Yiri’s Horse Farm: Insight and Evocation

Text / Yi-Chen HONG, adjunct assistant professor, Department of Sociology, NCCU

Departing from a horse image, Yiri’s Horse Farm is an exhibition with both physical (offline) and virtual (online) venues. In terms of the conception and visiting itinerary of the exhibition, the online horse farm is set as a starting point by the artist Chun-Yi CHANG (hereafter referred as CHANG). From the screen at the entrance of the physical venue, visitors begin to browse five different online works of the SVG horses, and then conveniently visit the offline works in order: Carousel, ±1 of dual channel video, Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in the form of wall painting, sculptures of Wooden Horse imitating the collection of Taiwan Toy Museum, veritable LED Marquee that lives up to its name (literally in Chinese “galloping horse LED”), and finally, audio-visual installation Coded Horse. After seeing through the five physical works echoing the online ones, we return to the online horse farm at the entrance. A smooth itinerary of an infinite loop. Although the start and end are overlapped as a perfectly harmonious whole, visitors can still start from any work at will and complete their exhibition narratives from different itineraries. The online horse farm as the exhibition’s starting point as a strategy can be understood as a contemporary symptom in the era of digital development and raging pandemic. The conception of various image transformations embodies the intertwined reality and fiction of the exhibited works. The exhibition itself is like a brief history of time about “images”. Taking a horse image as an intermediary and exemplar, the artist launches a radical investigation on the possibility of “form”, and at the same time, casts a retrospective glimpse of nostalgia. Digital aesthetics interacts with material beauty; programming technology and objects laid bare are both affecting. The works are not only straightforward, perceivable and inspiring for all, but repeatedly evocative of endless nostalgia. As such, a free game of aesthetic experience is galloping without restraint in Yiri’s Horse Farm.     

Digital as source, image as origin

In recent years, CHANG has successively developed a symbiotic mode of exhibition: online and offline venues go in parallel. Since the exhibition To Martian Anthropologists in 2020, she has already employed web pages as the venue where the exhibition actually happens; the 15 internationally known artists have left the clues to earthly cultures for the Martian anthropologists in the physical venue which remotely echoes the online one. The appeal of Yiri’s Horse Farm this year is more focused and the style is more homogeneous due to the nature of solo exhibition. As in To Martian Anthropologists, Yiri’s Horse Farm continues to explore online exhibitions, and what’s more, it concentrates, in the era of Internet media nowadays, on the possible transformation between the given forms such as painting, photography, video or sculpture. If we set a scope along the space of Yiri Arts and see as a boundary the relationship between the framed works in the venue, then the online exhibition of Yiri’s Horse Farm as an opening home field rewrites our common sense to the presentation and ways of seeing of art, and the modes how artworks refer to reality. The curating gesture has legitimized not only the inverted hierarchy of virtuality and reality, but the fact that the two-dimensional digital space inherits modernist painting’s flatness of surface.        

The physical works in the offline Yiri’s Horse Farm refer to the digital world rather than the real one; the images come from SVG vectors, instead of ideas or substances. The physical artworks function like a language, and their referent is represented by binary codes 0 and 1. The concept of the offline works, as the fruits of material and volume, is clearly derived from the egg and sperm in the digital womb. The colorful programming language flowing on Coded Horse is exactly the coded text in SVG that constitutes the shape and dynamics of the herd of horse vectors. The coded text should have been hidden behind the web pages, but has been externalized as an image on the screen. When the code keeps moving like blood flowing, the shapes and movements of the horses appear simultaneously, as if the DNA sequence of a gene were externalized. The phenomenon justifies not only the same digital source shared by the offline Coded Horse and online Standing, but foregrounds the digital origin of the whole Yiri’s Horse Farm. The online exhibition is no longer a passive audio-visual record or alternative to the physical one. It is eager to be self-reliant, capable of creation, and independent on no one; it plans an incarnation to achieve a potential eternity (Yiri’s Horse Harm, offline date: 23/12/2021 - 23/01/2022; online date: 23/12/2021-). However, the offline exhibition does not become as such subservient, just like the online exhibition has no sovereignty. The online and offline exhibitions coexist in parallel: both are separable individuals, and at the same time, prosperous to be integrated as a whole.    

If the reference source for the works of Yiri’s Horse Farm is extended beyond the established exhibition venue, what we can possibly find is still of video nature. The image of the online work Carousel #2, a loop dynamic web page, comes from the shadow of a micro-carousel photographed by CHANG in 2014. The work then was a loop color video with sound and is now transformed into a vectorized dynamic web page in SVG, presented with a more pure, dynamic image in black and white. Image as origin: representation is represented with transformation. The running horse photographed in sequence by Edward Muybridge is nailed to a stake and becomes a carousel vector in the online loop web page Circling. The prototype of Muybridge’s horse in the transition between leaping and stagnation has created, in the self-dialectics of movement and stillness, more new layers of image. The colorful toy horses moving in sequence in Rocking are the only work representing real objects rather than videos. Photographed from the collection of Taiwan Toy Museum, the color photos of the wooden horses on the web page are processed by image matting to render the online horse vectors clear and sharp, but we can’t see the actual toys on site. The corresponding work offline consists of a series of wooden horse sculptures with the same material and black color, which are three-dimensional silhouettes of the colorful rocking horses in our childhood memories. The actual colorful toy horses belong to something invisible in the art venue.    

