Signifiers without the Signified, embers of an enduring glory
SU Meng-hung’s Xiang Nai Er exhibition
By Wu Chieh-Hsiang
The Chinese title of SU Meng-hung’s exhibition immediately conjures the fashion brand “Chanel”, but the English title is a phonetic re-translation of the Chinese, Xiang Nai Er. This is reminiscent of the linguistical gymnastics and misplacement of signifier and signified in the 2016 solo exhibition, A Painter of the Empire, where the English title of the series of paintings “Grandeur．Void．Cloud．Lark", was a literal translation of each kanji character, 美, 空, 雲, 雀, that comprises the name of Japanese cultural icon and singer Misora Hibari. Not only does Xiang Nai Er reference Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s phonetic name in Chinese, it is also a pop song by Faye Wong. No specific reference is given as to why certain phrases or names are repeated. This is consistent with SU Meng-hung creative maxim, where symbols and images mutually reference, ad infinitum. Signifiers become the signified; and the signified become signifiers. Hence, they are not subject to historical or political interpretation, and are released from the history of visual art and freed from the entanglements of mimesis, replication, or aura, while also detached from preconceived notions of the dominance of Western art history.
From referencing the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, to embedding one of Sanyu’s signature flowers-in-vase motifs within a Chanel coromandel screen, SU Meng-Hung is adept at extracting glimpses from the history of East-West interaction, and then compiling these into key events. Giuseppe Castiglione’s experiences of transitioning from a Christian missionary into a painter in the Chinese imperial court, and of injecting his understanding of Western artistic techniques into the subject of Chinese paintings, left behind a history of (dis)harmonious cultural interaction between the East and the West.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel developed a series of jewelry designs by appropriating motifs of flora, fauna, and imagery from her collection of pearl-inlaid Chinese coromandel lacquer screens and naming her famed Coromandel Jewellery series after the governorate of the Dutch East India Company on the Coromandel Coast. SU Meng-hung’s art poses a conspicuous question regarding these fortuitous or accidental cultural rendezvous between the East and West: Where does the “originality” of art begin and what does it mean in the whole institution of art? Originality may be a misconception in Western art history, as SU Meng-hung points out in his doctoral dissertation (2012): “Using machine production as a method of art generation perhaps proposes that creativity has switched to another path. Aura has not vanished; the only question now is how machines produce aura.” (p. 52) If machines of reproduction are the cause of vanishing artistic aura, then aura is the source of its originality, which is to say that art carries remnants of the sacred/mythical and, in the operation of reproduction, art can be cloaked in the embers of empire, in remnants of departing glory, or in a soupçon of legend.
SU Meng-hung’s allusions to coromandel screens, to wallpaper, and his use of wall stamps and repetitive printing techniques within the Xiang Nai Er exhibition space is reminiscent of handmade calico-print production methods; calling to mind Victorian Era Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the rise in industrialization and commercialization enabled the middle class to produce and imitate, through mass produced home décor, the extravagant styles that were once exquisitely created by the noblesse. The textile industry of this era began machine-manufacturing large sheets of fabric with a plethora of complex, repeated patterns from which customers could choose. It was at this time that British Arts and Crafts advocate William Morris established the semi-manual, semi-industrial lifestyle economy through his woodblock prints. With world trade interactions and business and industrial exchanges, patterns that mimicked imagery from Eastern landscapes, gardens, flora and fauna began to emerge in home décor designs of this era. Chinoiserie furniture made of bamboo became fashionable in Europe during that time. It has been estimated that in the latter half of the 19th century, Britain was home to some 150 bamboo furniture factories. (Bamboo Style, by Gale Beth Goldberg)
Whether manual or mechanical, “reproduction” and “repetition” occurred long before Walter Benjamin’s thesis of the vanishing aura. Generally speaking, the emphasis on originality in art history has been relegated to the Romantic period with the advent of individualism and Geniekult. This was also an era when art made a further departure from the jurisdictions of theology. According to Rosalind Krauss’s observations of Auguste Rodin’s method of producing sculptures using plaster moulds, and of photographs developed from negatives being considered as original or authentic, the opposition between reproduction technology and original concept is paradox. Krauss also mentions that originality can be questioned when the avant-garde, in its ultimate rejection of tradition and representational art, triggers a demand for originality and presentity but is followed by the stylistic repetition of elements in the De Stijl movement, in Minimalism, or in Abstract Expressionism with their emphasis on individual character; or by experiment that deviates from the traditional form of art. (The Originality of the Avante-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, 1986.) Though Krauss poses the question, she does not take the leap out of the art history framework to inspect the logic between originality and mechanical reproduction, and therefore, does not see that the contradiction she points out is not only in the internal logic of art history, but also in the relationship between the market and production.
