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作品 (中文)
[Work: BamBoo-60]
Collected in The Public Solitude – Dear Gu (2022.05.26–2023.05.25)
ISBN：9789572876824
Recently, the artist CHENG, I-Chun from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts held a solo exhibition at Yáo in Taichung. One of the installation works utilizes dozens of bamboo stalks, each cut to remove the central sections between nodes, leaving behind hundreds of individual nodes. These nodes are then reassembled and adhered sequentially into two elongated bamboo poles composed solely of nodes, which are installed horizontally, spanning across the exhibition space.
In another room, two sets of headphones and heart rate sensors are mounted on white wooden boxes on opposite walls. Viewers are invited to wear the sensing devices and listen, through the headphones, to an auditory composition that translates their own heart rate data in relation to recorded sounds of the hollow interiors of bamboo. What is heard is a combination of pitch generated from heart rate values alongside recordings of the bamboo’s inner cavities.
With only the nodes remaining, the hollow intervals between them—now absent—are perceptually filled through an auditory “mixing.” This produces a sense of compression and constriction in both visual and auditory experience. This sensation appears to arise not from external imposition, but from an internally generated pressure. The bamboo nodes, severed from the temporal process of growth, are presented horizontally in a manner that suggests temporal extension, yet paradoxically intensify a sense of temporal rupture and an inability to extend—resulting in a feeling of suffocation.
This compression of bamboo’s hollow interior into a structure of only nodes evokes associations with contemporary neoliberal conditions of self-management. Such conditions often operate through cumulative achievement, producing a sense of competing with oneself and generating self-imposed pressure. Time is continually accelerated and compressed in the pursuit of optimization and performance—even activities such as accumulating points in video games become part of this self-upgrading logic.
A key distinction between this contemporary achievement-oriented society and earlier disciplinary societies lies in the source of pressure. In the latter, pressure originates from an external authority; it is the gaze of the master that produces alienation. In contrast, within the former, this authority has been internalized. Through the accumulation of performance—ultimately still oriented toward an abstract external authority—individuals become agents who actively reproduce their own conditions of alienation.
Formally, the work may initially appear to be an exploration confined to the internal concerns of minimalism, without reference to anything beyond art itself. However, the opposite may be the case. It is precisely through a sustained engagement with the ontology of artistic form, pursued to the point of exhaustion, that the work is able to cross the boundaries of art and begin to refer to that which art is not, or what art might become.
As artistic form extends beyond its own limits to point toward an exterior, one might further ask: is it possible for an artwork to be inherently political, while containing no explicit political content?