A Sampling Machine
／Gong Jow-Jiun
2010/07/12 ART EMPEROR
From his 2003 solo exhibition “Kai Dao Tu Mi,” to “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Light and Shadow” in 2007 and “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Distortion” in 2008, the creative process of Su Meng-hung’s kitschy paintings, installations, silkscreen prints and sculpture has been a history of blood, sweat and tears that has apparently turned him into a human plastic injection molding machine. In an essay titled “How I Became a Plastic Injection Molding Machine,” Su employs black humor and self-mockery in offering the public a naked view of his darker side, not only lashing out – “Fuck your mother’s art!” – but also prodding critics who nearly universally regard his work in such wholly modernist terminology as “gaudy, cross disciplinary, kitsch, Taiwanese Pop, cynical and ‘grabbist.’”
Among these art critics, none is more interesting than the perspective of Shih Rui-jen. Shih argues that Su seeks to make traditional Chinese flowers and birds paintings into some sort of gaudy, grandiose visual icon and uses the device of three-dimensional installation to turn them into a more sensually appealing cultural marker. These flowers and birds paintings are symbolic of the tastes of the elite and the literati, as Shih notes: “The circumstances of the decline in Chinese art are precisely the opposite of those in the West. It’s not haunted by the popularity of kitsch in the prevailing culture, it’s due to the excessive interference and influence of the literati while still lacking a sort of mechanism to allow the free development of the arts and more make the arts more accessible to the society at large.” On this point, Su at once seems to be assailing the conventions of his predecessors while at the same time seemingly resuscitating the traditions of feudal China’s artistic orthodoxy, providing the conduit through which they flow back into society.
From this perspective, whether or not Su’s use of Huaniao elements in his works is definitively relevant to the issue of Modernist kitsch in modern art seems quite frankly doubtful. At the very least, I believe Su’s use of the imagery of later Qing Dynasty-era painters like Giuseppe Castiglione (a.k.a. Lang Shih-ning, 1688-1766), Shen Zhenlin (Emperor Guangxu era) and Wang Chengpei (? – 1805) as visual markers in his works is not purely driven by a desire to ridicule a societal symbol and make is an object of pop culture. From a visually detached perspective, just what is the connection between the usage and sampling of these particular images and the prevailing Modernistic consciousness in post martial law-era Taiwan painting is the issue I will attempt to sort out in this article.
The Problem With the Modernist Nature of East Asian Painting
In viewing a series of Su’s works, one of the techniques the observer can’t hope to avoid is his persistent appropriation of elements of the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, the Italian Jesuit painter to the courts of three Qing emperors. To say that such appropriation is nothing more than an attempt to satirize the kitsch of today’s cultural imagery which devolves into an embarrassing state of secondary kitsch is to understate the historical dimension of these visual elements.
First, in contemporary creative arts, the photography of Jeff Wall (1946-) restages the composition and scene arrangements of earlier painters like Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) while harkening back to the source of the modernistic creative sensibilities of the 19th century, shifting the visual dispositif focus from the realm of visual representation of ideas to the realm of the creation of an entirely subjective scenario with visual arrangement. The parallactic nature of this circuitous approach is nothing if not built on Wall’s aesthetic notions on photography. The dialectical relationship is inherent not only in the photographer’s moving between his own era and his 19th century wellspring, it is embedded in the arrangement of the works themselves. In “Picture for Women,” for example, Wall arranges the shot so that the viewpoints of both the viewer and the “hidden photographer” are one and the same, capturing his act of photography in a mirror image. Like the geometrically fractured compositional arrangement of Manet’s “The Bar at the Folies-Bergères,” the viewer’s visual perspective fails to find an appropriately agreeable center of focus, giving rise to an “impossible” sensation of the futile. The mirror image and positioning of the photographer in “Picture for Women” proceed to create a confounding visual predicament for the viewer amidst the line of sight of three players, the woman, the photographer and the camera. Thus amidst the kaleidoscopic effect of the overlapping lines of sight, the viewer crosses into a dazzling zone of multiple lines of sight.
The 20th century photographer Wall’s deep interest in the modernistic nature of 19th century painting is transformed into a modernistic visual wellspring of appropriation, transposition and alteration. Viewing Su’s continual visual appropriation, alteration and transposition of Giuseppe Castiglione and other Qing-era artists in this context, I cannot help but to ponder the particular fate of “East Asian Modern” in the history of modern painting.
As far as Su’s continuous reference to Castiglione, he represents Western painting techniques such as perspective and shading the Italian missionary introduced upon his arrival in China, with emphasis on a visual composition in which far off objects are smaller than closer objects as well as the lighted and shaded surfaces of the subjects depicted. According to the research conclusions of Wang Yao-ting: “After the arrival of Giuseppe Castiglione in China, Imperial Qing painting was profoundly influenced by a number of Western painting techniques relating to the piling up of color and the application of hues. The colors used in paintings began increasingly to trend toward the richly saccharine, a sort of painting style that is particularly evident in Imperial Qing painting during the rein of Emperor Qian Long.” Additionally, the ability of “oil painting” to precisely master the expressive power of an image received the continued affirmation of Qing Emperor Yong Zheng. As such, Castiglione was able to cultivate and train oil painters for the 18th century Imperial Qing court, extending the scope of influence of Western painting’s facility at recreating ideas.
