Daily+, the Time Duplicate that Sprung from Wall Climber

Text by Wen-yao CHEN

 (Art Critic)

I really like Wall Climber, and what first attracted me rather was the text layout on the page. I’ve never read a book before that seemed like you were digging around in cabinets while reading it—any words and plot could drop into sight at any moment. It’s convenient acquisition, and it’s also fate. There are always some shapes that seem a bit clearer, yet other fuzzy shapes are passed over at whim. Seven paragraphs. (Or was it eight chapters? Or a history exam?) People’s life experiences became intertwined because of the space—actually, they weren’t necessarily related—following time’s flowing investigation endlessly.

“Matchbox” contained North Campus’ keywords for space and other functions: proximity, concatenation, stacking, nudity, abandoned studios, dream capsules. In regards to Nine Single Room’s uniform shape focus, “Stacked Spaceship” took inventory of people’s job titles and everyday objects. Gangsters in “Spider’s Web”, mother & dog in “Small Half-empty Frame”, and teenage girl in “Coral Reefs Ecological Settlement” —these ordinary yet unique people are immediately forgettable. The novelist cruelly remarked: “Their stories are destined to break down. It’s difficult to extend their stories any longer because the main character of the story isn’t them—it’s these houses.” “Maze of Alleys: Tsai Story I” and “Maze of Alleys: Tsai Story II” inserted Tsai’s life into Fuzhou’s history and the North Campus property dispute, and it also cleverly connected to last year’s 254 Yen in Air Plant—a work that was triggered by the time’s unidentified remnants in the exhibition hall. Lastly, “Drifting Planet” turned debris into archeological remains and made clear from the beginning that the important point was that the residents of the space cannot be present.

The above are rational slices of the novel, but they cannot touch upon the exquisite writing. The exhibit curator brought the novelist to personally visit the exhibit before many of the other artists. Using words to depict, describe, name, place, as well as insert his world view added some achievements to the show. Wall Climber is a multilayered reveal of the space, and in Wall Climber the actual copy of the book already presented this simulation: text and physical materials were one and the same, a type of concrete media. In addition to showing significance, it also brought a visual sense experience. Certainly, this type of arrangement is not the first of its kind, but it gave a finishing touch when entering the artery of the exhibition space. The novel was no longer confined to the pure text document format that was sent to participating artists as points of consideration for the show. Text became a dual space reference, later derived into Reading Capsule, Guide of Wall Climbing, and the pedestal-style Daily+ Satellite Station—placed at ten art organizations around the greater Taipei area. There has never been a book that was dissected like this; through a contemporary art style returning to the scene where it was written. It met the curator’s goal of the “exhibition – text – art” work  reentry, which can be said to be one of Daily+’s big highlights. 

The space induced the birth of words. The words were derived as part of the space’s imagination. We can’t help thinking that there exists a certain amount of influence or citation between these modern works of art and the novel in Daily+ due to Wall Climber’s part in the exhibit that was “switched on” by curation. Some links certainly are (such as Pierre-Laurent CASSIÈRE’s Moment ; the formation of which was stimulated by a scene from the novel), however, I lean more heavily towards seeing it as the same type of time duplication. Each grew out of an inspiration (and Wall Climber was the first one), and each extension to another dimension was not of inferior quality.

For example, Wan-Shuen TSAI’s Plant & Waste—even if you know that the artist uses previous exhibition artist Kuei-Chih LEE’s Recycling Scenery as a foundation for her work, there are remnants of previous applications of Nanzaigou silt on part of the walls. The walls are partially repainted and contain embedded letters, as well as a straightforward-yet-poetic description. What’s conflicting is that when I reentered this space, I had a unique futuristic feeling, like these refurbished, clean walls were mostly Chinese characters written with water radicals (overflow, flow, mud, ferry) or had names related to fish (Goby fish, Mosquitofish, Rose bitterling...). It’s the unearthing of ancient civilizations, originally covered by the interlacing of the instability of time in Recycling Scenery, piercing through the wall’s trail of enormous tree stumps. Although archaeology traces the past, it’s actually an issue of the future from start to finish.

Also take for example Chih-Sheng LAI’s Drifting Sandbar. The things that float have wrestled free of gravity and give people an impression of becoming detached from reality, despite its distance from the surface being less than three centimeters, and being tied to the original old house (thus not leaving its tangible reality). Its after-effect can be felt in the shaking of the floating boards, looking around side-to-side or lowering one’s head at whim, glimpsing at the space carved out by the steel cables—as if the individual broken shards of a mirror reflect part of the whole, sometimes close and sometimes far, that lends itself to a type of vertigo.

Yet another example is Ho-Jang LIU’s DaGuan Villa--Flash Fiction. What kind of feeling will one have when returning to the place one lived twenty years prior as a student? In the sculptures created in the early years of NTUA, I thought of what Walter BENJAMIN’s wrote about art works: the “here-and-now” of the original. On one hand, these sculptures make people think of how Taiwan has been influenced by Western contemporary sculptures—very retro. Yet in another manner, the artist changed the placement method and revealed an even stronger modernist feeling; another aura given off through the  superimposition of space and time.

Another example is Stephane THIDET’s There is no Darkness. Water is borne from earth, and duckweed springs to life on the surface of the water. A suspended light bulb goes against our imaginations for they are not in the air but rather slowly skimming the surface of the water, sketching out ripples continuously being interrupted by duckweed; dying out before even taking form. Upon entering this housed pond, everyone subconsciously quiets down, as if measuring the space by carefully following along the wall. Dancing to a tune because the wooden floorboards amplify the sounds of steps, just as light makes us pay attention to darkness.   

Or perhaps Claude CLOSKY’s Notification. In the center of a wide and empty exhibition hall is an outdoor scene walled off by glass. There are tablet PCs on the walls and criss-crossing charge cables hanging from the ceiling (Micro-B, Lightning, and Type-C formats are all supported). What’s conveyed here are things that have no shape—it’s a sound space. Jeff DESOM’s Rear Window Loop spread out different life scenes in the same painting. The action in each panel appears to happen at the same time as if it were a parallel reality; each thing is « someone else’s stuff ». The faraway mirror image of Youki HIRAKAWA’s Vanished Tree, the realistic theater of Man-Nung CHOU’s Fever 103°, the blurring of reality and fantasy in Nicolas TOURTE’s I Don’t Know—each highlight is a complete coordinate axis.

The settlement brought a type of tenacity that refused to be completely eliminated. We cannot, or sometimes aren’t willing, to completely wipe clean the marks of the past. This is the draw of this type of space—also it’s first and foremost the artist’s challenge. But there’s nothing better than being creative in the space of a scroll of palimpsest! Scrape off and start over, each layer of content more or less stacked on traces of the previous content, that’s unavoidably viewed as some type of revision on the textures of time as well as carrying another brand-new meaning. (At Daily+, there’s something fresh every day.)  The walls of the museum certainly could scrape off the remnants of previous exhibits (this time’s participating artist Chih-Sheng LAI did just that several years back), but art museums are a neutral white box after all. Until the present day, there was a lack of interesting points. (There is no special privilege of “it must be here,” so I feel that the artists that present their works here take advantage of this yet also get taken advantage of.)  

(Translated by Rebecca LEE)