The Growth Patterns of Air Plant: An Interview with Chun-Yi CHANG
This article is excerpted from the "Air Plant Forum" held at Yo-Chang Museum on December 22, 2017
Text : Chun-Yi CHANG | Interviewer: Yun-Ting CHANG
Q: Why did you choose “Air Plant” as the name of the exhibition?
A: I chose “Air Plant” as the name of the exhibition primarily because air plants are plants with vigorous life force. Their growth mechanism is very special because they can grow in both soil and on other plants. What is most special about them is that even without their roots, they can continue to grow. This is because air plants absorb nutrients through their leaves. Thus, I proposed the name “Air Plant,” which is a metaphor for free and active art creation entities with tenacious vitality. What I mean by art creation entities include not only artists, but also the audience. When the audience stands in front of artworks to observe, read, experience, or even “participate” in them, the artworks can inspire different perceptions and thinking in the audience that are different from its ordinary experiences and thoughts. This, to me, establishes the foundation for an art creation. Thus, when I planned this exhibition, I started with this basic art creation concept. This is why the exhibition was named as “Air Plant” (Picture 1).
Q: Why did you start with the concept of art creation entities when you planned this exhibition?
A: This has to do with the fact that I am an art creator myself. I believe that I am an artist before I am a curator. In other words, art creation is my core. Therefore, when I started planning this exhibition, my first consideration was the practice of art creations. I hoped that we can go back to art practice. Thus, what I thought of first was the kind of exhibition that would help artists create art and the type of suggestion that could inspire them to dig and explore things that could be a source of inspiration for their artworks? I focused a lot on these ideas, and the entire exhibition mechanism, including the communication and coordination process between the artists and me, was developed based on these ideas.
Q: You are an artist, but this time, you were a curator. What do you think of your dual identity as both an artist and a curator?
A: As an artist, my attention is on art practice. However, as a curator, I keep thinking about what art practice will be like in 30 years or 50 years. Compared with exhibitions, art creation is relatively more subjective, in which maybe only one artist has to be held responsible for his/her artwork. By contrast, planning exhibitions requires the joint effort of numerous related individuals. To me, exhibition planning is a bit like flying a kite. When conditions are insufficient, the kite will not be able to fly. For example, we have to know whether the ground we are stepping on is even or not and whether the wind is strong enough. We also have to look at the sky and see we want our kite to go. When I changed my role from an artist to a curator, the problem I faced was how to let the kite fly successfully, and what direction I want it to fly towards.
Q: Several review articles have been published regarding this exhibition, which talked about the artworks in the exhibition. What I am curious about is the formation of the exhibition. Can you elaborate more on the production process and operation model of this exhibition?
A: I hope that artists can use a freer, more flexible method to participate in this exhibition. Conversely, I hope to provide the artists with the greatest possibility when it comes to the exhibition mechanism, allowing them to realize their current creative endeavors or demonstrate the artwork they want to show the most in this exhibition. Some artists would ask me “what do you want me to make?” I would answer “I want you to make what you want to make the most right now.” So, in principle, I set no limitations for the artists regarding what artworks they must exhibit or the space in which they must exhibit them. I tell the artists that they can choose any space in the exhibition area to do their artworks, and that they can also view the entire exhibition venue as their exhibition area. This is akin to thinking the second and third floor of the Yo-Chang Art Museum and the seven houses in The Northern Campus as one single giant canvas.
When I took the artists on a site survey in July, I asked them where they would like to stay and work on their art creations. The reason why I asked that was because I was curious about which exhibition area each artist had the strongest feeling towards, and whether they had any initial thoughts, however rough or outlandish. I feel that the most lively and creative ideas spring from these chaotic and uncertainty moments. Because the artists came one after another, discussions with artists were a cumulative process. The later the artist came, the more information the artist obtained. We subsequently developed the Air Plant Sharing Platform so that each artist can use this network platform to understand the work plan of other participating artists.
In short, I tried to let the artists understand the initial concepts of other participating artists while the artists contemplated about their own artworks. This enabled the artists to have an idea about what the exhibition would look like when it opens, and provided the artists the time to assess whether they needed to adjust their artworks, whether it be changing their exhibition areas or cooperating with other artists. In other words, I tried to have the artists, and even myself, stay for a period of time in a state of stimulating chaotic uncertainty. This gives everyone the idea that any work ideas and any exhibition form are possible, and that they can wait for inspirations to actively explore new possibilities.