In this light, if the middle to late Qing period of the 18th and 19th centuries can be seen as the beginning of East Asia’s move towards the modern world, then the origins of the modernity in East Asian painting lie along a path cleared through the incorporation and appropriation of the techniques of classical Western painting. But this path has clearly been strewn with conflict and contradiction. As fellow Jesuit missionary painter Jean Denis Attiret (a.k.a. Wang Zhicheng) wrote in his “Yanjing Mission Chronicle;” China’s emperor wishes there to be no shadows in paintings or that its best to have no shadows in the images; virtually all paintings are done in watercolor and few painted using oil.” In this context, modernity in East Asian painting seems to lay amid reflection over the use of shaded areas, and one cannot but directly acknowledge Western painting as the source and cannot escape the powerful influence of its ability to visually represent ideas.
If we fast forward to 1980s post-martial law era Taiwan, Su Meng-hung, growing up during that period, also acknowledges being influenced by the wave of subjectivity in the contemporary visual arts, compelling him to ponder a way out for painting. At that time, Wu Tian-chang, Huang Chin-ho, Hou Chun-ming, Kuo Chen-chang and others were largely using scenes from everyday Taiwan life as a backdrop, proceeding to incorporate and appropriate these into serial works and unmistakably diminishing the scope of influence of traditional Chinese painting. As a second-generation post-martial law era artist, however, Su has chosen a path of abject rebellion against “Taiwanese painting convention,” embracing anew the distorted and awkward situations that were key graphic elements of late Qing painting.
From Imitation, Quotation, to Sampling Machine
We can see that the way Su appropriates Castiglione actually can’t really be equated to “quotation;” it is closer to the “sampling” route taken in popular music. Through use of reproduction techniques such as silk-screening, some sort of sampling machine’s painting exhibition opens before our eyes. In the pop music of the 1980s, the so-called “sampling machine,” no matter what the sound, it could be reduced to a digital signal through the hardware of such a machine and transformed into a sound source to ultimately become sound samples on electronic synthesizers. This is a sort of changeable sample grouping generated through automated control systems that displays those characteristics of a mechanical grammar language that supersede those generated via humans.
Relative to Su’s incorporation of images from the works of late Qing painter Castiglione, the Jesuit’s own relationship with Chinese painting remains within the logic of “quotation”: Through quotation of things at hand, in some significant sense its retains its original mode of assemblage, nothing has undergone a fundamental change, whether in terms of syntax or compositional form. There are merely some visual elements of a painting, perspective and shaded areas for example, that have been swapped out. One must personally develop each and every element; one must utilize a system of one’s own creation; these are some of the operating paradigms of Modernism. Among these, drawing an external target into, in some poetic sense, one’s own very being to form a complete, one-dimensional little universe has become like a rite of passage.
Yet the sampling machine doesn’t work in this logic. The subject itself is broken down through scientific processes that are themselves merged into the object, whose base sensibility disintegrates into a state of anarchy with no passage of space-time.
From this perspective, Su’s 2003 works “Kai Dao Tu Mi – The Lanterns of Giuseppe Castiglione,” “Kai Dao Tu Mi – The Birds of Giuseppe Castiglione,” “Turtledove in a Cherry Tree,” “Kai Dao Tu Mi – A Partial Collection of Qing Dynasty Painter Wang Chengpei’s ‘Auspicious Spring’ Paintings” and “Kai Dao Tu Mi – The Flower Painting Genius of Qing Dynasty Painter Shen Zhenlin” seem to mark the beginning of his sampling of paintings. The perspective and all shadows have been displaced by application of Pop Art-style shadings or directly transformed into three-dimensional lantern installations. I thought of the color editing functions of Photoshop software, which have the effect of simplifying the original, dynamically variable color levels to just a few. Naturally if you use “streamline,” you’ll have more variance in color levels but none depart from the machine sampling effect of the program. Yet Su’s spread coating technique mimics a sampling machine, giving people a sense of being thrust into the awkward position of being able to identify and not being able to identify the sampled visual elements.
The 2003 work “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Huei Go Go” employs a skewed visual technique to further open up uniformly smooth space for his sampling machine. Amidst this, we can roughly identify some elements of late Qing painting while on the other hand the interjection of the mechanical language and skewed syntactical composition make it seem like watching a computer-generated self-revelation, with the subject reduced to fragments, becoming fragmentary ornamentation in the mechanical lexicon. In “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Extravagant Colors” from 2003, this sort of digitally mechanized sensory logic left a hard-edged interpretation of this painting form. “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Light and Shadow” series from 2007 utilizes silk screening and hollowing/raising techniques to compose a series of purely ornamental images that seem like they could be tablecloths or old-fashioned wallpaper. They also seem to be another sort of move by Su toward sampling machine painting. In “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Distortion” from 2008 reproduces the previous skewed sampling mode and we get an increasing sense of a sort of dizziness, perhaps stemming from an impatience with the artist’s reproduction of artworks, perhaps rooted in the solitary emptiness of this lonesome path of the sampling machine. Had Su initially chosen not the dialectical model of Jeff Wall’s quest for the source of modernity but rather Jeff Koons’ “Cicciolina” series, perhaps the viewing public would not feel that sense of claustrophobia and futility these sort of garishly glossy surfaces can bring on. In that light, “Chi In Ho Huan San” from 2005 and 2007’s “Unreachable Blooming” really show that the artist is bored to the point of distraction; the mouse has come out to play in an off-topic offering poking fun at his own work.