Unified multiplicity, uncontrollable control

An audio-visual installation located in the deepest part of the venue, like a herd of “coded horses” resting in the stable, is the critical pivot of the whole event in my opinion, for it connects not only the online and offline horse farms, but the artworks in the physical venue. As a digital work in the offline horse farm, Coded Horses conveniently joins, if we follow the visiting itinerary, another physical work Marquee–a dark horse seemingly jumping from the previous screen into the LED board and galloping all alone between the lights on and off. Moreover, the constitutive element of Coded Horse, like that of the five online works, is made of SVG and its coded texts of SVG are not hidden from but exposed to the screen. The five works online echo and correlate to the five works offline. With such clear symmetricity, such unified multiplicity, the exhibition reminds us of Principles of Art History (1915) by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. The author elaborates the idea of multiplicity as a classical style in the Renaissance paintings and emphasizes an “unification of the multiple parts”: each part of a painting is not only independent from but consistent with the whole which can be experienced in the parts. The whole regulates the parts, and yet the parts appear completely independent at the same time. The idea does not mean that the Renaissance painters presume the parts of a painting would be divided, just like Raphael’s cherub was taken away from the Madonna to be printed on the postcards nowadays.1 Although each work in the online/offline horse farms is unique, only when they are treated as a whole can the exhibition achieve its maximum horsepower.         

In the contemporary context multimedia, the unified multiplicity among the works in Yiri’s Horse Farm suggests a broader and diverse usage of media, and the interaction between virtual and real works is obviously more dynamic than that of two-dimensional paintings. The close internal link between each of the works not only aims to integrate Yiri’s Horse Farm as a whole, but demonstrates CHANG’s conceptual footprints of the forms of image and time. The word “image” itself bears the above-mentioned implications and it should be given a precise Chinese translation according to the context where it appears. With the language of art, CHANG gives expression to the multilayered semantics of “image”: Muybridge’s horses by sequence photography transformed into Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse as an illustration of monochrome painting, wooden horses Circling around on the web page, real image of a carousel in reality and the video of carousel in the audio-visual installation Carousel in 2014, Carousel#2 in 2021 as a web image in loop, and offline sculptures of Wooden Horse, etc. The artist’s reflection on the potentiality of images also includes the discrimination and manipulation of nuances, such as the offline dual channel video in loop Carousel±1: two symmetrical halves of the carousel at different speeds diverge from the shared timeline, i.e. the fast left and slow right will lose the shared speed little by little. Carousel±1 is derived from the shadow of one of the toy carousels in the above-mentioned video installation Carousel and now the former shows the alterity2 of the carousel itself. Such heterogeneity doesn’t come from the exteriority, but from the transformation and divergence generated from the interiority of an image, in which the shared measurement is discarded. For contemporary art, alterity also serves as one of the tools to think about the other and concerns the contemporary soul as a sign; a self of alterity is not an opposite, heterogeneous other, and conflicts do not only end in contradictions, but are expected to bring about the freedom to break through public personae. The public persona here refers not only to the role setting, but even more to the various frames predetermined by human beings. Although the horses of the left and right circles miss the shared measurement, they are skillfully connected to the four frames of the screen, as if, by the steady difference of rotation speed, they were repeatedly practicing escaping in order.  

CHANG’s precise architectural methodology has established multiple connections between two horse farms. In the context of heteroglossia of contemporary art, the language of unified multiplicity adopted by Yiri’s Horse Farm is succinct and interreferential; the exhibition draws a clear and yet boundless boundary by a fertile artistic conception without unnecessary details. In other words, CHANG successfully imposes an uncontrollable control on the horses. Abstractly, the aesthetic experience of Yiri’s Horse Farm has been imprinted into the mental image of viewers and it not only evokes our memories of the images concerned (such as a carousel in the playground, rocking horse toy), but also claims in advance every possible forms of imagination of  the “image” in the future. 

Evocation from a sudden recollection 

Digital warmth, technological sensibility. There are neither AI devices nor electronic media to simulate human nature in the horse farm. Based on rationality and digital technology, Yiri’s Horse Farm provides sensational enzymes in different aspects to trigger emotional echoes right in the venue: vitalization of the codes, dis/appearance of the colors, observation of the pure forms, drive of the neighing and walking sounds, and call of the reminiscences–a sudden evocation of both yours and mine. 

