Artist Professor kuo-chang CHI

Through the Photographic Looking Glass

走出憂鬱的觀景窗－留法影像藝術家紀國章教授專訪

Taiwan Panorama Report by Yang Ling-yuan

Images Arts by kuo-chang CHI

In the fresh, cool air of late spring in Taipei, a group of students crowd into the basement of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum to look at a collection of 100 art works of photographs that appear to be in the style of Impressionist paintings. Some of the photos contain line drawings made with a brush, while others combine real scenes with oil-paint images. All of this leads some viewers to blurt out questions like, "Are these photographs or abstract paintings? " or "How the heck do you get photos to come out like this?

This photography exhibit, titled Trilogy of Color, brings together the last 12 years of creative work by Hualien native Chi Kuo-chang. Inspired by the work of Surrealist painter Joan Miro (1893-1983), Chi was determined to move beyond the realist framework built in to the camera, melding painting aesthetics into the world of photographic scenery to create new images that blend together the real and the abstract.

Chi's creations have earned him the high honor of an "Artiste Excellent" award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as well as the only invitation offered in 20 years to a Taiwanese artist to exhibit at France's Arles Photography Festival, the most important event of its kind in the world. His works have also been purchased for the collections of the Van Gogh Cultural Center Memorial Gallery in Arles, the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the Musee Nice-phore Niepce, and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Known for his symbolic use of color in creating photographic images, Chi Kuo-chang may be like most photographers--always lugging around two cameras, a tripod, and heavy special-use lenses--but he also brings a sketchbook, watercolors or poster paints, and brushes.

"First, I sketch out my idea in color," says Chi. "Once the image I'm looking for becomes clearer as I work with the brush, then I start using the camera." Fair-skinned, soft-spoken and slight, Chi also has a steely Hakka temperament, and never balks at taking on difficult tasks. To get the right shot, he will go back to the same spot time after time. The images he brings back are almost always single-exposure. Aside from those pieces that require some digital processing or reworking on a computer, all of his works are completed once they have been developed in the darkroom.

A world in a single flower

"I like seeking out the unusual in ordinary things," says Chi. "In scenes that everyone ignores, or in things that people think are decaying, I look for something eternal that is unique and beautiful. That's what these images are about." Without an explanation from a museum docent or Chi Kuo-chang himself, it would be hard to imagine that the colors and waves we see in his Symbol of Color series are actually taken with a high-powered telephoto lens. In fact, they are color images taken from very small segments of moving water, photographed at various places near bodies of water in France and other countries in Western Europe. The black lines in the images of his Dying Flower series, on the other hand, were made from photos of lotuses in the Taipei Botanical Garden as they began to wilt.

The photos in the Variegated Shadow series have another story behind them. As Chi Kuo-chang walked around on the streets in France and other European countries, he saw crude scrawlings in many places. He did not rush to begin taking pictures, but rather would sketch an image in his sketchbook and, after touching up the graffiti with water-base paints, would compose photos as he looked through the camera's viewfinder.

Ever creative, Chi Kuo-chang has also tried applying color directly to finished photos, creating yet another type of obscure dreamscape. As audiences see Chi Kuo-chang's colorful, eye-catching works, it seems like the pictures record a condensed image of the artist's multifaceted life. In fact, however, these photos bring together Chi's difficult memories of social isolation, depression, and three near-death experiences.

"These works come from overflowing dream-worlds, some good, some bad. They also come from the sparks caused by the collision between outer and inner worlds," says Chi. He calmly notes that the repeated use of blue and purple in his works is related to the long periods of depression he has experienced and to his childhood memories. As he talks with breathless enthusiasm about the fine points of creative work, however, it is hard to believe that Chi used to suffer from social impairments and would rarely talk in the presence of strangers.

A wordless nightmare

Sent to elementary school two years earlier than other children, Chi Kuo-chang had to force himself to act more mature than his age. To play with children older than him who were in the same grade, he had to be more willing to experiment and try new things to challenge himself. He had not been in school for very long when, one day as he was outside riding bikes with his neighbors from school in the street in front of his house, he was hit by a truck that suddenly turned into the street. In addition to suffering a serious concussion, he saw one of his good friends die in the accident, and this tremendous shock rendered him unable to speak, while the painful swelling of the brain caused by his head injury kept him from eating anything but rice gruel for several months. From that time on, even though he regained the ability to speak, some of the impediments remained, and he found it difficult to study language.

The next year, when Chi and his classmates ran off to play at the beach without any adult supervision, he fell up to his neck into muddy quicksand. In the midst of this danger, it felt like someone grabbed him and pulled out in one motion. Oddly, he was never able to find out who saved him, or how he escaped death. For Chi, it remains a mystery to this day.

In high school, Chi Kuo-chang joined the scouts. On a trip to climb Mt. Muchih, he was misbehaving as usual on the way up, and while playing with friends, he fell and rolled down the mountain, suffering a serious spinal injury that forced him to recuperate at home for some time.