Fortunately, when relating the arduous history of how he became a human plastic injection molding machine, Su maintained that living under the callous and repressive logic of capitalism kept his chosen painting sampling machine vigilant, to the extent possible rejecting the clamor and expression of subjectivity. His even temper, through application of each brush stroke and career endeavor, steadily opens up uniformly smooth space for his sampling machine, much like the emotional states expressed 250 years ago in Castiglione’s works “Barn Swallow and Green Peach Blossom,” “Lotus Flower and Butterfly,” and “Flower in a Vase,” in Shen Zhenlin’s “Flower Painting God” and in Wang Chengpei’s “Peonies.” The will of the Imperial court at the top cannot be extended yet in turning on a little machine of his own device he nonetheless skated through the Imperial court. Whether kitsch or refined elegance, there remains an indescribable elation faintly visible in each brushstroke before us.
Among these art critics, none is more interesting than the perspective of Shih Rui-jen. Shih argues that Su seeks to make traditional Chinese flowers and birds paintings into some sort of gaudy, grandiose visual icon and uses the device of three-dimensional installation to turn them into a more sensually appealing cultural marker. These flowers and birds paintings are symbolic of the tastes of the elite and the literati, as Shih notes: “The circumstances of the decline in Chinese art are precisely the opposite of those in the West. It’s not haunted by the popularity of kitsch in the prevailing culture, it’s due to the excessive interference and influence of the literati while still lacking a sort of mechanism to allow the free development of the arts and more make the arts more accessible to the society at large.” On this point, Su at once seems to be assailing the conventions of his predecessors while at the same time seemingly resuscitating the traditions of feudal China’s artistic orthodoxy, providing the conduit through which they flow back into society.
From this perspective, whether or not Su’s use of Huaniao elements in his works is definitively relevant to the issue of Modernist kitsch in modern art seems quite frankly doubtful. At the very least, I believe Su’s use of the imagery of later Qing Dynasty-era painters like Giuseppe Castiglione (a.k.a. Lang Shih-ning, 1688-1766), Shen Zhenlin (Emperor Guangxu era) and Wang Chengpei (? – 1805) as visual markers in his works is not purely driven by a desire to ridicule a societal symbol and make is an object of pop culture. From a visually detached perspective, just what is the connection between the usage and sampling of these particular images and the prevailing Modernistic consciousness in post martial law-era Taiwan painting is the issue I will attempt to sort out in this article.
The Problem With the Modernist Nature of East Asian Painting
In viewing a series of Su’s works, one of the techniques the observer can’t hope to avoid is his persistent appropriation of elements of the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, the Italian Jesuit painter to the courts of three Qing emperors. To say that such appropriation is nothing more than an attempt to satirize the kitsch of today’s cultural imagery which devolves into an embarrassing state of secondary kitsch is to understate the historical dimension of these visual elements.
First, in contemporary creative arts, the photography of Jeff Wall (1946-) restages the composition and scene arrangements of earlier painters like Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) while harkening back to the source of the modernistic creative sensibilities of the 19th century, shifting the visual dispositif focus from the realm of visual representation of ideas to the realm of the creation of an entirely subjective scenario with visual arrangement. The parallactic nature of this circuitous approach is nothing if not built on Wall’s aesthetic notions on photography. The dialectical relationship is inherent not only in the photographer’s moving between his own era and his 19th century wellspring, it is embedded in the arrangement of the works themselves. In “Picture for Women,” for example, Wall arranges the shot so that the viewpoints of both the viewer and the “hidden photographer” are one and the same, capturing his act of photography in a mirror image. Like the geometrically fractured compositional arrangement of Manet’s “The Bar at the Folies-Bergères,” the viewer’s visual perspective fails to find an appropriately agreeable center of focus, giving rise to an “impossible” sensation of the futile. The mirror image and positioning of the photographer in “Picture for Women” proceed to create a confounding visual predicament for the viewer amidst the line of sight of three players, the woman, the photographer and the camera. Thus amidst the kaleidoscopic effect of the overlapping lines of sight, the viewer crosses into a dazzling zone of multiple lines of sight.
The 20th century photographer Wall’s deep interest in the modernistic nature of 19th century painting is transformed into a modernistic visual wellspring of appropriation, transposition and alteration. Viewing Su’s continual visual appropriation, alteration and transposition of Giuseppe Castiglione and other Qing-era artists in this context, I cannot help but to ponder the particular fate of “East Asian Modern” in the history of modern painting.
As far as Su’s continuous reference to Castiglione, he represents Western painting techniques such as perspective and shading the Italian missionary introduced upon his arrival in China, with emphasis on a visual composition in which far off objects are smaller than closer objects as well as the lighted and shaded surfaces of the subjects depicted. According to the research conclusions of Wang Yao-ting: “After the arrival of Giuseppe Castiglione in China, Imperial Qing painting was profoundly influenced by a number of Western painting techniques relating to the piling up of color and the application of hues. The colors used in paintings began increasingly to trend toward the richly saccharine, a sort of painting style that is particularly evident in Imperial Qing painting during the rein of Emperor Qian Long.” Additionally, the ability of “oil painting” to precisely master the expressive power of an image received the continued affirmation of Qing Emperor Yong Zheng. As such, Castiglione was able to cultivate and train oil painters for the 18th century Imperial Qing court, extending the scope of influence of Western painting’s facility at recreating ideas.