Q: Why did you want to use this type of game rules?
A: Actually, this has to do with my previous exhibition participation experience. In the past, when I participated in domestic or international exhibitions, I often had to wait until the moment that the curtain was lifted to know what my artwork looked like. I had to decide what work I was going to show at an exhibition under many uncertainties. This meant that producing the artwork and exhibiting the artwork were often “disjointed” and easily became two entirely different events. When I planned this exhibition, I was curious whether I could combine exhibition participation and art creations into one event, and allow the exhibition to actually inspire more art creations, opening up more possibilities.
Before I went to study in France in 2003, I accepted an invitation to the Open Contemporary Art Center, and planned an exhibition called Work-Medium. The mechanism of the Air Plant exhibition can be said to be an extension of that exhibition. The subheading for the Air Plant exhibition is “Performance Ability within Contemporary Art.” In the Work-Medium exhibition, I called the participating artists performers. Therefore, you can see many ideas of the 2003 exhibition that were incorporated in the Air Plant exhibition. As described by the title “Work-Medium,” the exhibition tried to showcase the artists’ “working status” by using it as a medium in the exhibition. During that exhibition, I was interested in the artwork implementation process. The process described here did not refer to the artwork exhibition process, but rather the artist’s dialogue with the site space, with other artists, and even with themselves during the 21-day-long exhibition. This dialogue occurred under mutual stimulations.
Q: Can you talk more about the origin of Air Plant exhibition, that is, the Work-Medium exhibition?
A: That time, I recruited a total of nine artists. I set up the basic game rules, which were that the artists could make and install their artworks in any space of the exhibition site beginning from the first day of the exhibition. As for the type of work to be installed, it depended on when the artists participated in the exhibition and what had happened previously. For example, the first artist to enter the site could consider the relationship between his/her work and the exhibition site. The second and third artist would have to consider more; that is, they had to consider not only the exhibition site, but also the works of other artists that had already been installed. The artists’ entry into the exhibition site was like a drawing. When we added layers upon layers, each brush stroke must be adjusted according to the previous brush stroke. Artists who entered later must face not only the exhibition space, but also the brush strokes left by previous artists.
At that time, I used a more experimental and even risky method to conduct the exhibition. That is because the exhibition site looked empty on the opening day. There was nothing there, like we messed up. But in reality, there was a pinhole camera and a monitor already set up at the site individually by two artists on the opening day. The artists planned to record the evolution of the entire exhibition. Many things happened over the exhibition period. For example, one artist by the name of Shuo-Feng Tu was like an ascetic, and laid and drew on the floor with a pencil each day the exhibit opened its door. He used sketching and bodily labor to enter this space. Another artist called Wang Wang participated in the exhibition by marking items on the walls in graffiti forms whenever someone else installed something. Yu-Shen Su installed sensitive microphones at the exhibition entry and speakers inside the exhibition site to bring in outside noise into the exhibition area. Yu-Cheng Lin installed mobile devices that continuously wore down the wall in different exhibition site locations. Yung-Chun Shih participated in the exhibition from an observer perspective. Whenever an artist did something, he would go and measure the size of the artwork. Mu-Jen Lu invited people to walk with him from his Guandu workshop to Banqiao. At the time, the Open Contemporary Art Center was located in Banqiao. When they arrived in Banqiao, they were blindfolded and asked to walk around the exhibition area and use their bodies to explore the space. One artist, Yen-Hong Liu, who is also participating in the Air Plant exhibition, enacted a ceremony next to the exhibition site. He burned driftwood on the other side of the exhibition wall, used seawater to put the fire out, and then drew on the wall with the burnt wood. Mu-Jen Lu, the artist who invited people to walk with him, saw the burnt driftwood and began burning exhibition DM.
I discovered at that time that everyone was starting to have fun with the exhibition. From Yen-Hong Liu to Mu-Jen Lu to Ju-Huan Li, everyone began to challenge the game rules. This was because I said the artists could use any method to exhibit their artworks. I remember Ju-Huan Li’s artwork vividly. About two weeks into the exhibition, we held a seminar and invited some teachers and art critics for a discussion. Ju-Huan Li’s artwork was dismantling all the artworks at the exhibition site the day before the seminar. So on the day of the seminar, most of the artworks had been dismantled, and the entire exhibition looked like a construction site. The next day, Ju-Huan Li began cleaning, categorizing, and packing all the other artists’ artworks. She placed the artwork of each artist into individual burlap bags and labeled the artists’ names (Pictures 2–12).
