The Aesthetics of Pain

Our ability to look back through time, or to see directly into another culture from afar, is peculiar to the modern world and the invention of the camera. Photographs and newsreels allow us the privileged position of seeing, and judging or longing for, the exotic or for that which came before us. Prior to the dramatic changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, you had to travel to see into another society. Nostalgia is also a product of modernity: so is the artist’s ability to meld, intermix, and manipulate those responses to cultures and to the past.The Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen, who is the subject of the Asia Society’s “Condensation: Five Video Works by Chen Chieh-jen,” creates a photographic world that flits between the past and the present, documentary and fiction, alienation and nostalgia, empathy and revulsion. The exhibit, curated by Miwako Tezuka, is the first major American solo show of Mr. Chen’s work. Comprising just over two hours of films — some of it hypnotic, all of it stylistically seductive — the show introduces New Yorkers to one of Taiwan’s most acclaimed artists.In the exhibit, Mr. Chen, born in 1960 and based in Taipei, constructs films that are sociologically and politically charged. They explore the problems wrought by modernization, globalization, corporate exploitation, the Western gaze, sanctioned violence, political oppression, and persecution. They are originally shot on 16mm or 35mm film and transferred to DVD. Some of them are interspliced with actual vintage newsreels and photographs, which give them an official or educational tone. Black-and-white or merely tinged with color, the films at times resemble old, grainy footage, suggesting that the color, or life, has been virtually drained out of them.Mr. Chen, a political activist at heart, was a rebellious installation and performance artist long before Taiwan’s 37-year period of White Terror and martial law ended in 1987. His large digital photographs, which are manipulations of actual vintage photographs of violent torture or massacred victims, have put his art under the rubric “the aesthetics of pain.” They combine elements of Joel-Peter Witkin and Hieronymus Bosch. Many depict castrations and beheadings, and they usually include torturers, victims, and onlookers, as well as, occasionally, multiple images of the artist himself as both onlooker and victim. One of his photographs shows three sets of Siamese twins (representing the self-mutilating splitbody of the nation) doing the Dance of Death as they happily hack away at each other.Some of the collaged photographs are powerful for their violence. Mr. Chen claims that he wants to use historical images of horror so that he can “gaze” into the mirror of sin, so that he can uncover the past and penetrate the image. His art takes a somewhat therapeutic stance: It attempts to vivisect and lay bare the sins of the past, in the language of the present, so that viewers, and history, can acknowledge, heal, move beyond, and, ultimately, alter the future. It is a laudable position. However, the photographs can feel hyperrealist and cartoony, a style against which their heavy-handed messages compete. To a lesser and different degree, this is also a drawback in the films (his chosen medium since 2002), in which political portent can be subsumed by beautifully dreamy style.Mr. Chen is brilliant when it comes to evoking a mood and a pace. His films, all but one of which in the show are completely silent, create an ethereal, buoyant, and elastic sense of time, as well as a stifling sterility. I felt as if he were slowing things down to a drug-induced state. His camera usually pans mechanically back-and-forth in slow, Sisyphean motion, across almost nonexistent action — women sewing or standing, men standing or stacking furniture or loading a truck with political pamphlets. The films move between political statement and trance. They take an almost anti-Postmodern stance in their demand that we slow down and absorb, or immerse ourselves within, his liquid dreams.Mr. Chen, as if opening up a nest of boxes, transforms deserted factories and office buildings, which he fills with wind, into desert landscapes. He then gives psychological interiority to the abandoned spaces and abandons you there. His metaphors are clear but not overtly intrusive. His films, set among modern ruins, are beautifully claustrophobic and lonely. He is also brilliant when it comes to cropping the frame, through closeups, on the incidental: A sewing machine needle, an industrial fan, a foot, a knife, a stirred glass of tea, and a pot of water reflecting the sky all feel like haiku-length requiems. He is especially sensitive to speed, light, and rain. Used often but sparingly, Mr. Chen’s rains can be cleansing, orgasmic, or drowning, and they can take on the veiled, scene-shifting weight of the downpour in Kurosawa’s “Rashomon.”In “Factory” (2003), Mr. Chen brings Taiwanese textile workers, laid off in the 1990s due to unscrupulous outsourcing, back to sew in the ruined factory. The film, one of the most successful of the five, is poignant and respectful. It brings life to the ghost in the machine. At one point in the film, he focuses on the women’s gray heads of hair. I was reminded of desert shrubs, cobwebs, and tangled masses of thread. Still, “Factory,” as with his other videos, tends to drag at times. The films’ metaphors too often are merely repeated rather than expanded and explored.The Asia Society has included none of Mr. Chen’s photographs, out of which evolved the artist’s first video, the 21-minute film “Lingchi-Echoes of a Historical Photograph” (2002), the most complete work in the exhibit. “Lingchi” refers to the punishment of death “by a thousand cuts” for the crime of murder. The film is a fictional account of a real event. It was inspired by a series of photographs of an actual execution, taken by a Frenchman in China in 1905 and made famous when it was reproduced and meditated upon in Georges Bataille’s “Tears of Eros.”Projected in slow motion and in black-and-white on three screens, each tinted with color, the video walks a fine line between disturbing snuff film and homoerotic dreamscape. It suggests brutal and inhuman torture and methodical, religious, sacrificial ritual. The victim, tied to a post and stripped naked, is given copious amounts of opium. The drug is also massaged into his skin to prolong the execution — the process whereby his flesh, genitals, and limbs are gradually sliced away at the center of a crowd of clamoring, yet respectful, onlookers. “Lingchi,” which includes the original photographs, on which it is based, is tastefully cropped. The film’s hide-and-seek framing adds to its horror and — provoking us to bob and weave in a futile attempt to see the action — turns viewer into bystander.“Lingchi” is a political artwork brimming with browbeating messages: Entrancing to watch, it reminds us of our institutionalized and civilized brutality, our cultural prejudices, and our morbid sense of curiosity. Yet, mixing eroticism with murder, it also plays on our weaknesses. I guess this is fair game. But I could not help but wonder: Is this film, which pushes all of our contemporary buttons — I was reminded of the cell phone images of the Kurdish girl who was recently stoned to death in Iraq, as the authorities stood idly by — fueled more by artistic or manipulative prowess?Until August 5 (725 Park Ave. at 70th Street, 212-288-6400).

The Aesthetics of Pain

The Aesthetics of Pain

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