In this light, if the middle to late Qing period of the 18th and 19th centuries can be seen as the beginning of East Asia’s move towards the modern world, then the origins of the modernity in East Asian painting lie along a path cleared through the incorporation and appropriation of the techniques of classical Western painting. But this path has clearly been strewn with conflict and contradiction. As fellow Jesuit missionary painter Jean Denis Attiret (a.k.a. Wang Zhicheng) wrote in his “Yanjing Mission Chronicle;” China’s emperor wishes there to be no shadows in paintings or that its best to have no shadows in the images; virtually all paintings are done in watercolor and few painted using oil.” In this context, modernity in East Asian painting seems to lay amid reflection over the use of shaded areas, and one cannot but directly acknowledge Western painting as the source and cannot escape the powerful influence of its ability to visually represent ideas.
If we fast forward to 1980s post-martial law era Taiwan, Su Meng-hung, growing up during that period, also acknowledges being influenced by the wave of subjectivity in the contemporary visual arts, compelling him to ponder a way out for painting. At that time, Wu Tian-chang, Huang Chin-ho, Hou Chun-ming, Kuo Chen-chang and others were largely using scenes from everyday Taiwan life as a backdrop, proceeding to incorporate and appropriate these into serial works and unmistakably diminishing the scope of influence of traditional Chinese painting. As a second-generation post-martial law era artist, however, Su has chosen a path of abject rebellion against “Taiwanese painting convention,” embracing anew the distorted and awkward situations that were key graphic elements of late Qing painting.
From Imitation, Quotation, to Sampling Machine
We can see that the way Su appropriates Castiglione actually can’t really be equated to “quotation;” it is closer to the “sampling” route taken in popular music. Through use of reproduction techniques such as silk-screening, some sort of sampling machine’s painting exhibition opens before our eyes. In the pop music of the 1980s, the so-called “sampling machine,” no matter what the sound, it could be reduced to a digital signal through the hardware of such a machine and transformed into a sound source to ultimately become sound samples on electronic synthesizers. This is a sort of changeable sample grouping generated through automated control systems that displays those characteristics of a mechanical grammar language that supersede those generated via humans.
Relative to Su’s incorporation of images from the works of late Qing painter Castiglione, the Jesuit’s own relationship with Chinese painting remains within the logic of “quotation”: Through quotation of things at hand, in some significant sense its retains its original mode of assemblage, nothing has undergone a fundamental change, whether in terms of syntax or compositional form. There are merely some visual elements of a painting, perspective and shaded areas for example, that have been swapped out. One must personally develop each and every element; one must utilize a system of one’s own creation; these are some of the operating paradigms of Modernism. Among these, drawing an external target into, in some poetic sense, one’s own very being to form a complete, one-dimensional little universe has become like a rite of passage.
Yet the sampling machine doesn’t work in this logic. The subject itself is broken down through scientific processes that are themselves merged into the object, whose base sensibility disintegrates into a state of anarchy with no passage of space-time.
From this perspective, Su’s 2003 works “Kai Dao Tu Mi – The Lanterns of Giuseppe Castiglione,” “Kai Dao Tu Mi – The Birds of Giuseppe Castiglione,” “Turtledove in a Cherry Tree,” “Kai Dao Tu Mi – A Partial Collection of Qing Dynasty Painter Wang Chengpei’s ‘Auspicious Spring’ Paintings” and “Kai Dao Tu Mi – The Flower Painting Genius of Qing Dynasty Painter Shen Zhenlin” seem to mark the beginning of his sampling of paintings. The perspective and all shadows have been displaced by application of Pop Art-style shadings or directly transformed into three-dimensional lantern installations. I thought of the color editing functions of Photoshop software, which have the effect of simplifying the original, dynamically variable color levels to just a few. Naturally if you use “streamline,” you’ll have more variance in color levels but none depart from the machine sampling effect of the program. Yet Su’s spread coating technique mimics a sampling machine, giving people a sense of being thrust into the awkward position of being able to identify and not being able to identify the sampled visual elements.
The 2003 work “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Huei Go Go” employs a skewed visual technique to further open up uniformly smooth space for his sampling machine. Amidst this, we can roughly identify some elements of late Qing painting while on the other hand the interjection of the mechanical language and skewed syntactical composition make it seem like watching a computer-generated self-revelation, with the subject reduced to fragments, becoming fragmentary ornamentation in the mechanical lexicon. In “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Extravagant Colors” from 2003, this sort of digitally mechanized sensory logic left a hard-edged interpretation of this painting form. “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Light and Shadow” series from 2007 utilizes silk screening and hollowing/raising techniques to compose a series of purely ornamental images that seem like they could be tablecloths or old-fashioned wallpaper. They also seem to be another sort of move by Su toward sampling machine painting. In “Kai Dao Tu Mi – Distortion” from 2008 reproduces the previous skewed sampling mode and we get an increasing sense of a sort of dizziness, perhaps stemming from an impatience with the artist’s reproduction of artworks, perhaps rooted in the solitary emptiness of this lonesome path of the sampling machine. Had Su initially chosen not the dialectical model of Jeff Wall’s quest for the source of modernity but rather Jeff Koons’ “Cicciolina” series, perhaps the viewing public would not feel that sense of claustrophobia and futility these sort of garishly glossy surfaces can bring on. In that light, “Chi In Ho Huan San” from 2005 and 2007’s “Unreachable Blooming” really show that the artist is bored to the point of distraction; the mouse has come out to play in an off-topic offering poking fun at his own work.
