Another temporality: Starts from Chun-Yi Chang’s ‘Carousel Waltz’ series

by Tzu-Chieh Jian

Source: Taishin Bank Foundation for Art and Culture Nominators Reviews

I believe many people have the similar experience during the junior or high school years. Loved a certain Pop singer or a certain song so much and recorded the same song repeatedly on both Side A and Side B of a cassette. Wore a set of headphone and listened to the same song repeatedly, didn’t matter where you were, you were disconnected to the outside world. The point was definitely not about how good the song was, but rather in the posture of the disconnectedness, the experience of repeated song overlapped with some of original self-experiences, and the repeating melody became a thought, collected all the feelings caused by the music on the way. This was how I felt, when I saw the repeated videos of 18 unridden carousels of Chun-Yi Chang’s ‘The Carousel Waltz’  series in the Crane Gallery in January. Seemingly closed, looping images driven by the dynamics of continuous expansion. This was a temporal performance about self disintegration, which contains a strange sense of time mixed with going forward, stop and going backward.  

Before going into the Crane Gallery, one has to go through a street full of large hardware stores in the Yan-Cheng area of Kaohsiung, the Pier 2 and the Kaohsiung Harbor. This area represents the industrial development of a harbor city for the past and present. And when we enter the  dim gallery space which was prepared for the video playback. In a very long rectangular exhibition space, seeing two rows of 18 LCD displays playing images of carousels rotating individually, inevitably causes dizziness and make reality afar. 

If it’s only one carousel, we would have expected it to be a playground filled with children and laughter. But when there are 18 carousels rotating simultaneously in front of you, we will then witness how repetition escapes normality. This repetition is similar to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of repetition. It came from a point of view which concerns on ‘the characteristics of non-exchangeable and non-replaceable’[1]. This attitude of non-exchangeable is almost inappropriate nowadays. How come we saw contemporary arts in the area of large hardware stores in Kaohsiung? The area itself also reflects characteristics of the non-exchangeable, but there’s nothing odd, cause I just walked out of Bandon Grocery Store which was an old factory warehouse in the Pier 2 area.

These carousels were actually filmed from different district in Paris by Chun-Yi Chang, a Taiwanese artist living in France. Some of these carousels are over a hundred years old. Through these public playground facility, parents and children could not only create shared childhood memories, but also extends the local connection. These carousels became the artist’s filming object, other than the above mentioned dizziness, the displays were neatly positioned next to each other, this felt like if the purpose of existence of the carousels has been taken away. The carousel are far away from their original purpose. And on these empty facilities, we could not be sure if it is the rotation of carousels driving the movements of video playback, or if it is the video playback that is driving the rotation of carousels. 

Due to the ambiguity of this dynamic procedure, we perceived disintegration under the glossy appearance. Although the colour and brightness of these carousels were extremely saturated and dazzling, on site, the place exudes a smell close to melting plastic from the electric wire when equipments started running. ‘The Carousel Waltz’ are still rotating, looking at these clear and beautiful images. It is a metaphor of how far we as the viewers are from reality. Similar contrast were also reflected in the naming of the work. The Chinese name of this work is the direct transliteration of the English word ‘Carousel’. This gesture of taking the sounds rather than the semantics, conveys an understandable context. There is a description on Chun-Yi Chang’s exhibition program note: 

“The Carousels are rotating without stopping, yet there’s no one there riding them. There is no exciting departure bell, the constant running has no end. A journey without a destination never started and will never end; As they followed their own tempo and turns a journey of three and half a minutes into eternity.”

So far, this journey without destination had made me felt incomprehensibly gloom. Unlike the beginning, which reminds me of the younger years when I had the obsession to put on my headphone and listened to the same song over and over. This obsession of segmenting myself and the world is always moving forward, stop, and moving backwards, attaching on some boundaries of modernity. However, in ’The Carousel Waltz’ series, the amenities and images that go back and forth, were creating a world that obeys its own ‘internal time logic’, maybe we can call it the ‘Carousel’ universe. In this universe, how one measures time is different, and we as the viewers felt the rudeness when we enter this repeated universe. 

Why do we felt this rudeness? Because we expected to see these videos to have a start and a end, and meaning refilled in artistic experience. I thought about the exhibition curated by Hai-Ru Tsai, ‘Joy Luck's Mirror Garden’, she also applied the transliteration method for naming the exhibition. In this exhibition, with the victim of second generation female of the White Terror as the main theme, it expose the wounds to display the privacy. Privacy is another temporality and ‘The Carousel Waltz’ is very close to this kind of temporality.                                                                                       

(To see Chun-Yi Chang’s ’The Carousel Waltz’ series online, please click the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BTKcSlkpqI&feature=share)

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p.1.