The aforementioned exhibition demonstrated the process involving the artists’ random participation and labor and one that went from “nothing to something” to “something to nothing.” Here, the “nothing” was not really nothing and the “something” was something that was continuously changing. In this space, the artworks of the nine performers overlapped. In time, their exhibition times also overlapped. All performers chose whether to interact with other performers and evaluated their own participation at any time according to the site’s current status. When the nine artists performed on their own, they also co-performed. The co-performance here was not a mutually exclusive co-performance, but a mutually inclusive co-performance. Art critic Hai-Ming Huang wrote a review on this exhibition titled “The Interactive Uncertainties in Alternative Exhibitions” (published in the Artist magazine in March 2003). I felt that Huang had precisely conveyed the core concept of this exhibition, that “The working status was never meant to be a preparation of the work about to be finished, but rather, the work itself. The purpose of this exhibition is to convey that the working status and the mediums will never be fully completed or settled.”
Q: Let’s go back to the name of the exhibition, Air Plant: Performance Ability within Contemporary Art for a minute. What exactly is performance ability and what is its relationship with the exhibition?
A: “Performance ability within contemporary art” is an idea that the Air Plant exhibition attempts to convey. Nevertheless, what I planted was a seedling, not a fully-grown tree. The idea of air plants can be divided in two parts, which are “how air plants absorb nutrients” and “air plants’ distinct survival mechanism” (i.e., being able to live without their roots). I gave this name to the exhibition as a metaphor. The goal is to touch on various art practice and cultural resource-related issues including how art creation entities can absorb nutrients. These are all topics worthy of discussions. As for performance ability, it signifies a network created by integrating different creative energies through sparking dialogues between various art creations. As such, a field of art creations full of vitality and nourishment can be cultivated through “exhibition” and “performance” created by the interaction between people (i.e., bodies), things (i.e., behavior and performance), and objects (i.e., sculpture, items, and installations). Besides allowing more freedom and flexibility for art creators to take part in exhibitions, this approach also creates stimuli and dialogues (with themselves or with others) during the working process. I believe that when art creations reach out to others, they create an opportunity for artists to find and reflect on new, unknown creative perspectives. I also believe that “performance ability within contemporary art” will continue to develop through such conversations, making it a performance ability that will never be completed or finished. It should always be a “work-in-progress.” But being unfinished does not mean you have not completed your work; rather, it means that your performance ability should always remain in a state where you are willing to learn and expand your horizons. Once it is finished, it becomes settled and loses its flexibility, and that is when it becomes harder for artists to explore their full potential.
Q: In the introduction to the exhibition, you talked about how artists can only observe “the conditions and constraints of their creative thinking” by keeping themselves at a distance from what they are familiar with. Can you elaborate on this?
A: As conditions in creating artwork, creative thinking is a concept that can be easily understood. For example, conditions include one’s cultural environment, languages learned, and mediums used. These things gradually form the way one thinks and creates. As constraints, how does creative thinking work? Actually, it works in the same way that it does as conditions. But how can creative thinking that is used as conditions also constrain us? From the perspectives of languages and thinking, we know that languages dictate the way we think from the beginning. They slowly formulate our thinking patterns so that our languages and thinking are intricately intertwined. Hence, when we thinking in the same languages, there are bound to be some limitations to how we think. That is, when we express our thoughts, there are boundaries that our languages cannot reach or barriers that we cannot overcome. Thus, there will naturally be things that exceed the scope of our thinking.
This is relevant to the concept of “impensé” often mentioned by my mentor, François Jullien. In general, impensé is a place that we have never thought of. To be more precise, it represents things that we never knew we could think of. To Jullien, real thinking is not about topics that others before us have already covered. Rather, it is brand-new things that people have never thought of before. This is the mystery – how do we think of something that we did not know we could? Even if we could initiate thinking through doubting things that seem suspicious, like René Descartes did, we would either end up doubting things that we have always suspected (e.g., whether gods or ghosts existed) or things that we have always believed in (e.g., one believing in Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that art would exempt him/her from a “vane” death, only to realize later that art was what made him/her vane).
In short, we can only doubt what we suspect or what we believe in, but we cannot doubt things that we do not know. And what are those things that we do not know that we can doubt? That is the mindset imposed on us by our language, the things that we are unaware of. Hence, the challenge is to realize the existence of these impensé. This is difficult because we can only become aware of the constraints set on our thinking by our languages by moving away from the surroundings familiar to us. This way, we can become aware of things that we do not know that we can think about before.