Fortunately, when relating the arduous history of how he became a human plastic injection molding machine, Su maintained that living under the callous and repressive logic of capitalism kept his chosen painting sampling machine vigilant, to the extent possible rejecting the clamor and expression of subjectivity. His even temper, through application of each brush stroke and career endeavor, steadily opens up uniformly smooth space for his sampling machine, much like the emotional states expressed 250 years ago in Castiglione’s works “Barn Swallow and Green Peach Blossom,” “Lotus Flower and Butterfly,” and “Flower in a Vase,” in Shen Zhenlin’s “Flower Painting God” and in Wang Chengpei’s “Peonies.” The will of the Imperial court at the top cannot be extended yet in turning on a little machine of his own device he nonetheless skated through the Imperial court. Whether kitsch or refined elegance, there remains an indescribable elation faintly visible in each brushstroke before us.
蘇孟鴻－取樣繪畫．機器物語
／龔卓軍
2010/07/12 非池中藝術網
從2003年的「開到荼靡」個展、2007年「開到荼靡之浮光掠影」、2008年「開到荼靡之變形記」，蘇孟鴻的媚俗繪畫、裝置、絹印版畫與雕塑創作歷程，從他自己看來，雖然宛如使自己成為一具塑膠射出成型機器的血淚史。這讓他自己在〈我如何成為一部塑膠射出機器〉 一文中，以黑色幽默的口吻，調侃自己，向觀眾交出赤裸的黑暗之心，同時大罵：「肏你媽的藝術！」之外，也讓批評家幾乎一面倒的用現代性樣貌中的「艷俗、混雜、媚俗、台式普普、犬儒者、拿來主義」來觀看他的作品。
這些藝評當中，最有趣的莫過於石瑞仁的觀點。他討論了蘇孟鴻試圖將讓中國傳統的花鳥畫改造成一種艷俗浮誇的視覺圖象，或者用立體裝置的方式，將它們變成一種更感官訴求的文化符號。這些花鳥畫代表的是貴族與文人品味，石瑞仁也注意到，「中國藝術的衰落，情況剛好與西方相反，不是導因於媚俗的潮流作祟，而是因為文人的介入和過度主導，卻少了讓藝術自由發展和流向社會的一種機制。」 就此而言，蘇孟鴻一方面看似在調戲古人，另一方面，卻有點像是在挽救傳統封建的中國藝術道統，讓它們有個管道流向社會。
從這種觀點來說，蘇孟鴻作品當中挪用的花鳥元素，是否一定與現代藝術中現代性的媚俗議題相關，反而頗為令人懷疑。至少，我認為蘇孟鴻在運用郎世寧(1688-1766)、沈振麟(咸豐同治年間)、汪承霈(?-1805)這些清代中晚期畫家的圖像符號時，並不單純是社會符碼的嘲諷與普普化，從視覺無意識的角度來說，這些圖像的挪用與取樣，究竟與解嚴後的台灣當代繪畫的現代性意識有何關聯，是我在這篇文章嘗試釐清的問題。
東亞繪畫現代性的難題
觀看蘇孟鴻一系列的創作，其中讓人最無法迴避的手法之一，就是那揮之不去的郎世寧圖素挪用。如果說這種挪用不過是反諷今日圖像文化的媚俗之舉，進而形成了令人困窘的二次媚俗狀態，那是低估了這些圖素的歷史向度。
