A Sampling Machine
Gong Jow-Jiun
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.
Gong Jow-Jiun
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.
Related Works
Manjusaka 2010
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Kai Dao Tu Mi 2003
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