Where theory falls short, artists have the perfect interpretations. Using standard brush techniques modeled in Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, SU Meng-hung reveals the distance between this system of artistic cultivation established on emulation and modeling, and the concept of originality. SU Meng-hung also links together internal elements of art history using techniques such as emulation, sketch guides, printmaking, reproduction, appropriation, and material simulation, to produce artistic works for the commercial gallery, while simultaneously reflecting the conditions such as capital flow and material costs which are external to art.
The faux lacquerware color application of layering and sanding juxtaposes vibrant luxury with weathering, is a precise representation of SU Meng-hung’s unique style. SU Meng-hung manually accomplishes “mechanical reproduction”. From his early edition of an introduction chart for main characters from Dream of the Red Chamber; to his illustrations for The Golden Lotus; to producing woodblock prints that resemble wallpaper or fabric designs that can be repeatedly printed and distributed evenly across a canvas and at times extending to walls when fabric runs out. Lacquerware, gold foil, and pearlescent “imitation materials” are techniques the artist researched and developed to showcase ways in which any class of taste product can be.
By bringing the Eye of Providence from the U.S. dollar bill into his model set, SU Meng-hung’s God’s Eye stamp represents God’s concern over American values, but in the torrent of capitalism, it sees instead how desire and vanity have moved from the private realm to the public and become obvious. Though it symbolizes the omniscient, God’s Eye is but a graphic printed from a mould, SU Meng-hung bids farewell to the system of symbols and the system of representation, and turn to the thorough surface of painting.
SU Meng-hung repeatedly evokes middle-class desires of the East and West over the past few centuries, encompassing imitations of Western still lifes and skull paintings, an output of a series of fine-line brush paintings, the East-West mutual imitation of kitsch, badly applied gold foil, and weathered pearlescent pigments. On different levels, these touch upon issues of the artist’s role in the taste economy. Are artists the suppliers or an instigators of consumption culture within capitalism? Or these who have insight of the whole mechanism?
By manipulating “reproduce-ability”, SU Meng-hung highlights the controversy of originality and praised the “market supply quality” of pop art with printing and media characteristics. By referring to himself as a “plastic injection form machine” (SU Meng-hung’s doctoral dissertation, 2012), he insists on regarding artistic creation as artistic production. Besides further departing from the concept of The Creator that haunts art throughout history to this day, he also takes a more comprehensive view in testing the distance and involvement between capitalist forms and artistic output. By referring to the Chanel brand, Xiang Nai Er also puts forth the “governing state” of capitalism as a successor to imperialism. On the one hand, it provides ample imitation, emulation, and reproduction to distribute taste, so that culture seems to be boundless and disloyal; while on the other hand, it uses originality and authenticity to create a new status-differential in the aftermath of the dissolution of empire and liberation of the colonized. Fashion is possibly the industry with the least-stable signifiers in the creative economy. Inspiration of the designers may come from their own culture, but when the final product is presented on the catwalk -- whether Chinese-style, kimono-style, palatial style, Egyptian-style, bohemian style, Indian style, Native American style (periodically drawing ire and critiqued for cultural appropriation) -- all becomes a surface aesthetic of being like a thing but not the thing. In the world of fashion, the degree of cultural attachment is extremely low while brand loyalty remains extremely high.
There are many facets to present discourses on art including the departure from sacred imagery, the loss of aura, the segregation from craft, market, and mass production, as well as the rejection of repetition… these repeatedly swirl in self-entanglement throughout in art history. Better yet to regard SU Meng-hung’s straight-shooting results of self-experimentation from a capitalist, industrial, and technological production logic. In the exhibition hall, a metal scaffolding has been gilded in gold-foil to represent bamboo-scaffolding, positioned to face a bamboo chair atop a mound of landscape rocks on the opposite wall. This inexplicably causes me to associate the development of perspective during the Renaissance period, and Michelangelo, who was perpetually lying on top of scaffolding. The gilded scaffolding enables the momentary clarity of surface significance.
