Licentious and Scattering Illusion : The Salvation in the Consumerist Era
Foreword
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who had read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made. Oscar Wilde
Since Sam Su Meng-Hung’s 《Kai Dao Tu Mi(開到荼靡)》series (2003), his work has consistently aimed to explore the expression form and the essence of contemporary’s vanity vision. By borrowing from the lexicon of Chinese literary terms and appropriating traditional painting elements, the artist continues to stage one scene after another, depicting the vain shadows and lights pertaining to a consumerist society.
However, are the implicit terms hidden in the licentious illusions only a re-transcription of art history and a manipulation of the esthetic strategy on ‘kitsch’? Can the truth that exists in the artist’s work be captured among the fleeting mirages？Is the reality in the work, like what Lacan terms as desire, just a permanent lack that is empty？Or at the vanishing point of what Benjamin terms as aura, the consumerist vision provides us another ray that directs to elsewhere？
Under the fetishist and immoral expression form, Sam Su Meng-Hung reiterates implicit terms to praise the sensual ‘jouissance’ beyond the body and leads the viewer to elsewhere, among the fleeting rays. In rejecting the refined and pretentious gesture of the palace of art, and the typical official esthetic terms, the artist’s licentious images express his personal piety through a rebellious gesture.
I. Where the glamour is extreme, the extravagant flower blossoms the last
Illusion is the first of all pleasures. Oscar Wilde
In recent years, my work has been about revealing, with a personal interpretation, the absurdity among the seemingly rich, pretty and luxurious appearances…I chose the Chinese flower-and-bird painting that the public in general would like to hang in their interiors… Sam Su Meng-Hung
The 《Kai Dao Tu Mi》 series that allowed the artist to emerge has a precision in its artistic strategy and aroused a considerable effect in the critic world, which is not to be repeated here. The text is simply based on the textual data of critics and exhibition reviews, and suggests that, undoubtedly, it is the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series that successfully transformed Sam Su Meng-Hung from a student of art into a real creator.
However, the series’ importance may lie rather in the fact that it opened up a unique domain in the artist’s personal creation. Through the series, the domain the artist occupies is the vanity vision situated ‘where the glamour is extreme, the extravagant flower blossoms the last’. The artist’s statement indicates that the choice of the exhibition title《Kai Dao Tu Mi》 points precisely to the border between the glamour and the decay. It is just at the point of border that is dim and impalpable; it is hard to distinguish the vanity from the illusion. It is also here that the fleeting fragments of the world appear exceptionally unusual.
In the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series, the artist uses the techniques of patterns and planes as well as three-dimensional forms to remodel the content of the Chinese traditional flower-and-bird painting. It is remarkable that the emergence of flower-and-bird painting in China began with Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty and his court painters. Ironically, it is also the emperor that brought the Northern Song from extreme prosperity to decay.
Moreover, in the artist’s statement is quoted the sentence on the flower lot picked by the maid She-Yuei in ‘Night Banquet for a Birthday Celebration at the I-hung Hall’ of the literary classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Again, we see the artist’s sophistication and intention. At the end of The Dream of the Red Chamber, ‘Fall into a tract of paleness; the earth is really clean’. It undoubtedly brings us from the Jia family’s previous prosperous scene gradually to the solitude and void.
Whether the richness and glamour of the flower-and-bird painting, or the licentious side depicted in the text of The Dream of the Red Chamber, they are both situated at the border between the prosperity and the decay. If we take it as a starting point to penetrate the artist’s thought, we might deduct that the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series already opened his fascination for the situation where things are no longer retrievable. Only at that dangerous point of border, ‘beauty’ can be a criteria for art. Also, only when ‘the day the Tu-mi flowers blossom, the spring fragrance come the latest’, one can perceive the existence of ‘beauty’ and its immediate disappearance.
Such fascination and exploration for that limit allows Sam Su Meng-Hung to claim that an individual’s work is real creation. At the point where things are extreme and vague, the kitsch appearance of his work points rather to the absent emptiness. Only when the viewer steps out of the meretricious and gorgeous exhibition space, can he taste what is meant by the phrase : ‘Fall into a tract of paleness ; the earth is really clean’. At the transient and irretrievable instant, the work’s ‘kitsch’ colorful graphics suddenly becomes the illusion of ‘nirvana’.
