[…] In his paintings, you see conceptual symbols, concrete shapes, actual energy and a certain kind of invisible energy or some dull material or shapeless curtains interweaving and melting into each other. In his earlier works, you don’t feel the absence of humans. In his recent pieces, however, the feelings of humans’ diminutiveness in a big city and the absence of humans are apparently there. [3]
Lamenting humans’ diminutiveness against the backdrop of a huge city, losing subjectivity in the process of modernization….these dramas have been staged widely. In the perspective of this theme, Chen’s paintings do look like scenes where an old soul in modern times lingering and wondering in deserted factories. Nevertheless, how does the imagery of 'the absence of humans' become a discourse that we associate with and even recognize in his paintings? The Photorealism paintings in 1970s Taiwan imply the absence of humans through painting without strokes and the coldness of reflections on countless windows of high-rise buildings. In Chen’s paintings, he created scenes where people are long gone by means of blotting out color shapes and leaving traces of altering all over the canvas. It seems that Chen means to use this painting language as the last remaining bits of human sensibility in a certain industrial city life. Different from the oratorical styles in many abstract paintings, Chen’s pieces offer viewers a sensibility created from an almost self-belittling 'collage of dilapidation.'[4] They are like a “billboard on which many notices have been posted and torn off,'[5] 'an incomplete draft, an unfinished building.'[6] Finally a perfect metaphor is found for Chen’s style: Lo-Fi[7].
Portraying 'the absence of humans' with ruins and dilapidation, Chen’s paintings are often seen as illustrations of alienation, a human condition in the modern society. If we are not satisfied with the humanistic reading of paintings as pictures, we can interpret his works in the light of formalism as 'a locale where energies gather, disperse, decline and merge' or an organic combination of various opposing elements such as “moving and staying still, void and solid, partial and whole, complete and fragmented, tranquility and anxiety…'[8] But the formalist interpretation is not satisfactory either. While I was reading the reviews on Chen Chien-Jung’s works, every now and then I was seized by the storyteller’s horror: Is there any new plot to continue the story?
II
Except for the few pieces based on real locations in the city (for instance, the Huashan Culture Park buildings in Four Consecutive Buildings and the parking structure in Park), Chen Chien-Jung himself made up most of the construction structures in his works—'my ideal architectural spaces,' he said. But for the artist, these spaces are rather a starting point in his painting language than a motif. Chen had explained how he painted these pieces: Without too much planning beforehand, he often just made shapes with a ruler and a pencil and kept altering or redrawing them. In his creative process, Chen relies on how his hands handle his tools (such as rulers and covering tapes). That is a crucial characteristic of his works.
Take Circle Line (2005) for example, besides the recurring elements in Chen’s works--dripping traces left by automatic drawing techniques, hard edges softened by repeated altering and overlapping large color shapes—you will not ignore a row of shapes drawn in blue lines that look like consecutive parallel rectangles. They were hand-drawn with tubes of pigments; the seemingly casual lines have a pleasant rhythm implying the artist’s hand movements and sense of speed. Stretching from left to right, the pattern seemingly will extend to infinity. Visually, it is delicate and smooth drawing, but what attracted my attention was its consecutiveness that made these shapes appear to be a series of parallel rectangles. It is naturally hard to draw precisely by hand, but the intention to draw meticulously is obvious behind these consecutive shapes. As a result, lines seem to be drawn with rulers and processed with tools. Chen allows this procedure to guide his hand movements to a great extent; through manipulating his tool fastidiously, Chen created a new presence of the human body in his paintings.
Another noteworthy point: Chen doesn’t work with a predetermined plan so that his hands and his tools rarely work together to depict a concrete imagery or a whole space. The spaces in his paintings are always 'architectural' instead of 'architecture' that has depth for viewers to fall in. Practically without any exceptions, all of his works look like drafts for some real spaces. However, now we cannot just naively regard Chen’s draft-like painting language as a style. Cultivated by our visual culture, we perceive graphics such as perspective drawings, sectional drawings and drafts as 'plans' that predict some possible purposes—an architectural space you can enter, an object you can assemble or an image filled with details. Drafts, therefore, imply an epistemological function: they are open to the future. As we examine a draft, we also predict something is taking shape.
With all our visual cultivation, I am enchanted by the drafts unfolding in Chen Chien-Jung’s paintings. Our visual cultivation allows us to see these graphics as certain plans so that we can describe his paintings as 'always in an unfinished state.' Chen’s random way of painting, however, seems to disrupt the rational future of these drafts. What he really presents to us is a series of enigmatic plans: channels through which you cannot communicate, obscure objects, fake perspective drawings that are disorienting... In fact, there is nothing 'unfinished' in his paintings since they don’t lead to anything waiting to be materialized. The artist’s body movements and his tools are like a machine running idly. In the era of graphic meanings being overproduced, this sort of idle running probably will be the last drop of sensibility left in painting.
(Translated by Cheng-Yuan Huang. The original text was written in Chinese)
[1] Hsu Yuan-Da, 'Introspection of Instincts and Cultivation—On Chien-jung Chen’s Lo-Fi,' Artist no. 318 (November 2001), p. 559.
[2] Hsu Wan-Jen, 'A Scavenger of Balanced Multi-dimensional Traces—Chien-jung Chen vs. Abstract Painting,” Artist Magazine no. 351 (Aug. 2004), pp. 366-370.
[3] Huang Hai-Ming, 'Reading "New Mind - Artistic Creations in Motion",' in New Mind - Artistic Creations in Motion, ed. Jo Hsiao. Taipei: Provisional Office of Taipei Artist Village, Council for Cultural Affairs, 2001, pp. 24. In the article, Huang reviewed the New Mind - Artistic Creations in Motion exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum from February to April in 2001, organized by the Provisional Office of Taipei Artist Village. In the art show, half of Chen Chien-Jung’s works were created after he took resident artist position at the International Studio Program(ISP), New York.
[4] Supra note 2.
[5] Chang Ching-Wen, 'In the State of Waiting for the Answers—Chen Chien-Jung,” Artop no. 22 (April 2004), pp. 93-94.
[7] Critics of Chen’s paintings often use musicality as a metaphor for his painterliness. This is true to some extent since he is indeed a rock music fan. The form of modern rock has been very inspiring in his career.
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