Landscape” has never been nature purely. As a way to represent human being’s aesthetic experience of nature, landscape is essentially cultural and humanistic. “Landscape painting” which is used to represent sceneries, in this case, is an activity of re-creating cultural memory and constructing codes. Consequently, landscape painting does not fall into the category of topography, as it does not realistically document landforms. To borrow W.J.T. Mitchell’s words, we can say that landscape is “a medium, a vast network of cultural codes.”[1]
Comparing to the “imperial gaze”[2] embodied by the landscapes of European colonies discussed by W.J.T. Mitchell, although the works of Teng Pu-Chun and Chang Chia-Ying are also informed by cultural codes, the artists adopt different approaches of weaving cultural codes respectively, which allow them to both utilize cultural codes while successfully unlocking the enclosed nature of existing codes and order, bringing about the “paysage”[3] (landscape) defined by Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay “Paysage avec dépaysement.” The French term “dépaysement” can be roughly translated as “the feeling of disorientation,” which might be the closest way of saying that can be used in this rather untranslatable case. However, “the feeling of disorientation” still falls quite far from what Nancy aims to describe. To the French philosopher, the notion of landscape stems from the ideas of “remoteness” and “a vastness without end.” In this instance, “remoteness” refers not only to a physical distance but also a psychological one. Because of the remoteness, landscape is difficult to grasp, ascertain, without clear boundary and coordinates, and no longer follows existing conventions or familiar habits. All forces from different directions encounter and engage with one another; or, it can be said that one force enters another. Consequently, the landscape described by Nancy is a not an object or a scenery. We can even say that landscape is an event, which unfurls itself towards the strange unknown in a ceaseless state of constant emergence, elusiveness, renewal, and uncertainty.[4]
Artist is someone who arranges the ideal conditions for such an event to take place. In Coding an Inner Landscape, the two artists create their inner landscapes by weaving codes. In this case, the “inner landscape” does not refer to an individual’s inner topography. Instead, it points to how artists employ involutionary, introversive forms and vocabularies of deconstruction and proliferation to embed human existence in in an uncertain state of continuously questioning existing answers.
The mountains, waters, clouds and rocks in Teng Pu-Chun’s work, as usual, are delineated with the artist’s highly individualistic method of wrinkling strokes. However, in this exhibition, in addition to the glassy layers of mountains, which are portrayed in an increasingly dense manner, forming a tapestry of woven codes, the peculiar rocks are inlaid with an undecipherable sign – the mysterious panels of glass. Moreover, the unexpected mixture of the spiritual and the material engenders an effect of defamiliarization, and breaks the homogenous world that the spectator is familiar with: In the mistily deep and serene otherworld filled with clouds and mountains, a clear glass panel suddenly appears, materializing a rigidly cold materiality and creating a strong sense of impact. Surfaces of the waters are composed with a horizontal pattern that is reminiscent of the static noise of CRT televisions. Floating clouds neatly painted resembling computer graphic drawings drift playfully on a vast and quiet indigo background. Through her way of coding, Chang Chia-Ying deconstructs existing signs, and creates an imaginative world interwoven with heterogeneous cultures and spaces. Ancient Chinese mythological characters taken out of the Classic of Mountains and Seas and figures extracted from Western classical paintings are freed from their original contexts to be mixed with the artist’s codes – her characters – to re-construct a hierarchy-free, diversely animistic world co-inhabited by gods, humans, and objects. Anthropocentrism is entirely banished from this world. In this inner landscape, objects, which are considered “without world,” and animal, which are considered “poverty in world,”[5] in Western philosophy, such as that of Heidegger, are given the ability to shape the world, which they inhabit and occupy.
[1] W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape”, in W. J. T. Mitchell ed. Landscape and Power, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 13.
[2] Ibid., p. 24.
[3] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Paysage avec dépaysement”, in Au fond des images, Paris, Galilée, 2003, pp.101-119.
[4] Ibid., p. 103, 105, 108, 114, 117.
[5] Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 51.