II. Glamour underneath a transparent veil, vague is the shadow of fallen flowers
Following the imagination of the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series, in 2007, the《Shadow》 played again on the traditional iconography. Different from the expression form of 《Kai Dao Tu Mi》, 《Shadow》took silk printing as its expression form of. In some works made with an intentional and artificial texture of classic painting, Sam Su Meng-Hung insinuates implicitly the contemporary painting vocabulary in the graphics. However, he simultaneously implants, in an implicit manner and close to the mirror reflection, classic graphics unto black, green and other modern colored planes. Here, the present and the past are both made plane altogether with the works ; time, following the plane works, loses dimension. Here, the iconography is no longer concerned with the so-called tradition, neither with whether it is contemporary or not. What remains is only a thin membrane stuck on the canvas.
Looking closely at the works from《Shadow》series, we find the artist always uses the approach of contrast and reflection to reveal slightly the membrane-like graphics. The works thus hold the viewer’s vision at the graphic’s surface. The vision cannot extend or penetrate, or further read and analyze their meaning. In confronting the meaningless membrane-graphic, the viewer starts to shift the vision towards the membrane of each work in the venue. So the membrane- graphics become the ephemeral and repetitive existence of glamour. The slight and complex vision created therein precisely reflects the ephemeral character of the contemporary images of fashion and consummation. It is the mere membrane-like images that give meaning to the sub-title,「Shadow」. It is true that the viewer can only capture brief impressions of these pretty lights and shadows and has no reason to linger over them. It is here that the artist opened the point of border in the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series. The point originally pertaining to the temporal dimension is transformed into a donut-like manifold of topology (拓樸流形). All the images stick to and circulate around the outskirt. There is neither an end nor a starting point but only the images which reflect and contrast mutually like between mirrors.
It is remarkable that the artificially made skin-deep surfaces have a visual structure that corresponds to the Mandala structure of esoteric Vajrayāna Buddhism(密宗佛教). Thus what the psychoanalyst Jung terms as representing ‘shaping, metamorphosing, eternal creation of eternal mind’ and ‘the representative of all roads leads towards a core, one that leads towards self’s integration ’ ironically finds its realization in the purposely shallow and consummerized kitsch and gorgeous images by the artist. Therefore, a possibility of nirvana is produced in the consumerist images purposely made. Just like the artist has emphasized in one of his statements, ‘seen from the history, any form of vulgarity once redressed by art becomes refined and serious…when kitsch becomes a kind of artistic performance and exhibition…it actually also bears the halo of art…’. Through the endless contrast and reflection of the shallow membrane-like graphics on the plane of the canvas, unexpectedly, a Mandala that embraces the universe of the mind is constructed. Thus it allows the viewer an escape from the circles made of endless membrane-graphics, and toward ‘ a road that leads towards self’s integration’ as described by Jung.
From the fleeting and irretrievable point of border in《Kai Dao Tu Mi》, to the endlessly circulating manifold in 《Shadow》, the meretricious lights and shadows in the artist’s work continuously point to the state of vanity beyond and after the glamour. Only when the viewer is at the moment of the artist’s 「The blooming day of Neverfower,The very ends of aromatic spring(荼靡花開日、春芳最晚時)」, and in the realm where ‘flower shadows are vague’, can he experience the ‘nirvana’ of escape.
III 合歡花解語、奇淫夢裏路 Albizzia knowing the words written in the path of Licentious fantasy
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. Oscar Wilde
As stated above, Sam Su Meng-Hung’s work consistently leads the viewer to the emptiness through its licentious, pompous and fleeting character. However, the essential question to be asked is : what is that which lies in the illusory substance of the work ? Is it comparable to what Lacan terms as desire, that the illusion is originally nothing, or that the veiled desire has some form to be revealed ? Or, is the desire itself also a way leading to the illusion ? In examining the artist’s work, we find that, apart from the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》which is a series of two-dimensional paintings with the traditional flower-and-bird painting as their subject, the videos and photography works in Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac and《Unreachable Blooming》correspond further to the artist’s body or the senses perse.
In this series, the artist presents his own body. In the images, he is bare and wears a mask of leopard’s head. He keeps on copulating with the dolls and models in the room and masturbating. Different from the British director Peter Greenaway’s films which satirize the phallocentric consumerism through stripping off the procreativity and the bodily, the intercourse or the masturbation in Sam Su Meng-Hung’s work suggest a praise to objects’ life and the possibility of genesis from there.
