This exhibition review was published on Widewalls Magazine on September 5, 2023.
Blurry Transparency
Wu Chi-Tsung solo exhibition at Katonah Museum of Art
Wu Chi-Tsung, Cyano-Collage 170, 2023 (Installation View). Cyanotype photography, Xuan paper, acrylic gel, acrylic, mounted on aluminum board. 35 7/16 x 118 1/8 (90 x 300 cm). © Wu Chi-Tsung Studio, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Courtesy Katonah Museum of Art.
Mountain climbing is a process of intaking. It starts from afar, with an unmovable object (the mountain) accessible only through remote contemplation. The climber’s subjectivity is jeopardized the moment s/he steps into the trails, relinquishing the possibility of looking at the whole thing ever again. The mountain has therefore become environmental, immersible, and consumable. When one enters the mountain, there is arguably always a doppelganger of the self being left at the entrance. The fun about mountaineering lies in the battle between your physical self who desires to treat the new environment as a “constant” and your doppelganger who fights to remind you that this new “constant” is only conditional.
Wu Chi-Tsung climbs, and he understands the mountains. “Synchronicity” , his first institutional solo show in the US at the Katonah Museum of Art, curated by Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, highlights the worthy trails in Wu’s multi-dimensional practice: subjectification of the “constants”.
Wu Chi-Tsung’s works are based on treating mediums as “constants” - water, light, time, cyanotypes, shaped-canvases that continually ask to be subjectified. The viewers might become eager to be immersed into these seemingly unvarying elements which are integrated with tremendous artistic quality, but are always provided with triggers and opportunities to realize that these “constants” are only made possible by our subjective consciousness. The artist has disclosed to me that his readings expand from Buddhism to Nietzsche, but I would define Wu Chi-Tsung as an environmental pantheist - his practice demonstrates how the microcosms of our individual subjectivity might be willingly expandable, mergeable, and penetrable with our surroundings. Instead of “creating” art, he immerses.
Wu Chi-Tsung: Synchronicity (Installation View). © Wu Chi-Tsung Studio and Courtesy Katonah Museum of Art.
Extendable Mountains Through Traditional Windows
One of the two main wings of the Museum houses a selection of Wu Chi-Tsung’s most celebrated series - the Cyano-Collages. Much like mountain climbing, it is a labor-intensive process when the artist applies hundreds of layers of cyanotypes on Xuan paper onto a surface and repetitively finishes off with acrylic. Professionally trained in Chinese calligraphy and traditional painting, Wu is also well-informed of the aesthetics that are international and translatable. “I see the Western approach of innovation as shaking off the old (as a burden) to move forward. But the Eastern approach of innovation means carrying the history on your back to move forward.” Basing his studios between Taipei, Berlin and Ho Chi Minh City, Wu’s trails are evidently leading to global destinations. However, if we’d ask to check into the climber’s backpack behind his back, we wouldn’t be surprised to find tools that are traditionally Eastern.
The artist has told me stories when he visited Suzhou’s traditional Chinese gardens at a very young age. These visits are crucial to his artistic development in a somewhat unannounced manner because the garden scenes are nowhere to be found directly in his works. However, the way Wu Chi-Tsung absorbs the aesthetics of Chinese gardens, extrapolating it into an Eastern way of thinking, and re-applying this value to a global vision proves his maturity in understanding cultures and traditions in the most profound way.
Wu Chi-Tsung, Cyano-Collage 124, 2021. Cyanotype photography, Xuan paper, acrylic gel, acrylic, mounted on aluminum board. 35 3/8 x 118 1/8 in. (90 x 300 cm) © Wu Chi-Tsung Studio and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Photo by Jason Wyche.
Art as a Way of Cropping
The good designs in traditional Chinese gardens create an infinite amount of possibilities in subjective viewing: An opening on a wall is only as important as what it captures behind it; a rock never fully reveals itself when observing from a window; and even when it does, it shows different shapes and attitudes from different angles. We are not seeing what the architects designed for us to see. Instead, the architects AIDS us in possibly seeing what we WANTED to see. Unsurprisingly, the mindset of treating subjectivity and objectivity as interchangeable is well-embedded in mounting climbing: After we lose ourselves in the sinuous paths, we might eventually come to an opening, or a peak, enabling us to either briefly summarize what we’ve just done (even though not fully disclosed) or to onlook into the undiscovered directions that are forthcoming.
Wu Chi-Tsung’s Cyano-Colleges are equipped with this Eastern way of looking from within and without. From within these works, he never provides a full scale of a mountain - everything he depicts is part of something. We are unsure of how zoomed-in we are. At the same time, the trails created by white acrylics appear to be very specific and maze-like, but in a grand scheme of things, they are tremendously interchangeable and “constant”. From outside of the works, this exhibition selects a number of shaped-canvas works. They are (and arguably including the ordinarily-shaped canvases) Wu’s Chinese garden windows. They are simultaneously art pieces to be contemplated and also different “crops” of a grander view beneath these windows. The curator Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe is well aware of the “visually interactive” nature of these works/windows, and laid out the shaped-canvases in a viewer-friendly manner both from a traditional museum-goers’ perspective and a Chinese garden-visiting perspective to entice visitors to inspect and imagine beyond the canvases.
Wu Chi-Tsung, Landscape In The Mist 001 (Installation View), 2012. Single-channel video. 9:16 minutes. © Wu Chi-Tsung Studio, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Courtesy Katonah Museum of Art.