At first glance, Xiang Nai Er appears to be culled for the collector’s market in both theme and media, while a more detailed observation reveals the artist’s response to art history, cultural interaction history, and technological history. SU Meng-hung once mentioned that he hoped his art could be “appreciated on an intellectual and popular level”, however, the amusement in SU Meng-hung’s “appreciation on an intellectual and popular level” is that, what is regarded as elegant is actually quite common, and what is regarded as common actually has a profound critical character. What attracts the pure art connoisseur’s eye is what the artist has always possessed: a decadent aesthetic of the lingering embers of a dissipating but never vanishing glory.
https://talks.taishinart.org.tw/juries/wch/2019062901
SU Meng-hung’s Xiang Nai Er exhibition
By Wu Chieh-Hsiang
The Chinese title of SU Meng-hung’s exhibition immediately conjures the fashion brand “Chanel”, but the English title is a phonetic re-translation of the Chinese, Xiang Nai Er. This is reminiscent of the linguistical gymnastics and misplacement of signifier and signified in the 2016 solo exhibition, A Painter of the Empire, where the English title of the series of paintings “Grandeur．Void．Cloud．Lark", was a literal translation of each kanji character, 美, 空, 雲, 雀, that comprises the name of Japanese cultural icon and singer Misora Hibari. Not only does Xiang Nai Er reference Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s phonetic name in Chinese, it is also a pop song by Faye Wong. No specific reference is given as to why certain phrases or names are repeated. This is consistent with SU Meng-hung creative maxim, where symbols and images mutually reference, ad infinitum. Signifiers become the signified; and the signified become signifiers. Hence, they are not subject to historical or political interpretation, and are released from the history of visual art and freed from the entanglements of mimesis, replication, or aura, while also detached from preconceived notions of the dominance of Western art history.
From referencing the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, to embedding one of Sanyu’s signature flowers-in-vase motifs within a Chanel coromandel screen, SU Meng-Hung is adept at extracting glimpses from the history of East-West interaction, and then compiling these into key events. Giuseppe Castiglione’s experiences of transitioning from a Christian missionary into a painter in the Chinese imperial court, and of injecting his understanding of Western artistic techniques into the subject of Chinese paintings, left behind a history of (dis)harmonious cultural interaction between the East and the West.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel developed a series of jewelry designs by appropriating motifs of flora, fauna, and imagery from her collection of pearl-inlaid Chinese coromandel lacquer screens and naming her famed Coromandel Jewellery series after the governorate of the Dutch East India Company on the Coromandel Coast. SU Meng-hung’s art poses a conspicuous question regarding these fortuitous or accidental cultural rendezvous between the East and West: Where does the “originality” of art begin and what does it mean in the whole institution of art? Originality may be a misconception in Western art history, as SU Meng-hung points out in his doctoral dissertation (2012): “Using machine production as a method of art generation perhaps proposes that creativity has switched to another path. Aura has not vanished; the only question now is how machines produce aura.” (p. 52) If machines of reproduction are the cause of vanishing artistic aura, then aura is the source of its originality, which is to say that art carries remnants of the sacred/mythical and, in the operation of reproduction, art can be cloaked in the embers of empire, in remnants of departing glory, or in a soupçon of legend.
SU Meng-hung’s allusions to coromandel screens, to wallpaper, and his use of wall stamps and repetitive printing techniques within the Xiang Nai Er exhibition space is reminiscent of handmade calico-print production methods; calling to mind Victorian Era Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the rise in industrialization and commercialization enabled the middle class to produce and imitate, through mass produced home décor, the extravagant styles that were once exquisitely created by the noblesse. The textile industry of this era began machine-manufacturing large sheets of fabric with a plethora of complex, repeated patterns from which customers could choose. It was at this time that British Arts and Crafts advocate William Morris established the semi-manual, semi-industrial lifestyle economy through his woodblock prints. With world trade interactions and business and industrial exchanges, patterns that mimicked imagery from Eastern landscapes, gardens, flora and fauna began to emerge in home décor designs of this era. Chinoiserie furniture made of bamboo became fashionable in Europe during that time. It has been estimated that in the latter half of the 19th century, Britain was home to some 150 bamboo furniture factories. (Bamboo Style, by Gale Beth Goldberg)
Whether manual or mechanical, “reproduction” and “repetition” occurred long before Walter Benjamin’s thesis of the vanishing aura. Generally speaking, the emphasis on originality in art history has been relegated to the Romantic period with the advent of individualism and Geniekult. This was also an era when art made a further departure from the jurisdictions of theology. According to Rosalind Krauss’s observations of Auguste Rodin’s method of producing sculptures using plaster moulds, and of photographs developed from negatives being considered as original or authentic, the opposition between reproduction technology and original concept is paradox. Krauss also mentions that originality can be questioned when the avant-garde, in its ultimate rejection of tradition and representational art, triggers a demand for originality and presentity but is followed by the stylistic repetition of elements in the De Stijl movement, in Minimalism, or in Abstract Expressionism with their emphasis on individual character; or by experiment that deviates from the traditional form of art. (The Originality of the Avante-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, 1986.) Though Krauss poses the question, she does not take the leap out of the art history framework to inspect the logic between originality and mechanical reproduction, and therefore, does not see that the contradiction she points out is not only in the internal logic of art history, but also in the relationship between the market and production.