首先，在當代藝術創作中，傑夫．沃爾(Jeff Wall 1946)以其攝影回指畫家馬內、塞尚等人的構圖與場景佈置，同時，也回到西方十九世紀現代性創作意識的源頭，將視覺部署(visual dispositif)的焦點從再現表象的問題場域，移位至創作主體觀視與視覺創置的問題場域。這一種視差式的迂迴前進路徑，無非是建立在沃爾對攝影的美學思考，不僅讓自身穿梭於其當下與其十九世紀源頭的辯證對質關係，也內建於其作品的配置中。譬如：在〈女人圖像〉(Picture for Woman)這件作品，將自身的攝影行為，透過鏡像，拉開一般攝影圖像中將觀者與「潛在的攝影者」視角等同為一的配置方式。如同馬內在〈女神遊樂廳〉(The Bar at the Folies Bergères)中破碎幾何的構圖安排，讓觀者的觀視角度找不到適切的認同位置，產生徒勞的「不可能」感。沃爾在〈女人圖像〉中的鏡像與攝影師位置，進一步創造了觀者在女人、攝影師、相機三個視線角色間無所適從的配置狀態，使觀者在萬花筒般的交疊視線中，進入多重視線穿插暈眩之域。
二十世紀的攝影家沃爾對十九世紀繪畫現代性的濃厚興趣，在他的作品中轉化為現代性的圖像源頭的挪用、移位與轉置。從這一點來看蘇孟鴻對郎世寧等清代畫家的一再進行圖像挪用、移位與轉置，不禁讓我思考「東亞現代性」在現代繪畫史上的特殊命運。
以蘇孟鴻不斷引用的郎世寧來說，他代表了西洋傳教士畫家來華後，引進「透視法」與「陰影法」等西洋畫法，重視遠小近大與創造物體明亮與陰暗面畫面構成。依據王耀庭的研究，「顯然郎世寧來華以後，在色彩的堆積、敷染色調的一些技法對清宮的繪畫影響深遠，繪畫的色彩越來越趨於濃郁甜膩，到了乾隆朝清宮繪畫的這種畫風更加地明顯。」 另外，「油畫」能精確掌握形象的表現力，也得到了雍正皇帝的肯定，於是郎世寧得以在十八世紀的清朝宮廷中培植油畫畫師，延展西洋畫再現表象能力的影響範圍。
就此而言，如果十八世紀至十九世紀的清朝中後期，可視為東亞邁向現代世界的發端，那麼，東亞繪畫現代性的開端，是以編納、挪用西洋古典繪畫技法打開其道路的。但是，這條道路顯然充滿了衝突與矛盾。西洋傳教士畫家德尼(王致誠)在《燕京開教略》中說：「中國皇帝希望在畫面上沒有黑影，或是最好毫無陰影，差不多所有的畫多是用水彩的，很少數是用油畫所畫的。」 就此而言，東亞繪畫現代性似乎介於一個思考上的陰影地帶，既無法直接認取其西洋源頭，又無法脫離其強大再現表象能力的影響。
如果我們快速把位置挪移到1980年代解嚴前後的台灣，成長於這個時期的蘇孟鴻，也承認受到當時視覺創作尋找主體性的潮流影響，催迫他思考繪畫的出路。當時的吳天章、黃進河、侯俊明、郭振昌等人，多以台灣世俗圖像為底材，進行系列的編納與挪用，明顯降低了中國繪畫的影響範圍。但是，做為解嚴後第二代的創作者，蘇孟鴻選擇了一條悖離「台灣民俗畫素」的道路，重新認取晚清繪畫變形尷尬處境中的圖像要素。
從模擬、引用到取樣機器
我們可以看到蘇孟鴻對郎世寧的挪用方式，實際上沒辦法說是「引用」，而是接近流行音樂中的「取樣」(sampling)之路，透過平塗與絹印的複製技法，某種取樣機器的繪畫展開在我們眼前。在80年代流行音樂中，所謂的「取樣機器」(sampling machine)就是說，不論是什麼樣的聲音，通過這種機器裝置，都能夠還原成數位訊號、轉換成音源，成為電子合成樂器的聲音樣本。這是一種經過自動控制的程式所輸出的樣本變樣群集，呈現出機器語法大於人工類比語法的特質。
相較於蘇孟鴻所編納的晚清郎世寧繪畫圖像，郎世寧與中國繪畫的關係仍屬「引用」的邏輯：通過引用拿來的東西，在某種意義上還保留著原來的組裝方式，不論是句法或結構形式都沒有發生根本的變化，只是將其中的畫素、透視、陰影的片斷等進行替換而已。自己必須親自開發一個一個的元素、自己必須使用自己所創造出來的體系，這些都是現代主義式的運作原則。其中，將外界的對象引入到自己具有某種詩意的體內，以形成一方完整的小宇宙，成為一條必經之途。
然而，取樣機器不然，主體幾乎是通過科學技術將自己解體，並融入到對象之中，其感性的基質是無政府式的、時空翻轉的、主體解體式的狀態。
以此來觀看蘇孟鴻2003年〈開到荼靡之郎世寧的燈籠〉、〈開到荼靡之郎世寧的鳥〉(櫻桃桑鳲)、〈開到荼靡之清朝的汪承霈的春祺集錦局部〉、〈開到荼靡之清朝的沈振麟的繪花神〉，可以視之為蘇孟鴻取樣繪畫的開端。所有的陰影與透視皆被置換為普普式的色塊塗佈，或直接轉變成立體的燈籠裝置。這令人聯想到photoshop程式中挖剪色階，將原本變化多端的色階簡化為幾個色階的效果，當然，若使用streamline這樣的軟體雖會有更多變的色階產生，卻都不離程式的機器取樣效果。然而，蘇孟鴻用平塗的方式來模擬取樣機器，使人感到介入可辨識與不可辨識其取樣圖素的尷尬處境中。
2003年的〈開到荼靡之灰格格〉使用了歪像技法，進一步打開了他取樣機器的平滑空間，我們在其中，一方面略可辨認出晚清繪畫中的一些元素，另一方面卻又因為機器式語法和歪像句法結構的介入，變得像在觀看電腦編程的自我展示，主體化為碎片，成為機器語彙的碎形裝飾物。2003年的〈開到荼靡之靡彩〉，為這種數位機器化的感覺邏輯，留下了一個硬邊繪畫式的註解。
