The Feast of Chun-Te

Show presentation by Lin Chi-Ming

The solo show of Hsieh Chun-Te, organised by MoCA Taipei and curated by Dominique Païni and Lin Chi-Ming, presented as a collateral event of the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, will show the diverse aspects of his creation. As a well-known photographer, starting his career from the end of 60’s, Hsieh is one of most unclassified artists of Taiwan. The restaurant, C’est bon, to which he has contributed his creative ideas and profound knowledge of local culinary tradition, was selected among one of top 100 emerging restaurants in the world (selection in COCO, 2009, Phaidon). Though he is excellent in so many areas, a central artistic thought could still be discerned: Hsieh believes that art should touch something deep inside us, and so his art, in whatever its form, searches to provoke our biological and primal desire.

The photo series “Raw” charged with eroticism started in 1987 and completed in 2011, will be the highlight of the Feast of Chun-Te. The original idea of this series comes from an observation of a specific place on the skirt of Taipei, Sanchong. Sanchong used to be a kind of satellite city of Taipei, where, along with the high-speed development of the metropolis, people emigrated from the country part of Taiwan would quite very often choose as a temporary dwelling place. So we can detect very keenly all kinds of abuse of the environment and a drifting feeling of not-being-at-home. The series is inspired by these observations, but it is not at all a documentary but rather a kind of allegory of our state of being, using principally the form of staged photography.

To enter the deep root of our experiences and to provoke our primal desires and reorganize them, Hsieh disposes another approach, the food art, which makes him so specific and so contemporary.

To tighten the link between the series of photographs and the food art performance, not only the record of the performance will be displayed in many parts of the site, an installation of considerable size would occupy by itself one room of the venue. A water rice field, simulated with ceramic pieces, will be installed in the room and in its center, a very small quantity of real rice seedlings will be planted, which will grow in the period of exhibition and symbolize hope after so many sorrows that we may see in the photographs. The Playful Cruelty of Hsieh Chun-Te

by Dominique Païni

When I first saw Hsieh Chun-Te’s photographs I was struck by the sense of the imminent storm that permeated many of them. It was as if Hsieh was representing a postlapsarian world. Some of the compositions clearly indicate the performance of a violent action condemned by both propriety and the rules of human society. His works almost always contain a form of punishment; a body cast down on a symbolic field of thorns, hanged bodies, bodies abandoned by the indifference of our modern deafness, bodies drawn and quartered, sexually punished bodies, or bodies that seem to be held up to public disgrace. From Giorgione’s The Tempest to the prints of Gustave Doré, the storm is representative of divine wrath.

The artist who dares to portray such scenes of sacrifice is a visionary, haunted by the disquiet arising from the complicity between Eros and Thanatos. Never before had one come across a scene of capital execution culminating in the sexual act. In his work, Chun-Te incorporates the sexual act into a depiction of this terrible ceremony that legally ends lives and one which is observed by a group of grim on-lookers (The Romance on the Stele, Raw series). What audacity, what derision on behalf of the artist to fuse this legalised transgression that consists in coldly taking away human life with that most beautiful of all human actions! It is indeed a ceremony, here, and throughout all of Hsieh Chun-Te’s work. I will elaborate more on this later. In order to describe Hsieh Chun-Te’s works more precisely one would have to view the other images that form an ensemble, like the caprichos that go beyond a single caricature to describe the disasters of the world. The allusion to Goya here is quite deliberate. These large photographic compositions make me think of the famous title that Goya gave to one of his works: The sleep of reason breeds monsters in which black and white, ugliness and beauty, purity and vice clash with each other. Hsieh offers a kind of photographic equivalent to these visions of the decline of a decadent and corrupt humanity, visions traversed by winds which threaten to sweep away the ruins of a post-cataclysmal world.

54th International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia
Collateral Event:

Chun-Te
The Feast
Kuratoren: Dominique Paini, Lin Chi-Ming
Ort: Scoletta dei Battioro e Tiraoro Campo S. Stae 1980, Venezia