As mentioned above, the colorful programming languages flowing on the horse vectors in Coded Horse and Standing are textual codes of SVG, which allow the shapes of the horses to be exposed on the screen and their movements to be made. We see as such the creation of a horse vector by not only a birth certificate but a proof of how to be born; the created object does not aim to simulate living creatures, but to unearth its own digital origin. The web pages no longer create illusions and simulacrums of real horses, but honestly confess the way they really exist. What is heated is not the screen that has been used for a long time, but the rising temperature of my body because of the immediate sense of digital reality.     

The dominant colors of Yiri’s Horse Farm are black and white, but only a few colors appear in both the horse vectors’ veins of the coded texts of SVG and the still photos, processed by image matting, of the wooden horse toys in the online Rocking. The colored former is to show the shapes of the horses against the background of a white screen so that the existence and inner nature of the digital horses appear more colorful thanks to the coloring; the latter faithfully represents the original appearance of our childhood toys from which viewers can immediately recognise the wooden horse of their own era. The colorful wooden horses in the online horse farm are still images and they start to rock when touching. Upon rocking, they are deprived of their colors, turning into black silhouettes. Between coloration and agility, we only have one choice: multicolored tranquility coming into view, or touching shadow play against the candlelight with the lamps extinguished.  

A great number of black silhouettes appear in Yiri’s Horse Farm. Nearly 80% of the works are presented in the form of a black horse, nothing but black, either two- or three-dimensional, static or dynamic. A silhouette stands for purity, both in terms of form and color. The purified silhouettes make us speculate what Yiri’s Horse Farm explores lies in the fundamental issues of form. The black image not only touches our pure heart for its simplicity, but also evokes amorous feelings because a silhouette could be a substitute for love. Pliny, writer of Ancient Rome, once left a romantic legend. A Corinthian maid bade farewell to her lover about to go on a long voyage at sea. Reluctant to part, she found her lover’s figure projected on the wall by the candlelight. She picked up a piece of charcoal, drawing her lover's figure on the wall. In the days of separation, she could at least stare at the silhouette to slightly relieve herself from lovesickness. The Scottish painter David Allan (1744-1796) once transformed this beautiful story into a painting, and gave it a significant title, The Origin of Painting (1775), implying the love motive might well be one of the reasons for painting. Part of the images or portraits by human beings are made to substitute for the absent,3 and the images even eventually replace them. Whether it is a black horse vector, a sculptured wooden horse, a black horse galloping forever on a marquee, or a horse of Muybridge painted in monochrome on the wall, its formal purification and transformation, its uniqueness and homogeneity of color–all stand for a condensed observation of the form in the aesthetic process. The horses also serve as a door to the absent, and we who ride them do not rush into the past by accident, but reunite with the days gone by with profound affection.

Muybridge’s photography in sequence has imposed an epoch-making and timeless image, casting an influence over generations of painters, photographers and filmmakers. People today still pay homage to Muybridge and talk about his horse. CHANG’s Yiri’s Horse Farm in 2021 is a prolongation of her video works since 2014 such as Carousel, a recognisable nostalgia for almost all roving sons who have ever lived in Paris. The exhibition evokes and magnifies these memories of which the resolution has not changed at all. All kinds of memories of historical images suddenly look back at us right here, and we come to realize that they have not actually gone too far. Time flows in the artist’s life and works, which has cultivated endless self-reproduction. From now on, Carousel will definitely be metamorphosed in many other possible forms, won’t it? 

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1.Take for example Raphael’s The Sistine Madonna (c.1513-1514), featuring the unified multiplicity in the Renaissance paintings. The Madonna, Holy Child and other figures, especially two winged putti below–each part is a unique micro-universe and the parts can be integrated as a new pattern, a macro-universe. Who among modern people has not yet seen the reproduction of the two winged putti alone? But how many know that they come from Raphael’s masterpiece? In contrast, Wölfflin believes that the formal style of the Baroque paintings in the 17th century is in favor of an unity, an absolute unification, and the multiplicity among interdependent and harmonious parts are no longer valued. The parts that constitute these Baroque paintings are not clearly defined and mixed with other parts to focus on an overall aura; in one word, the parts have lost their rights to be an independent individual.

2. Jacques Rancière in Le Destin des Images (2003) once mentioned that the alterity of images does not result from its reference or projection to other things, but from the composition itself derived from the images intervened by the heterogeneity. The art of image lies in an operation to create some discrepancy and dissemblance. In the paragraphs concerned, Racière specifically cites movies as an illustration, such as the image operations in Au hasard Balthazar by the French director Robert Bresson in 1966.   

3. At the end of the 18th century, portrait silhouettes, combined with paper-cutting techniques, were very popular in Europe. For Pliny’s story and David Allan’s painting, please refer to Chapter 1 “Images and Marks” in What is painting? (new edition 2017) by Julian Bell. The grandfather of Julian Bell is the well-known British art critic Clive Bell (1881-1964), who advocated “art as significant form”.