2007年「開到荼靡之浮光掠影」系列，運用了絹印和打凹打凸的技法，構成系列純裝飾性的圖像，像是桌布、陳舊的壁紙，也像是蘇孟鴻朝向樣本機器繪畫的另一種嘗試。2008年「開到荼靡之變形記」則是對先前歪像取樣模式的再生產，我們越來越感覺到一種暈眩，或許源自於藝術家對藝術生產重覆的不耐，或許源自於這條孤獨的取樣機器道路之空寂無人。如果當初蘇孟鴻選擇的不是沃爾的尋求現代性源頭的對話模式，而是傑夫．昆斯(Jeff Koons)的小白菜系列的話，或許觀眾就不會感到這種油亮的艷麗平面所帶來的窒悶與徒勞感。就此觀之，2005年的「奇淫合歡散」與2007年的「開不到荼靡──以蘇孟鴻為名」實在是藝術家悶得發慌，老鼠出洞，開自己作品玩笑的題外之舉。
所幸，在訴說如何使自己成為一具塑膠射出成型機器的血淚史的時候，蘇孟鴻維持住了資本主義生產邏輯的冷酷與壓抑語調，守住他所選擇的取樣繪畫機器，盡量剔除主體的狂喧與表現，他耐著性子，透過一筆一筆的塗佈與生涯規劃，平穩的展開他的取樣機器平滑空間，就像250年前的郎世寧畫〈碧桃家燕〉、〈荷花蝴蝶〉、〈畫瓶花〉、沈振麟畫〈繪花神〉與汪承霈畫〈牡丹富貴圖〉的心情一般，宮廷在上，雖志不能伸，但打開自己發明的小機器，滑行其中，不論媚俗或雅緻，仍有無人稱的快意，隱隱閃現於下筆之一瞬。
這些藝評當中，最有趣的莫過於石瑞仁的觀點。他討論了蘇孟鴻試圖將讓中國傳統的花鳥畫改造成一種艷俗浮誇的視覺圖象，或者用立體裝置的方式，將它們變成一種更感官訴求的文化符號。這些花鳥畫代表的是貴族與文人品味，石瑞仁也注意到，「中國藝術的衰落，情況剛好與西方相反，不是導因於媚俗的潮流作祟，而是因為文人的介入和過度主導，卻少了讓藝術自由發展和流向社會的一種機制。」 就此而言，蘇孟鴻一方面看似在調戲古人，另一方面，卻有點像是在挽救傳統封建的中國藝術道統，讓它們有個管道流向社會。
從這種觀點來說，蘇孟鴻作品當中挪用的花鳥元素，是否一定與現代藝術中現代性的媚俗議題相關，反而頗為令人懷疑。至少，我認為蘇孟鴻在運用郎世寧(1688-1766)、沈振麟(咸豐同治年間)、汪承霈(?-1805)這些清代中晚期畫家的圖像符號時，並不單純是社會符碼的嘲諷與普普化，從視覺無意識的角度來說，這些圖像的挪用與取樣，究竟與解嚴後的台灣當代繪畫的現代性意識有何關聯，是我在這篇文章嘗試釐清的問題。
東亞繪畫現代性的難題
觀看蘇孟鴻一系列的創作，其中讓人最無法迴避的手法之一，就是那揮之不去的郎世寧圖素挪用。如果說這種挪用不過是反諷今日圖像文化的媚俗之舉，進而形成了令人困窘的二次媚俗狀態，那是低估了這些圖素的歷史向度。
首先，在當代藝術創作中，傑夫．沃爾(Jeff Wall 1946)以其攝影回指畫家馬內、塞尚等人的構圖與場景佈置，同時，也回到西方十九世紀現代性創作意識的源頭，將視覺部署(visual dispositif)的焦點從再現表象的問題場域，移位至創作主體觀視與視覺創置的問題場域。這一種視差式的迂迴前進路徑，無非是建立在沃爾對攝影的美學思考，不僅讓自身穿梭於其當下與其十九世紀源頭的辯證對質關係，也內建於其作品的配置中。譬如：在〈女人圖像〉(Picture for Woman)這件作品，將自身的攝影行為，透過鏡像，拉開一般攝影圖像中將觀者與「潛在的攝影者」視角等同為一的配置方式。如同馬內在〈女神遊樂廳〉(The Bar at the Folies Bergères)中破碎幾何的構圖安排，讓觀者的觀視角度找不到適切的認同位置，產生徒勞的「不可能」感。沃爾在〈女人圖像〉中的鏡像與攝影師位置，進一步創造了觀者在女人、攝影師、相機三個視線角色間無所適從的配置狀態，使觀者在萬花筒般的交疊視線中，進入多重視線穿插暈眩之域。
二十世紀的攝影家沃爾對十九世紀繪畫現代性的濃厚興趣，在他的作品中轉化為現代性的圖像源頭的挪用、移位與轉置。從這一點來看蘇孟鴻對郎世寧等清代畫家的一再進行圖像挪用、移位與轉置，不禁讓我思考「東亞現代性」在現代繪畫史上的特殊命運。
以蘇孟鴻不斷引用的郎世寧來說，他代表了西洋傳教士畫家來華後，引進「透視法」與「陰影法」等西洋畫法，重視遠小近大與創造物體明亮與陰暗面畫面構成。依據王耀庭的研究，「顯然郎世寧來華以後，在色彩的堆積、敷染色調的一些技法對清宮的繪畫影響深遠，繪畫的色彩越來越趨於濃郁甜膩，到了乾隆朝清宮繪畫的這種畫風更加地明顯。」 另外，「油畫」能精確掌握形象的表現力，也得到了雍正皇帝的肯定，於是郎世寧得以在十八世紀的清朝宮廷中培植油畫畫師，延展西洋畫再現表象能力的影響範圍。
