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Chih-Chien Wang: The Poetics of Empty Hands

Anil Ragubance

In 2004, I happened upon a panel discussion being hosted by a gallery in Montreal. The talk featured several emerging artists who were speaking on their concerns as new cultural voices. The panel soon drifted out into the oceans of Artspeak, and it prompted the moderator's question: why do you make art? The panel's explanations were long and varied and the discussion soon became a scenic voyage around the outlying hot buttons - circling the islands of Post and Anti - stalling somewhere between Virtual and Techno. The inevitable argument broke out over the importance of the Internet. As the audience murmured, the question was posed to the artist seated at the end of the row: Why do you make art? The artist, Chih-Chien Wang, closed his eyes and took a moment before speaking. From that pause, he uttered the phrase:

All art is very boring, and very lonely...but if I can make something that can be for my lover, or my ESL teacher, then I am happy.

His response was jarring, and it silenced the crowd. In fact, as the talk continued, the tone of the discussion also shifted - all of the artists spoke more intimately, more self-consciously, as if the affair had suddenly been humanized. Myself, I had realized something from his statement that went far towards contextualizing his work: Chih-Chien Wang is an artist whose poetics emerge out of context more than subject. His words during the panel talk would normally have seemed quite sentimental, but here they were a grounding gesture that tethered the discussion, and more importantly they served as an offering that made others want to meet him halfway and share his intimacy.

Chih-Chien Wang is an artist who chooses the driest land on which to dig for water. Just as he took the verbal jousting of his peers and, without guile, found its poetic counterpoint, his work is about his placement, and what he makes of his surroundings. This is among the reasons why it is inaccurate to contextualize Wang's art as an art of Displacement. The characters that he creates out of himself are not the uprooted and homeless longing for something lost. Instead, his characters are more of the intrepid sort. They have ventured out from their familiar homes to build new spaces. In these surroundings, his subjects can only meet as strangers, yet seem to share in an old complicit memory. His subjects grasp at some mythic underpinning to their immediate lives - this may be the heart of the matter - Wang's art is more of a syncretic endeavor than one of individuation.

In Wang's visual language, he plays certain images as motifs: box apartments walled in by purchased objects, isolated foods in various states of consumption and desiccation, images of bodies wrapped or mingling with food. These motifs are simple gestures of memento mori. The signs of mortality are made more threatening by a changed sense of time - our lives emerge out of the short half-life of kitsch materials, disposable commodity, and bad supermarket food. This visual cycle in Wang's montages, his kind of urban ars moriendi, is disrupted by his intimation of the possibility in human relationships, or his intuited sense of myth connecting people.

This potential is not fulfilled in Wang's earlier artwork, existing more as an elusive question. In his Suit, 2002, a pressed jacket stiffly hangs in its plastic dry-cleaning sleeve, unused, and among all the other objects barricading Wang's subjects in their apartments. The suit exists as his social link, but is instead an uncrossed threshold, as monolithic as it is transformative.

His more recent work has tried to bridge gaps between his discursive threads of daily physical change, household activity, and human contact. In the Counting series from 2004 montages of Wang's daily morning self-portraits are dovetailed with images where strangers are invited to pose with him. In Chih-Chien and a Postman, 2002, the artist is seen posing with his mail carrier. They are shaking hands and wear mutually awkward expressions, both appearing equally vulnerable in the artist's home. The artist makes a simple poetry out of connecting two solitary personal orbits that - while touching opposite ends of the same wall daily - are buffered by a handful of letters. It is not easy to keep this kind of gesture outside of the realm of sentimentality. Wang's use of montage serves to deadhead any hint of mawkishness. He keeps the play between images contrapuntal; any release in tension is swiftly followed by greater density.

Chih-Chien Wang practices an art of vulnerability; an art that takes the posture of mutually lowered heads. His offering of empty hands is disarming and it allows us to be surprised by our own emotions.

This project is supported by PRIM and CIAM