Magnificence And Vicissitudes

Deconstruction, Crossover, and Reconstruction
—An Interpretation of the Contemporary Woodcarving of Chen Yi Lang

Chang Chan-Lin

(Doctoral Assistant Researcher of the National Taiwan of Fine Arts)

Engrossing oneself in artworks can bring out the experience of alienation from the self-world. An artwork is a vivid, magical, and typical object, which makes us to return the world in broader and more abundant way.

－ Susan Sontag[1]

He is not eager to become an artist, and that is the reason he does not theatrical like general artists. He is honest to his creations. Even though his works have complicated and almost luxury architecture, his works are strongly original and wild like art brut.

－ Hou Chun-Ming[2]

    To understand a good artist, we need to begin from several dimensions. First, we investigate and determine her/his works belong to which location or segment in the medium development history from the perspective of art history. Second, we discuss the aesthetic meanings and results of her/his works from the perspective of aesthetic creation. Finally, we discover the unique personality, characteristics, and life experiences. This study uses these three dimensions of art history, aesthetic characteristics, and life history to interpret the contemporary woodcarving of A-Long, Chen Yi-Lang.

    When using the perspective of art history in discussing the works of Chen Yi-Lang, we need to adequately broaden our viewpoints and incorporate the development history of woodcarving art in Taiwan; particularly, the Sanyi woodcarving community is highly related to Chen Yi-Lang. The woodcarving craft began in the Japanese colonial period and has been through several historical phases. From 1920s to 1950s, artists used strangely-shaped natural woods to create realistic modeling sculptures. Between 1950 and mid-1970s, Taiwan massively exported eastern and western style woodcarving works. After mid-1990s, the trend of contemporary woodcarving became more conceptual, experimental, aesthetically explorative, and multi-material design. However, from mid-1970 to 1990s, with the rise of Taiwanese economics, the domestic market emerged, and the Sanyi woodcarving began to focus on local related issues. In this era, the figures in local customs, such as Bodhidharma and GuanYu, became popular topics in woodcarving and establish the concrete base of woodcarving. Artists at that time used sophisticated carving techniques and strangely-shaped natural woods to develop a semi-realistic “strangely-shaped woodcarving” style, resulting in diversified woodcarving creations. With the establishment of Woodcarving Golden Award, Woodcarving Festival, and Woodcarving Museum, contemporary wood carving style obtained not only greater supports and responses but also national-wide influence, becoming an essential branch of Taiwanese contemporary art development.

    Chen Yi-Lang is one of the best masters in the contemporary woodcarving. He was born in Chiayi, 1968. When he was 18 years old in 1986, he moved to Sanyi, Miaoli County, to learn woodcarving techniques in traditional factories and art studios. Cultivated in the rigorous lively environment, he was well-trained and the experience in Sanyi gave Chen the most vital gift—he not only obtained crucial styling techniques but also began his professional career. In the mid 1990’s, he met Hou Chun-Ming, Kung Chung-Wen, and Hung Tien-Yu who were contemporary art workers. Meeting with those art workers was a turning point for Chen Yi-Lang. From the perspective of art history, those challenges did help Chen to polish his techniques. Different from those artists cultivated by institutes, Chen Yi-Lang must confront two phases of challenges on his pathway to contemporary creation. And that is the reason the successful responses and trials were significantly meaningful to Chen. Challenging his past experience is the first phase. He must incorporated traditional craft background and contemporary modeling into an organic entity. In his second phase, when marching to the future, how he used real works to demonstrate the conceptual, reflective, and domain dimensions emphasized by the contemporary art creation.

The Firebug Series after 2000 is a powerful response to answer the questions of “past and future proposed” by Chen. We can observe and find the influences of strangely-shaped natural woods and sophisticated woodcarving techniques on the Firebugs. However, the appearance of the Firebugs was filled with conceptual experimental spirits and the wooden media were embodied with pure aesthetic contexts. The rhythm and tension of the woods were successfully reserved. As what is found by Hou Chung-Ming, the complicated and sophisticated work structure of A-Long is full of wild interest. The word “wild interest” can be defined as the aesthetic interest produced by continuously crossing the existing norms. Moreover, the word “norms” refers to the training from local artists who have certain rules of modeling to follow with. “Norms” can also refer to the preference produced by the art behavior or concepts of art institutions. Overly addicted to existing training and experiences can bring negative impacts on artists. In other words, to sustain creative power, artists must obtain abundant reflective abilities and review art concepts. However, this question bothers many creative artists and art reviewers. However, the creations of Chen Yi-Lang surpassed these norms and limitations and proposed powerful response, “He gives you and me a new pathway to understand traditional media, completely reversing the regular formal and contextual path of art reviewers.”