These three brushes with death had serious effects on Chi Kuo-chang. "Since I could not use language to express myself clearly, I became afraid of talking to other people," he says. "And so I tended to close myself off from the outside world." As Chi moved from Hualien to Taipei to attend vocational high school, the low sense of self-esteem caused by these problems made it nearly impossible for him to adjust and made him unusually sensitive--and those seconds he spent stuck in the quicksand became a nightmare that followed him through his life.

An enthusiastic autodidact

Fortunately, "In the camera's view-finder, I discovered a different world," says Chi. When he tested into the printing arts department at Taipei Municipal Da'an Senior Vocational Industrial High School, Chi Kuo-chang showed little interest in printing. In the darkroom, however, he became fascinated with the world of images. Even though he had no guidance from the teacher who specialized in photography, by his third year in high school Chi was participating in photography exhibits held by the Department of Education of the Taiwan Provincial Government and by the Ministry of Education, taking first prize in both events and winning guaranteed admission to National Taiwan College of Arts.

Yet while his dreams of studying photography led him to college, he found that the educational environment could not satisfy his thirst for knowledge about the field. This led him to change majors, first from fine-arts printing to arts, and then from arts to film. Like a sponge dropped into a dry well, he eventually was so disappointed that he left school. Yet the reading he had done on photography led him to learn that Paris led the world in photography and arts studies, and this knowledge sparked in him a desire to study in France.

At the same time, Chi Kuo-chang also set to work on holding his first solo photography exhibition. He thought of how his family kept many pet birds when he was a child, and his deep love for birds led him to start using a telephoto lens to document wild birds and migratory birds around Taiwan. The result was more than pictures of birds: these works blend light and water into the poses of aquatic birds, creating fantastic dreamscapes that won Chi's work a new audience. These works also drew the attention of master photographer Lang Ching-shan, who took Chi Kuo-chang on as his only pupil from Taiwan, further opening Chi's path to international recognition.

Yet while he loved photography, Chi Kuo-chang faced the same problem as all other art students in Taiwan: how to convince his parents that he could make a decent living at art. Filled with the desire to study in France, Chi could only try to convince his parents that he would be able to make his own way in that country. Chi's previous troubles in college had already made his conservative father, a civil servant, less than understanding. His father still loved his son, however, and hoped that he could figure things out after completing his mandatory military service.

"When I was assigned to the navy, I practically fainted," says Chi. The terrifying memories of almost dying near the ocean were still fresh in his mind, and Chi normally would have nothing to do with water. He never expected that fate would toy with him in such a way. A few weeks of basic training were already terrible for him, and he was completely unused to the demanding physical training and rigid structure, where soldiers even needed permission to use the toilet. Moreover, as missions on the open water drew closer each day, the pressure finally caused the terror inside him to gradually emerge, which resulted in an outbreak of serious anxiety problems.

"But I couldn't let my father down!" says Chi. Originally offered a discharge by military doctors, Chi got a grip on his fear and managed to complete his term of service. Fortunately, his skill with a camera got him a transfer to work as a military photographer, a move that also temporarily warded off his symptoms of depression.

Encountering Impressionism

During his studies in France, Chi Kuo-chang was truly in his element, absorbing a great deal of aesthetic knowledge and cultural sustenance. He fell in love with the paintings of Surrealism master Joan Miro, and became an admirer of Vincent van Gogh's bold use of color and the abstract beauty of Pablo Picasso's works. At that time, he was also thinking about what direction to take for his final student project. Chi's ambitions presented him with problems that forced him to spend a great deal of time thinking and experimenting. He did not want to become a "postcard-style" photographer of pretty scenery, but instead wanted to work the way painters do, making pictures freely on the canvas. The camera lens, however, is a fixed quantity; scenery cannot be changed at will; and photographers are limited by environmental and light conditions.

Later, he remembered how he discovered the subtle effects of moving water in his earlier work on wild birds: refracted colors and ripples on the water created geometrical forms and patches of color were reflected off nearby objects--these effects seemed to be highly suited to the visual sense that he was pursuing. For his art, then, Chi Kuo-chang decided to overcome his fear of water.

"For two years I walked the French coastline, looking for those tiny, disappearing points of light within the vastness of the sea," recalls Chi. The weather, season, and color of the sky all influenced the structure of the light reflected in the waves. In the hope of capturing an image from his dreams as it formed on the water, Chi would spend an entire day silent at the water's edge.Fortunately, it was not a waste of time. When Chi presented his project, his advisor was deeply affected by his work. Chi Kuo-chang received his master's degree from the Universite National de Paris 8's Departement de photographie et multimedia, and later served as lecturer and visiting professor at the French Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Fading beauty

Earning wide praise from galleries and scholars in France, Chi Kuo-chang hoped to live and work in France for the rest of his life. Eleven years ago, however, when Chi's grandmother passed away and his ailing father began to need his company, he returned to Taipei to work, pursuing a new stage of artistic growth.