Going back to art creations, if we never leave the conditions that have formulated our creative thinking, it will be difficult for us to realize that those conditions have also become the limitations to our works. Therefore, I believe that the only way for art creators to see that the conditions that have always inspired their creations are also the limitations to what they can create is by leaving their creative thinking or keeping themselves at a distance from it. And this is one of the reasons I proposed the notion of air plant in the first place.
Q: Contrary to the ideas of “rhizome” and “radicant” proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Nicolas Bourriaud, respectively, you proposed the name “Air Plant” for this exhibition. Why did you emphasize the air plants’ ability to survive without their roots? What is your image of air plants?
A: Air plants’ unique ability to survive and prosper without their roots prompted me to think that if an artist is a free and unrestrained air plant, how will the artist continue to survive after he/she leaves their artistic field or culture that has cultured him/her for so long? Alternatively, if moving away from the artist’s roots can help him/her perceive the conditions of his/her growth or the way he/she thinks, it can also help him/her realize that such conditions may also constrain his/her growth or thinking. Thus, the artist may be able to further explore more possibilities that are beyond his/her reach. This will help him/her move away from getting too attached to something. After all, becoming attached and settling down are the beginning of immobility and inflexibility. Hence, the “moving away from roots” I proposed is to simply move temporarily away from what we have come to rely on and find to be obvious. This will give us an opening to observe the possibilities contained within the impensé. Furthermore, I also believe that the point of art creations is to continuously explore impensé and to cultivate unforeseen possibilities. The “moving away from roots” I propose does not entail a permanent expulsion; rather, it is a temporary break, so that there is a gap between ourselves and our familiar surroundings, allowing us to comprehensibly glimpse upon things that we are oblivious to. From this angle, we can see that “moving away from roots” doesn’t entail severing all ties. It is a reflection of ourselves. After all, impensé is relative and subjective to our own thinking.
Q: You have invited artists from many fields including the fields of performance, dance, theater, and sound arts for this exhibition. How do you see the relationship between visual art and performing art?
A: Knowing that it would be held concurrently with the Da Guan International Performing Art Festival organized by the National Taiwan University of Arts when I first began curating this exhibition, I started to wonder whether there was a way to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between visual and performing arts. This symbiotic relationship could be either minute (e.g., a potential influence in the way someone thinks) or substantial (e.g., the interaction or co-constructions between artwork elements). Therefore, I invited artists from various fields including directors, choreographers, theater workers, and sound artists to join this exhibition. Nevertheless, my focus is not on the ways performing arts become involved with visual arts, and I do not plan to discuss the “theatricality” of visual arts or the “forms” of performing arts. Instead, I want us to answer the questions “Can we travel even further upstream; can we return to a place before professional art fields are divided into different categories; and can we search for and spark common thinking patterns for creating art?” I am interested in the conversations between individual art creation entities so that we can explore whether common creative thinking can be provoked and identify things that may appear in the upstream before art fields become divided and distinct.
Jullien used to expand on the concept of “commonality” using the Latin root (i.e., cummunis) of the French word “commun” (meaning common). “Cum” means sharing and co-using, whereas “munis” reminds people of giving and obligations. Jullien stated that the core meaning of the word is “those who co-own will co-share. There is a sharing and giving in the process.” If we simply look at the concept of co-sharing, we can see that there is an underlying question of “who do we share and not share with?” First, we can think of the makeup of commonality. What does it consist of? If it does not involve everyone, naturally, some people will be included and others will be excluded. Can those who are outside the circle of sharing share what they have with those who are inside? In other words, if co-sharing does not involve everyone, the problem of who to share with would arise. There would be a divide among those who we share with and those who we do not share with. Therefore, when we talk about what we have ‘in common with,’ we usually imply that there is exclusivity for a certain group of individuals. We share with those who are within the circle, and to those who are outside the circle, this commonality and co-sharing becomes an exclusive right not easily accessible to them. Regarding shared creative thinking, what I mean by sharing does not mean the exclusive sharing between certain art creation groups or a closed-off, conservative “sharing” that excludes others. What I mean is a flexible, mutual sharing of resources where art creators can freely give resources to each other and continue to welcome everyone through the process of giving and receiving. I highly anticipate cultivating a nurturing field of artistic creations through the Air Plant exhibition.