Water, Holding Weights
The other main hall of the Museum features a number of video works titled “Still Life” and “Landscape In The Mist”. Wu summarizes these works as an experiment of “using technology to depict the process of traditional Chinese paintings,” but the outcomes are far more meditative and philosophical than the verbal description. Take the large scale video work “Landscape In The Mist 001” as an example, it visually depicts a misty scene with tree branches laid out in perspective against one another. The video plays at a very slow speed, almost unnoticeable unless you decide to stick around for a while. In the case that you do, the branches at the background will gradually emerge, fusing with their frontal counterparts to eventually form a refreshed composition. If you compare the video second by second, it shows almost no progression. But if you compare the initial scene to the final, the difference is drastic.
One would never imagine how this is achieved by simply looking at this dreamy tape: the artist arranges the branches in a large scale water tank. The video is a natural depiction of the reality inside the tank when water is being gradually drained. The video is unedited at all. Water is the key “constant” to this series of works - it does not show itself and is barely noticeable aside from a few drops occasionally finding their way to the front of the camera. But water, as a somewhat hidden “constant”, is actually the defining logic of Wu Chi-Tsung’s video works.
With video shorts taking over the everyday viewing world and movies with faster paces and shorter run times crowned in the professional viewing world, it is clear that ADHD has become as much of an infectious eye problem as a brain problem. With water as a “constant,” Wu Chi-Tsung favors an unpopular way of looking and perceiving in the contemporary era. With everything around us moving at a pace that had never been achieved before, the efficiency of perceiving information comes at a cost: the underlying premises which bear the weights of perceivable information might be overlooked, whether it’s logic, experience, or simply water. Water is like air, it’s omnipresent and vital to our lives, but it is only present when we deliberately conceive of it or when other pressing matters recede. Also similar to air, the quality of water is measured by its transparency and pureness. However, the lesson Wu Chi-Tsung’s video works have taught me is that we can only clearly acknowledge and research the relationship between humans and what holds the weight of us (our surroundings) by making this water a little murky; by dissolving our subjectivity into these pure waters. This is how we stay afloat, with a purpose.
Wu Chi-Tsung, Dust (Installation View), 2006. Video camera, projector, tripod. Dimensions variable. © Wu Chi-Tsung Studio, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Courtesy Katonah Museum of Art.
Dust
If Wu’s video works imply the merits of murkiness in a constant medium, his installation “Dust”, tucked away in its own gallery surrounded by black draperages, highlights these constant imperfections, metaphorically and quite literally. “Dust” is basic in setup, abstract in its presentation, but highly compact conceptually. A live video camera is placed against one side of the wall. It aims at a live projector which is also the only light source in the room, broadcasting what the camera is seeing. Naturally, what is projected onto the screen is one bright dot of light created by the head of the projector. But more importantly, this setup augments and elucidates what constantly floats and flies around the room - dusts.
In this Nam June Paik-esque setup, the classic “camera looking into itself, canceling subjectivity and objectivity” interplay is re-imagined. Instead of finding meaning on both ENDS of the “looker” and “lookee,” Wu Chi-Tsung asks us to zoom into what is IN BETWEEN. Once again, a “constant” is created - the intermediary between an observer and its caster. As long as one looks at another, this void in between is always there and will always be there, except for that this time it is somewhat focused on and highlighted.
From an Eastern interpretation, this work is about Svabhava, a Buddhist term that Wu brought up repetitively during his conversation with me. It stands for the intrinsic nature of all things. Just like us human individuals, each molecule of dust is unique and unpredictable, but when we come together and become a “constant” congregation of “dusts,” our actions seem more predictable and purposeful. Dusts were scattered and unorganized by nature, but as we enter this room, they move and they think because we move and we think.
From a Western tradition, I find this work highly relatable to Heidegger’s definition of “thrownness” when he characterizes the concept of “time” which is perhaps by itself the ultimate intermediary and “constant”. In understanding how “time” is perceived to us, the German philosopher finds a sensation of oneself being inevitably given up and tossed into a status of a void. “Dust” provides this very sensation of “thrownness,” deprived of any indication of apparent passage of time. Moreover, this installation keeps reminding us that it is our subjectivity (walking into the room) that fires up the movements of the dusts, thanks to the curator’s vision to completely separate out this piece in its own void of a lightless room.
Rather than treating “Dust” as a video installation, I find it more appropriate to understand it as a framework, in an a priori sense. Wu’s video works and Cyano-Colleges arguably find their origin in “Dust” which curiously but reasonably dates back in 2006 and was one of the artist’s earliest works. Wu Chi-Tsung’s three main bodies of works on display might seem distinct in presentations, but we will soon find synchronicity, as the title of the show suggests. Amongst Wu Chi-Tsung’s trails that connect an Eastern tradition and the global contemporary, we will see what surrounds us ever so clearly if we learn to look with a blurred vision.
Wu Chi-Tsung: Synchronicity (Installation View). © Wu Chi-Tsung Studio and Courtesy Katonah Museum of Art.
Wu Chi-Tsung at Katonah Museum of Art
“Wu Chi-Tsung: Synchronicity”, curated by Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, will be on view at Katonah Museum of Art until October 1st, 2023. The Museum is located at 134 Jay St, Katonah, New York.