In Book X of The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato described a fable about the cave. The fable describes in a metaphorical way that the journey of human evolution started from a vague sensual world in a cave, then towards the shining sunlight outside and all the truths along with it. It puts the realm of the senses as opposite to the light representing the reason. However, the French feminist thinker Luce Irigaray(中文文章字尾漏y) re-interpreted the cave in the fable as the womb. According to her interpretation, then the logic of feelings exists as opposite to Plato’s reason and it has to lie and gestate in the deep and obscure cave.
Applying the perspective to interpret Sam Su Meng-Hung’s work about the body, we find that the space where the body is situated is like the cave-womb described by Irigaray. Thus there is a meaning of procreation in the artist’s intercourse in 《Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac》. Besides, we see the process of giving birth and killing the dolls with hands. Consumer goods here are endowed with a biological quality, and it is for this reason that the artist can intercourse with them, that the objects are alive. What is interesting is the leopard-head mask worn by the artist, which gives an almost primary religious meaning to the obscene acts in the cell. Rather, the artist enacts again the ceremony of the consumerist era through the intercourse with objects.
In〝S aM khya-K a rik a-Bhasya〞《數論頌注疏》, Gaudapada talks about Asura’s theory on the genesis of the cosmos in the Indian antiquity："Like the birth of a baby comes from the combination of a man and a woman, the genesis of all things also comes from the copulation of yin and yang." Besides, Upanishads奧義書 and Bhagavad Gita《薄伽梵歌》also mention this kind of cosmology. According to the esoteric Vajrayāna Buddhism’s密教 theories, human body is an epitome of the cosmos itself. They suggest that the world originates from the copulation of yin and yang and for no other reason, except for the sexual impulse. For human beings, it is the combination of man and woman that results in the process of genesis of new lives. It is in the same way that the universe was created through the copulation of yin and yang. In the vast and boundless void, the great pulsation of genesis is incarnated, for human beings, as the sexual impulse. It is sexual desire and love that result in new names and new colors（’name’ means spiritual phenomenon ; ‘color’ means material things；human being is the combination of the spirit and the material, so he is sometimes termed as name-color）. Therefore, human beings can generate and procreate. It is just in this sense that the leopard-headed priest in《Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac》 wants to lead the viewer beyond the phenomenal realm and to make again the genesis of all things.
Following the comprehension and the interpretation of the mysticism, it seems we can understand why, in the works where the artist presents himself naked, there is always a sexually provocative obscenity in the expression form. If seen from the angle of the mysticism, sex itself is an effective means to escape the world of phenomenon and it is the most sacred. Therefore, sex in such a ritual does not manifest itself as passion, but an act that is non-characterized. It is a state of mind that is stateless, and a self that is integral. What indulges therein is the utmost self and self-escape. It is in the sense of nirvana that the body in 《Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac》and《Unreachable Blooming》 no longer belongs only to the artist but to a ‘a state of mind that is stateless, and a self that is integral’, which is beyond one’s body. It is the shift of the body’s attributes that allows the nirvana of the viewer through the works. And the obscene body figure of Sam Su Meng-Hung’s is no longer, either, the subject of desire, in Lacan’s terms, that is castrated and becomes powerless.
In 2008, after his artist residency in Korea, Sam Su Meng-Hung began another series of works. There we can see the gorgeous flowers and shadows of the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》 series come to be represented in a circular and smooth fashion. For sure, the artist has returned to his familiar subject and medium, like Wilde’s words quoted above, that a work of art must result from a unique temperament of the creator. According to Wilde, art is the strongest and purest individualism ever known in this world. The works that are pompous and licentious but lead the viewer to escape the present and to jump into the illusion come precisely from Sam Su Meng-Hung‘s personal strong and refined temperament.
The implicit terms in these licentious illusions manipulate and transcribe not only the art history and the contemporary aesthetic strategies. Among the fleeting and fragmentary mirages, exists the truth in the artist’s soul. Under the fetishist and immoral expression form, Sam Su Meng-Hung consistently uses implicit terms to reiterate the sensual ‘jouissance’ beyond the body, thus leads the viewer to elsewhere among the fleeting rays of the consumerist vision. With his rebellious gesture, the artist has a singular temperament which comes to refine the licentious images through which is revealed his personal piety for art.