The Dying Flower is inspired by Chi's thoughts of how he often accompanied his grandmother to the Taipei Botanical Gardens to exercise. There he noticed that the remnants of lotus flowers in the dead of winter were even more beautiful than when they were in bloom. Upon seeing this, he could not help but think of the primeval fragility and inconstancy of life. All told, he spent four winters by the lotus ponds, looking for a way to capture the transient beauty of the lotuses just before their death.

In the lonely, intense process of taking photographs, people would often stand next to him and stare, saying, "They are just trash now. What's there to take a picture of?" But through artistic and technical skill, Chi Kuo-chang made these dead branches and leaves into brilliant visual works.

Yet, despite his aesthetic successes, during this time in Taiwan he began to feel a deepening sense of powerlessness and emptiness, and Chi Kuo-chang suddenly began to get the sense that his depression was coming back.

"Since it was so hard to find someone who truly understands my work, I felt I would never again know who I was creating for!" says Chi. During this time, he turned out many works and held many exhibitions, but he always ran into innumerable unreasonable demands from exhibition spaces or government organizations. Later, when he began work on a photo series on Taiwan glove puppet master Huang Hai-dai, the experience of meeting this nationally acclaimed artist led him to understand how Taiwanese society is often ignorant and dismissive of artists. After this, when his beloved teacher Lang Ching-shan passed away, the government and public's indifference to this internationally renowned photographer was almost enough to make him give up his art.

Chi Kuo-chang believes that education in Taiwan has emphasized academic subject matter at the expense of other skills for so long that people who want to study art are either forced to leave the country if they want to develop their work or, if they remain in the country, to find another way of making a living and make art a leisure pursuit. Even now, as many work to promote creative cultural industries and as the government has begun to emphasize the development of art students, only a small number of projects receive support, and photography in particular has received little support.

Waiting for spring

"Taiwanese people are willing to spend money to see a movie, but they won't walk into a gallery to look at a photography exhibition, to say nothing of buying or collecting pictures," says Chi. This is very unfavorable for the environment for photography, and is another source of worry for Chi.

In France, whenever an important photographer dies, the bureau in charge of national heritage at the Ministry of Culture and Communications will allocate a budget for a team of specialists to work for two years to classify the works of the photographer, establish an archive, do preservation work, create a digital record, and then hold exhibitions and publish multilingual collections of their work and biographies. This program not only involves organized and systematic efforts to preserve artists' work, but also incorporates a genuine determination to show respect for artists. In Taiwan, in contrast, will we ever see the day when artists enjoy the same kind of attention and prestige?

"Photography helped to bring me out of a world of isolation and depression. I only hope that I can keep down this road and stay focused!" Chi Kuo-chang, who places all his hopes in art, is still waiting for spring to arrive on the other end of the viewfinder.

Between Abstract and Real

Chi Kuo-chang's photography works along roughly two lines. The first includes intimate, approachable works in the "documentary" or "cultural" mode, while in the second mode, Chi's abstract photography pursues an aesthetic of the image that challenges existing frames of visual reference.

"Taiwan's overall aesthetic environment is lacking, and does not inspire artists to be visually innovative, and thus you can only begin from the cultural or documentary mode," says Chi. Before he went abroad to study, Chi Kuo-chang worked on the staff of the United Evening News as a photojournalist, a job that gave him extensive experience and a strong respect for society and culture. At the age of 19, he completed his "Waves" series, which documented birds' environments and was well-received among students and professionals. Later black-and-white series such as Paris Dream (1995), Faces of Nepal (1997), and Huang Hai-dai: A Life in Glove Puppetry (1998) won prizes and admiration worldwide.

Influenced by French Impressionist and Surrealist painters, Chi Kuo-chang attempts to make the camera challenge the painter's brush as he produces images from his imagination through scenes made from photographs of real things. Originally conceived while he was studying in Europe, the Symbol of Color and Variegated Shadow series are works that Chi has continued to produce.

All of Chi Kuo-chang's work--documentary, pure image, and abstract art--was born in the "pre-digital" era and draws on the history of traditional visual arts. Chi believes that photographers are "painters who use cameras," and that the difference lies only in the tools they use to express themselves. He says, "Artists always have to make something out of nothing, turning the ideas in their minds into specific images."

Chi Kuo-chang does not approve, however, of the way some photographers think that using synthetic digital technology is the same as creating works of art. He argues that if digital technology replaces conceptualization and composition through a lens, then photographers would never need to seek out the right image in a harsh environment or use their own skills to capture things like the reflection of light off of the sea, to say nothing of the days and nights spent working in the darkroom honing their developing and printing techniques. If this happens, says Chi, then photography will lose all of its vitality.

In his travels to France and elsewhere in Europe, Chi Kuo-chang has found that other artists also have the same worries. "Originality means everything in art, and can never be replaced by technology," says Chi. Since he doesn't want to get carried away with digital technology, Chi Kuo-chang still shoulders his camera, tripod, and a few long, heavy telephoto lenses as he travels across the world, seeking out those images in his heart. Because of this, what we see in his works is not only art, but human values and a sense of reverence that are truly moving.

(Lin Yi-min and Yang Ling-yuan/tr. by Michael Hill)

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