Based on the previous studies, my article tries to elaborate the idea of 'complex art' in 1960s Taiwan by concerning on the ready-made artworks, and their relative contexts.
In this period, Taiwan, as Free China （Ziyou Zhongguo）, was in martial law enforcement as well as still a member of the United Nations. Artists in this time had to organize themselves in the name of 'international exchange' and cope with the official cultural ideology, that is, the issue of modernization of Chinese culture, in order to achieve artistic freedom and the legality of avant-garde. For example, PUNTO International Art Movement which was founded by some artists from Italy, Spain, Japan, Taiwan, etc., was invented to exhibit in Taiwan in 1963 because the Taiwan painters, Xiao Qin (1935-) and Li Yuan-Jia (1929-1994) were its members, and the other foreign painters were inspired by the spirit of Chinese culture.
The PUNTO exhibition, with its social connections with Taiwanese artistic circle, had impacts on the bifurcation between painters of May Society (Wuyue Huahui) and of the Orient Society (Dongfang Huahui), which both occupied dominant positions in the artistic field with their abstract paintings. Furthermore, the dominant artists and their challengers were also bifurcated by this exhibition. The challengers came from the field of art design, which was deemed the periphery in artistic hierarchy. In 1966, an astonishing ready-made work, Washing Hand (Xishou), by Hua-cheng Huang (1935-1996) was placed on the roundabout in West Gate District (Hsimenting) which was a chair with a washbasin on its seat and a poetry wrote on a scrap of paper on the front of the chair back. This work was a part of Modern Poetry Exhibition (Xiandai Shizhan) hold as a section of Chinese Art Season (Jhongguo Yishuji), and in the exhibition, almost all the participating artists were devoted to cover or industrial design.
Huang was an art director in Taiwan Television Enterprise, Ltd. founded in 1962 and the editor of Theatre quarterly (Juchang), a journal introducing avant-garde theatre and movies by translation. His background had provided him some advantages. First, he could exercise different media across arts. His Hand Washing seems to be astonishing at first glance, however, the grafting of different arts in Hand Washing: literature and fine art, were in fact a common feature in theatres, in movies and even cover designs. Another advantage was that the official cultural ideology was suspended from the field of art design and replaced by the idea of Existentialism which Huang learned from the performance of Beckett's theatres.
Those ready-made artworks seemed to meet a social tendency towards a consumer society, but they disappeared soon instead. The reasons for this finality might be that the prevalence of media is so strong that any successive artists who search for avant-garde expressions would not ignore it. Moreover, the artists who made ready-made works lost their alternative imaginary enemies: the members of May Society and the Oriental Society went aboard in succession, and finally disbanded in 1971. Finally, the suddenly reversal of international relations of Free China made the prevalence of Existentialism faint quickly, and the common features of ready-made works: ridicule, irony and self-exile, relatively hardly raised any interests in the ethos of raising nationalism and vernacularism.
Keywords
Ready-made artworks, May Society (Wuyue Huahui), The Orient Society (Dongfang Huahui), Hua-cheng Huang (1935-1996), Modern Poetry Exhibition (Xiandai Shizhan), Chinese Art Season (Jhongguo Yishuji)
As industrialization continues to deepen, metal materials, whose variety expands along, become critical representative substance of the 20th and 21st centuries. In particular, when applied to sculpting art, as they are fundamental to the construction of modern industries, their direct reflection of people's way of life and the spirit of the industrial era renders impressive results.
The power and speed of machine productions are more emphasized in the modern era. Influenced by this trend, sculpting artists set out to experiment on the use of different metal materials. These artists have made substantial progress in developing an alternative style to present their work.
The combination of modern technologies—represented by metal materials—and art, therefore, indicates that art is no longer about mastering techniques, but incorporating the artist's ideas, the spirit of the era and the applied materials to develop human culture, making the form and content of sculpting art much more diversified than before.
By analyzing industrial productions, ready-made industrial objects and the re-production of them, as well as kinetic sculpture, this paper aims to show how metal materials have become so uniquely important in the development of modern sculpting art, their distinguished characteristics in forms, as well as the expanded use of such materials.
By reviewing the development of metal sculpting art in this island, a unique language of sculpture in Taiwan is confirmed in this paper. This is a language in which diversified expressions are made through special interpretations to materials, space and ideas, all different from those in the old days. This is also a language that speaks the unique sculpting aesthetics in Taiwan.
Keywords
Metal forms, Direct metal sculpture, Minimalism, Kinetic sculpture, Sculpture in Taiwan
Yu Yu Yang (1926-1997) was one of the most critical artists during the post-war period in Taiwan. He was so versatile that no single artistic titles would suffice to describe him. He was an oil painter, a graphic artist, a photographer, a cartoonist, a product designer, a sculptor, a landscape planning specialist, and even a laser artist. It is because he had worked on so many fields of art, applied such a great variety of materials to his works, developed such unprecedented avantgarde techniques and expanded his profound thoughts of art, that he had become so influential.
Among his various achieved works, Yang's series of sculpting art is recognized by both researchers and the general public for its strong coherence and completeness. This article examines the artist's development course of sculpting art by dividing it into four periods: the initial period in which "form" was explored; the period of "image" during his years in Italy; the period of "ideas" when he returned to Taiwan to create the "Taroko Gorge" series; and the "concepts" period when he incorporated traditional Chinese cultural symbols, such as dragons, phoenixes, the Sun, the Moon, and the Universe into his stainless steel sculptures, while reflecting on the meanings of landscape sculpting.
It is hoped that, by analyzing the course of development of Yang's sculpting art, this article would serve as reference not only for researchers to further explore his works, but also for other artists to learn about and interested members of the public to appreciate Yang's creation.
The paper mainly discusses Hsin-yu Huang's 2001 to 2006 artistic creations. It is as well an attempt to analyze the Huang's logical thinking as well as Huang's soul perception, which together take form into a complete personal ideology and the core of her work.
The reading will explain important details during the construction of Huang's artwork of the physical and psychological importance of the choice of materials, the reason behind the repetition of the Huang's works and motions, the coexisting partnership and collaborative approaches during the construction of the artwork, as well as the concerns for the relation between space and atmosphere of the place during the exhibiting process, etc. The paper is an attempt to discuss the present, past and future creations identifying the author, which searched for the meaning of Huang's life.
Post: Juming Museum, No.2, Xishihu, Jinshan District, New Taipei City 20842, TAIWAN (R.O.C.) addressing to “Sculpture Research Semiyearly Editorial Board”