Foreword
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who had read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made. Oscar Wilde
Since Sam Su Meng-Hung’s 《Kai Dao Tu Mi(開到荼靡)》series (2003), his work has consistently aimed to explore the expression form and the essence of contemporary’s vanity vision. By borrowing from the lexicon of Chinese literary terms and appropriating traditional painting elements, the artist continues to stage one scene after another, depicting the vain shadows and lights pertaining to a consumerist society.
However, are the implicit terms hidden in the licentious illusions only a re-transcription of art history and a manipulation of the esthetic strategy on ‘kitsch’? Can the truth that exists in the artist’s work be captured among the fleeting mirages？Is the reality in the work, like what Lacan terms as desire, just a permanent lack that is empty？Or at the vanishing point of what Benjamin terms as aura, the consumerist vision provides us another ray that directs to elsewhere？
Under the fetishist and immoral expression form, Sam Su Meng-Hung reiterates implicit terms to praise the sensual ‘jouissance’ beyond the body and leads the viewer to elsewhere, among the fleeting rays. In rejecting the refined and pretentious gesture of the palace of art, and the typical official esthetic terms, the artist’s licentious images express his personal piety through a rebellious gesture.
I. Where the glamour is extreme, the extravagant flower blossoms the last
Illusion is the first of all pleasures. Oscar Wilde
In recent years, my work has been about revealing, with a personal interpretation, the absurdity among the seemingly rich, pretty and luxurious appearances…I chose the Chinese flower-and-bird painting that the public in general would like to hang in their interiors… Sam Su Meng-Hung
The 《Kai Dao Tu Mi》 series that allowed the artist to emerge has a precision in its artistic strategy and aroused a considerable effect in the critic world, which is not to be repeated here. The text is simply based on the textual data of critics and exhibition reviews, and suggests that, undoubtedly, it is the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series that successfully transformed Sam Su Meng-Hung from a student of art into a real creator.
However, the series’ importance may lie rather in the fact that it opened up a unique domain in the artist’s personal creation. Through the series, the domain the artist occupies is the vanity vision situated ‘where the glamour is extreme, the extravagant flower blossoms the last’. The artist’s statement indicates that the choice of the exhibition title《Kai Dao Tu Mi》 points precisely to the border between the glamour and the decay. It is just at the point of border that is dim and impalpable; it is hard to distinguish the vanity from the illusion. It is also here that the fleeting fragments of the world appear exceptionally unusual.
In the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series, the artist uses the techniques of patterns and planes as well as three-dimensional forms to remodel the content of the Chinese traditional flower-and-bird painting. It is remarkable that the emergence of flower-and-bird painting in China began with Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty and his court painters. Ironically, it is also the emperor that brought the Northern Song from extreme prosperity to decay.
Moreover, in the artist’s statement is quoted the sentence on the flower lot picked by the maid She-Yuei in ‘Night Banquet for a Birthday Celebration at the I-hung Hall’ of the literary classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Again, we see the artist’s sophistication and intention. At the end of The Dream of the Red Chamber, ‘Fall into a tract of paleness; the earth is really clean’. It undoubtedly brings us from the Jia family’s previous prosperous scene gradually to the solitude and void.
Whether the richness and glamour of the flower-and-bird painting, or the licentious side depicted in the text of The Dream of the Red Chamber, they are both situated at the border between the prosperity and the decay. If we take it as a starting point to penetrate the artist’s thought, we might deduct that the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series already opened his fascination for the situation where things are no longer retrievable. Only at that dangerous point of border, ‘beauty’ can be a criteria for art. Also, only when ‘the day the Tu-mi flowers blossom, the spring fragrance come the latest’, one can perceive the existence of ‘beauty’ and its immediate disappearance.
Such fascination and exploration for that limit allows Sam Su Meng-Hung to claim that an individual’s work is real creation. At the point where things are extreme and vague, the kitsch appearance of his work points rather to the absent emptiness. Only when the viewer steps out of the meretricious and gorgeous exhibition space, can he taste what is meant by the phrase : ‘Fall into a tract of paleness ; the earth is really clean’. At the transient and irretrievable instant, the work’s ‘kitsch’ colorful graphics suddenly becomes the illusion of ‘nirvana’.