    From the perspective of aesthetic characteristics, the creation of Chen Yi-Lang is a deconstruction/reconstruction process, demonstrating highly vertical direct and promote appearance through carving out the internal world of woods. Awaken by the artist, viewers can see the most natural and adequate wooden media presenting in front of us. The inspiration of the Firebug Series came from nature. According to the literature, the idea was derived from the image of radiolarians.[3] Radiolarians are a type of plankton. Radiolarians are tiny, but they have almost perfectly geometric and radial structures. Comparing radiolarians to the Firebugs of Chen Yi-Lang, we can find that how he realize his creations. The picture of a radiolarian attracted us through the pure natural shape. The aesthetics of a radiolarian is purely being-in-itself. However, the Firebugs embodied Chen’s ideas and the elegance given by Chen. In other words, the Firebugs were being-for-itself, equipped with the personal idea of the artist. The Firebug Series not only used certain media, textures, shapes, postures, and tangible and intangible space to construct, but only obtained spirits. The traditional woodcarving subjects, dragons, phoenix, flowers, birds, were the assistant of Chen, using his hands to perform sophisticated woodcarving techniques and precisely bring out the spirit of subjects.

As we know, woodcarving is highly-embodiment behavior. When bodies and media vigorously encounter, the media were affected by the momentum and meaning of life. A friend of Chen Yi-Lang, Chang Li-Yeh described the phenomenon as that each piece of the Firebug Series is dynamic, burning like fire. [4] Creation is a wrestle between will and the real world. Potential artists can observe the interaction process and introduce the interaction as their creation energy. Subsequently, subjects become the object of will. This attempt in the Beasts of Characters was revealed more clearly. Regarding the style, the Beast of Characters not only inherited the appearance of creatures but also embodied the calligraphic element of the Oracle bone script. In the traditional Chinese culture, calligraphy and styling are highly correlated. The woodcarving works of Chen Yi-Lang redefine the relationship between calligraphy and styling, leading to surprising viewers with the new life of ancient cultural codes in the Beast of Characters, which is strange but also familiar. The Beast of Characters increase a new level of Chen’s creation—readability, in addition to visibility and sensibility. The Firebug and the Fire Elemental series presented how modern woodcarving explorers re-operate the mass. The Beast of Characters further exhibited that how the mass become an interpretative field. This breakthrough is a great improvement in the conceptual and reflective experimental development in Taiwanese contemporary woodcarving art.

    Meanwhile, when we view the Firebug Series and the Beast of Characters, we might know what it looks like or what might be the hidden messages, but we hardly identify what exactly the work is. Many reviewers have found the uncertainty and ambiguity in the denotation of the meanings. [5] Their vivid and complicated structures also aroused viewers’ original feeling on religious mysterious subjects. The texture and wood or stainless steel (metal) gave the works with magical colors. In the beginning of 20^th century, Clifve Bell stated his aesthetic perspective that the substance of an art work is a meaningful form which is the aesthetic behavior to special emotions or experiences.[6] In short, the goal of artists is to create refined forms, inspiring viewers’ different aesthetic emotions. In the Beast of Characters, Chen presented plentiful forms in front us, inspiring our emotional imagination and bringing out abundant meanings. These meanings can only be expressed by emotional styles. As what Susan Sontag highlighted, there is a creative alienation between excellent works and the viewers. Through experiencing the work, we can return to the living and magical world.[7] From this point of view, the Beast of Characters are evolving organisms, using their roots and branches to connect with the worlds of humans, nature, and super nature. Chen’s works not only possess styles but also can breathe and talk.

    As we observe the creation pathway of Chen Yi-Lang, we can find the confidence and mature beneath his works. It is hard to believe that the Firebug Series, the Beast of Characters, the God Series—the Eight Generals (2008), the Monkey King (2011), Heng General and Ha General (2011) were the works accomplished in less than ten years. In the history of Chen’s work, the structures and meanings became more complicated, extending, abundant, and lively. The creation consciousness was more autonomic and strong. The origin of Chen’s creations can be traced back to when he came alone to Sanyi to learning woodcarving craft in 1986. For the following 25 years, his works demonstrated different levels of deconstruction, crossover, and reconstruction, highlighting the meaning of art experiments. After 1980’s, several unclear aesthetic concerns connected through his works. First, in the Taiwanese woodcarving art development, Chen Yi-Lang successfully played the role to transform from tradition to modern, giving new possibilities to existing media and creating a new space for local art forms. Second, his practical creation practice and rich lift experiences deconstruct the myths of the origin—whether artists were cultivated by institutions or not—which explained the fragile boundary. Third, his works swung between abstract and realistic, which successfully embodied forms, textures, and contexts, expanding the aesthetic potentials of woods. With the education of tradition woodcarving craft, Chen built a concrete fundamental for his following deconstruction and reconstruction, leading to classical experiences and persistence. Arthur C. Danto stated that the spirit of contemporary art frequently embodies when crossing over different boundaries, mixing and breaking existing media, forms, aesthetics, identities, and cultures.[8] Only when artists realize the existence and limits of boundaries, they can understand the difficulty to cross over boundaries. However, the existence of boundaries makes the sensitive artists to be more ambitious to explore the essence of deconstruction and freedom after crossover. Artists then attempt to reconstruct their creation world. From this perspective, the creations of Chen Yi-Lang must nonstop surpass and move towards a broader field of contemporary art and deeply carve his trace in the new world.