Where theory falls short, artists have the perfect interpretations. Using standard brush techniques modeled in Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, SU Meng-hung reveals the distance between this system of artistic cultivation established on emulation and modeling, and the concept of originality. SU Meng-hung also links together internal elements of art history using techniques such as emulation, sketch guides, printmaking, reproduction, appropriation, and material simulation, to produce artistic works for the commercial gallery, while simultaneously reflecting the conditions such as capital flow and material costs which are external to art.
The faux lacquerware color application of layering and sanding juxtaposes vibrant luxury with weathering, is a precise representation of SU Meng-hung’s unique style. SU Meng-hung manually accomplishes “mechanical reproduction”. From his early edition of an introduction chart for main characters from Dream of the Red Chamber; to his illustrations for The Golden Lotus; to producing woodblock prints that resemble wallpaper or fabric designs that can be repeatedly printed and distributed evenly across a canvas and at times extending to walls when fabric runs out. Lacquerware, gold foil, and pearlescent “imitation materials” are techniques the artist researched and developed to showcase ways in which any class of taste product can be.
By bringing the Eye of Providence from the U.S. dollar bill into his model set, SU Meng-hung’s God’s Eye stamp represents God’s concern over American values, but in the torrent of capitalism, it sees instead how desire and vanity have moved from the private realm to the public and become obvious. Though it symbolizes the omniscient, God’s Eye is but a graphic printed from a mould, SU Meng-hung bids farewell to the system of symbols and the system of representation, and turn to the thorough surface of painting.
SU Meng-hung repeatedly evokes middle-class desires of the East and West over the past few centuries, encompassing imitations of Western still lifes and skull paintings, an output of a series of fine-line brush paintings, the East-West mutual imitation of kitsch, badly applied gold foil, and weathered pearlescent pigments. On different levels, these touch upon issues of the artist’s role in the taste economy. Are artists the suppliers or an instigators of consumption culture within capitalism? Or these who have insight of the whole mechanism?
By manipulating “reproduce-ability”, SU Meng-hung highlights the controversy of originality and praised the “market supply quality” of pop art with printing and media characteristics. By referring to himself as a “plastic injection form machine” (SU Meng-hung’s doctoral dissertation, 2012), he insists on regarding artistic creation as artistic production. Besides further departing from the concept of The Creator that haunts art throughout history to this day, he also takes a more comprehensive view in testing the distance and involvement between capitalist forms and artistic output. By referring to the Chanel brand, Xiang Nai Er also puts forth the “governing state” of capitalism as a successor to imperialism. On the one hand, it provides ample imitation, emulation, and reproduction to distribute taste, so that culture seems to be boundless and disloyal; while on the other hand, it uses originality and authenticity to create a new status-differential in the aftermath of the dissolution of empire and liberation of the colonized. Fashion is possibly the industry with the least-stable signifiers in the creative economy. Inspiration of the designers may come from their own culture, but when the final product is presented on the catwalk -- whether Chinese-style, kimono-style, palatial style, Egyptian-style, bohemian style, Indian style, Native American style (periodically drawing ire and critiqued for cultural appropriation) -- all becomes a surface aesthetic of being like a thing but not the thing. In the world of fashion, the degree of cultural attachment is extremely low while brand loyalty remains extremely high.
There are many facets to present discourses on art including the departure from sacred imagery, the loss of aura, the segregation from craft, market, and mass production, as well as the rejection of repetition… these repeatedly swirl in self-entanglement throughout in art history. Better yet to regard SU Meng-hung’s straight-shooting results of self-experimentation from a capitalist, industrial, and technological production logic. In the exhibition hall, a metal scaffolding has been gilded in gold-foil to represent bamboo-scaffolding, positioned to face a bamboo chair atop a mound of landscape rocks on the opposite wall. This inexplicably causes me to associate the development of perspective during the Renaissance period, and Michelangelo, who was perpetually lying on top of scaffolding. The gilded scaffolding enables the momentary clarity of surface significance.
At first glance, Xiang Nai Er appears to be culled for the collector’s market in both theme and media, while a more detailed observation reveals the artist’s response to art history, cultural interaction history, and technological history. SU Meng-hung once mentioned that he hoped his art could be “appreciated on an intellectual and popular level”, however, the amusement in SU Meng-hung’s “appreciation on an intellectual and popular level” is that, what is regarded as elegant is actually quite common, and what is regarded as common actually has a profound critical character. What attracts the pure art connoisseur’s eye is what the artist has always possessed: a decadent aesthetic of the lingering embers of a dissipating but never vanishing glory.
https://talks.taishinart.org.tw/juries/wch/2019062901