II. Glamour underneath a transparent veil, vague is the shadow of fallen flowers
Following the imagination of the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series, in 2007, the《Shadow》 played again on the traditional iconography. Different from the expression form of 《Kai Dao Tu Mi》, 《Shadow》took silk printing as its expression form of. In some works made with an intentional and artificial texture of classic painting, Sam Su Meng-Hung insinuates implicitly the contemporary painting vocabulary in the graphics. However, he simultaneously implants, in an implicit manner and close to the mirror reflection, classic graphics unto black, green and other modern colored planes. Here, the present and the past are both made plane altogether with the works ; time, following the plane works, loses dimension. Here, the iconography is no longer concerned with the so-called tradition, neither with whether it is contemporary or not. What remains is only a thin membrane stuck on the canvas.
Looking closely at the works from《Shadow》series, we find the artist always uses the approach of contrast and reflection to reveal slightly the membrane-like graphics. The works thus hold the viewer’s vision at the graphic’s surface. The vision cannot extend or penetrate, or further read and analyze their meaning. In confronting the meaningless membrane-graphic, the viewer starts to shift the vision towards the membrane of each work in the venue. So the membrane- graphics become the ephemeral and repetitive existence of glamour. The slight and complex vision created therein precisely reflects the ephemeral character of the contemporary images of fashion and consummation. It is the mere membrane-like images that give meaning to the sub-title,「Shadow」. It is true that the viewer can only capture brief impressions of these pretty lights and shadows and has no reason to linger over them. It is here that the artist opened the point of border in the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》series. The point originally pertaining to the temporal dimension is transformed into a donut-like manifold of topology (拓樸流形). All the images stick to and circulate around the outskirt. There is neither an end nor a starting point but only the images which reflect and contrast mutually like between mirrors.
It is remarkable that the artificially made skin-deep surfaces have a visual structure that corresponds to the Mandala structure of esoteric Vajrayāna Buddhism(密宗佛教). Thus what the psychoanalyst Jung terms as representing ‘shaping, metamorphosing, eternal creation of eternal mind’ and ‘the representative of all roads leads towards a core, one that leads towards self’s integration ’ ironically finds its realization in the purposely shallow and consummerized kitsch and gorgeous images by the artist. Therefore, a possibility of nirvana is produced in the consumerist images purposely made. Just like the artist has emphasized in one of his statements, ‘seen from the history, any form of vulgarity once redressed by art becomes refined and serious…when kitsch becomes a kind of artistic performance and exhibition…it actually also bears the halo of art…’. Through the endless contrast and reflection of the shallow membrane-like graphics on the plane of the canvas, unexpectedly, a Mandala that embraces the universe of the mind is constructed. Thus it allows the viewer an escape from the circles made of endless membrane-graphics, and toward ‘ a road that leads towards self’s integration’ as described by Jung.
From the fleeting and irretrievable point of border in《Kai Dao Tu Mi》, to the endlessly circulating manifold in 《Shadow》, the meretricious lights and shadows in the artist’s work continuously point to the state of vanity beyond and after the glamour. Only when the viewer is at the moment of the artist’s 「The blooming day of Neverfower,The very ends of aromatic spring(荼靡花開日、春芳最晚時)」, and in the realm where ‘flower shadows are vague’, can he experience the ‘nirvana’ of escape.
III 合歡花解語、奇淫夢裏路 Albizzia knowing the words written in the path of Licentious fantasy
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. Oscar Wilde
As stated above, Sam Su Meng-Hung’s work consistently leads the viewer to the emptiness through its licentious, pompous and fleeting character. However, the essential question to be asked is : what is that which lies in the illusory substance of the work ? Is it comparable to what Lacan terms as desire, that the illusion is originally nothing, or that the veiled desire has some form to be revealed ? Or, is the desire itself also a way leading to the illusion ? In examining the artist’s work, we find that, apart from the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》which is a series of two-dimensional paintings with the traditional flower-and-bird painting as their subject, the videos and photography works in Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac and《Unreachable Blooming》correspond further to the artist’s body or the senses perse.
In this series, the artist presents his own body. In the images, he is bare and wears a mask of leopard’s head. He keeps on copulating with the dolls and models in the room and masturbating. Different from the British director Peter Greenaway’s films which satirize the phallocentric consumerism through stripping off the procreativity and the bodily, the intercourse or the masturbation in Sam Su Meng-Hung’s work suggest a praise to objects’ life and the possibility of genesis from there.