就此而言，如果十八世紀至十九世紀的清朝中後期，可視為東亞邁向現代世界的發端，那麼，東亞繪畫現代性的開端，是以編納、挪用西洋古典繪畫技法打開其道路的。但是，這條道路顯然充滿了衝突與矛盾。西洋傳教士畫家德尼(王致誠)在《燕京開教略》中說：「中國皇帝希望在畫面上沒有黑影，或是最好毫無陰影，差不多所有的畫多是用水彩的，很少數是用油畫所畫的。」 就此而言，東亞繪畫現代性似乎介於一個思考上的陰影地帶，既無法直接認取其西洋源頭，又無法脫離其強大再現表象能力的影響。
如果我們快速把位置挪移到1980年代解嚴前後的台灣，成長於這個時期的蘇孟鴻，也承認受到當時視覺創作尋找主體性的潮流影響，催迫他思考繪畫的出路。當時的吳天章、黃進河、侯俊明、郭振昌等人，多以台灣世俗圖像為底材，進行系列的編納與挪用，明顯降低了中國繪畫的影響範圍。但是，做為解嚴後第二代的創作者，蘇孟鴻選擇了一條悖離「台灣民俗畫素」的道路，重新認取晚清繪畫變形尷尬處境中的圖像要素。
從模擬、引用到取樣機器
我們可以看到蘇孟鴻對郎世寧的挪用方式，實際上沒辦法說是「引用」，而是接近流行音樂中的「取樣」(sampling)之路，透過平塗與絹印的複製技法，某種取樣機器的繪畫展開在我們眼前。在80年代流行音樂中，所謂的「取樣機器」(sampling machine)就是說，不論是什麼樣的聲音，通過這種機器裝置，都能夠還原成數位訊號、轉換成音源，成為電子合成樂器的聲音樣本。這是一種經過自動控制的程式所輸出的樣本變樣群集，呈現出機器語法大於人工類比語法的特質。
相較於蘇孟鴻所編納的晚清郎世寧繪畫圖像，郎世寧與中國繪畫的關係仍屬「引用」的邏輯：通過引用拿來的東西，在某種意義上還保留著原來的組裝方式，不論是句法或結構形式都沒有發生根本的變化，只是將其中的畫素、透視、陰影的片斷等進行替換而已。自己必須親自開發一個一個的元素、自己必須使用自己所創造出來的體系，這些都是現代主義式的運作原則。其中，將外界的對象引入到自己具有某種詩意的體內，以形成一方完整的小宇宙，成為一條必經之途。
然而，取樣機器不然，主體幾乎是通過科學技術將自己解體，並融入到對象之中，其感性的基質是無政府式的、時空翻轉的、主體解體式的狀態。
以此來觀看蘇孟鴻2003年〈開到荼靡之郎世寧的燈籠〉、〈開到荼靡之郎世寧的鳥〉(櫻桃桑鳲)、〈開到荼靡之清朝的汪承霈的春祺集錦局部〉、〈開到荼靡之清朝的沈振麟的繪花神〉，可以視之為蘇孟鴻取樣繪畫的開端。所有的陰影與透視皆被置換為普普式的色塊塗佈，或直接轉變成立體的燈籠裝置。這令人聯想到photoshop程式中挖剪色階，將原本變化多端的色階簡化為幾個色階的效果，當然，若使用streamline這樣的軟體雖會有更多變的色階產生，卻都不離程式的機器取樣效果。然而，蘇孟鴻用平塗的方式來模擬取樣機器，使人感到介入可辨識與不可辨識其取樣圖素的尷尬處境中。
2003年的〈開到荼靡之灰格格〉使用了歪像技法，進一步打開了他取樣機器的平滑空間，我們在其中，一方面略可辨認出晚清繪畫中的一些元素，另一方面卻又因為機器式語法和歪像句法結構的介入，變得像在觀看電腦編程的自我展示，主體化為碎片，成為機器語彙的碎形裝飾物。2003年的〈開到荼靡之靡彩〉，為這種數位機器化的感覺邏輯，留下了一個硬邊繪畫式的註解。
2007年「開到荼靡之浮光掠影」系列，運用了絹印和打凹打凸的技法，構成系列純裝飾性的圖像，像是桌布、陳舊的壁紙，也像是蘇孟鴻朝向樣本機器繪畫的另一種嘗試。2008年「開到荼靡之變形記」則是對先前歪像取樣模式的再生產，我們越來越感覺到一種暈眩，或許源自於藝術家對藝術生產重覆的不耐，或許源自於這條孤獨的取樣機器道路之空寂無人。如果當初蘇孟鴻選擇的不是沃爾的尋求現代性源頭的對話模式，而是傑夫．昆斯(Jeff Koons)的小白菜系列的話，或許觀眾就不會感到這種油亮的艷麗平面所帶來的窒悶與徒勞感。就此觀之，2005年的「奇淫合歡散」與2007年的「開不到荼靡──以蘇孟鴻為名」實在是藝術家悶得發慌，老鼠出洞，開自己作品玩笑的題外之舉。
所幸，在訴說如何使自己成為一具塑膠射出成型機器的血淚史的時候，蘇孟鴻維持住了資本主義生產邏輯的冷酷與壓抑語調，守住他所選擇的取樣繪畫機器，盡量剔除主體的狂喧與表現，他耐著性子，透過一筆一筆的塗佈與生涯規劃，平穩的展開他的取樣機器平滑空間，就像250年前的郎世寧畫〈碧桃家燕〉、〈荷花蝴蝶〉、〈畫瓶花〉、沈振麟畫〈繪花神〉與汪承霈畫〈牡丹富貴圖〉的心情一般，宮廷在上，雖志不能伸，但打開自己發明的小機器，滑行其中，不論媚俗或雅緻，仍有無人稱的快意，隱隱閃現於下筆之一瞬。
Exhibition 相關展覽
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2010Manjusaka
Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan 彼岸花 耿畫廊，台北，台灣 |