In Book X of The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato described a fable about the cave. The fable describes in a metaphorical way that the journey of human evolution started from a vague sensual world in a cave, then towards the shining sunlight outside and all the truths along with it. It puts the realm of the senses as opposite to the light representing the reason. However, the French feminist thinker Luce Irigaray(中文文章字尾漏y) re-interpreted the cave in the fable as the womb. According to her interpretation, then the logic of feelings exists as opposite to Plato’s reason and it has to lie and gestate in the deep and obscure cave.
Applying the perspective to interpret Sam Su Meng-Hung’s work about the body, we find that the space where the body is situated is like the cave-womb described by Irigaray. Thus there is a meaning of procreation in the artist’s intercourse in 《Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac》. Besides, we see the process of giving birth and killing the dolls with hands. Consumer goods here are endowed with a biological quality, and it is for this reason that the artist can intercourse with them, that the objects are alive. What is interesting is the leopard-head mask worn by the artist, which gives an almost primary religious meaning to the obscene acts in the cell. Rather, the artist enacts again the ceremony of the consumerist era through the intercourse with objects.
In〝S aM khya-K a rik a-Bhasya〞《數論頌注疏》, Gaudapada talks about Asura’s theory on the genesis of the cosmos in the Indian antiquity："Like the birth of a baby comes from the combination of a man and a woman, the genesis of all things also comes from the copulation of yin and yang." Besides, Upanishads奧義書 and Bhagavad Gita《薄伽梵歌》also mention this kind of cosmology. According to the esoteric Vajrayāna Buddhism’s密教 theories, human body is an epitome of the cosmos itself. They suggest that the world originates from the copulation of yin and yang and for no other reason, except for the sexual impulse. For human beings, it is the combination of man and woman that results in the process of genesis of new lives. It is in the same way that the universe was created through the copulation of yin and yang. In the vast and boundless void, the great pulsation of genesis is incarnated, for human beings, as the sexual impulse. It is sexual desire and love that result in new names and new colors（’name’ means spiritual phenomenon ; ‘color’ means material things；human being is the combination of the spirit and the material, so he is sometimes termed as name-color）. Therefore, human beings can generate and procreate. It is just in this sense that the leopard-headed priest in《Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac》 wants to lead the viewer beyond the phenomenal realm and to make again the genesis of all things.
Following the comprehension and the interpretation of the mysticism, it seems we can understand why, in the works where the artist presents himself naked, there is always a sexually provocative obscenity in the expression form. If seen from the angle of the mysticism, sex itself is an effective means to escape the world of phenomenon and it is the most sacred. Therefore, sex in such a ritual does not manifest itself as passion, but an act that is non-characterized. It is a state of mind that is stateless, and a self that is integral. What indulges therein is the utmost self and self-escape. It is in the sense of nirvana that the body in 《Tasteless & Colorless Aphrodisiac》and《Unreachable Blooming》 no longer belongs only to the artist but to a ‘a state of mind that is stateless, and a self that is integral’, which is beyond one’s body. It is the shift of the body’s attributes that allows the nirvana of the viewer through the works. And the obscene body figure of Sam Su Meng-Hung’s is no longer, either, the subject of desire, in Lacan’s terms, that is castrated and becomes powerless.
- Warm scenery melt ; fragrances everywhere. Butterflies and bees play ; the spring color has arrived
In 2008, after his artist residency in Korea, Sam Su Meng-Hung began another series of works. There we can see the gorgeous flowers and shadows of the《Kai Dao Tu Mi》 series come to be represented in a circular and smooth fashion. For sure, the artist has returned to his familiar subject and medium, like Wilde’s words quoted above, that a work of art must result from a unique temperament of the creator. According to Wilde, art is the strongest and purest individualism ever known in this world. The works that are pompous and licentious but lead the viewer to escape the present and to jump into the illusion come precisely from Sam Su Meng-Hung‘s personal strong and refined temperament.
The implicit terms in these licentious illusions manipulate and transcribe not only the art history and the contemporary aesthetic strategies. Among the fleeting and fragmentary mirages, exists the truth in the artist’s soul. Under the fetishist and immoral expression form, Sam Su Meng-Hung consistently uses implicit terms to reiterate the sensual ‘jouissance’ beyond the body, thus leads the viewer to elsewhere among the fleeting rays of the consumerist vision. With his rebellious gesture, the artist has a singular temperament which comes to refine the licentious images through which is revealed his personal piety for art.