Tang Jo-Hung's pet dog had once been missing. No one knew where it had traveled. The dog remained lost for a while before it found the way back to the artist itself. No one knew where it had been, but no one seemed to deem it important anymore since it was back. The painter was the only person who decided to track its absence. It led him to a world of virtual reality where the painter embarked on a most unbelievable journey through the eyes of Cookey, the dog, while also viewing the dog’s journey with his own eyes at the same time. The two pair of eyes never engaged, enabling the two worlds observed to exist in parallel. In that voyage undertaken in both Cookey and the painter’s hearts, the dog was like a leopard running wild and the painter a skylark flying high (Note1). No one needs to know where he or it has been.
Tang Jo-Hung’s paintings are not made to tell stories. For Tang, small things in his life are magnified and dramatized into scenes of plays in his visual experiences, providing him opportunities to transform and become invisible psychologically. In this personal theater, the painter adopted the perspective of the animal it, the inanimate it, he, or she in his many monologues to experience the places that the Self cannot reach. One example of these places is the canvas. The canvas, a physical presence in Tang’s studio, is the stage, the backdrop, or the prop that facilitate the painter’s creative playwriting. With the painter being both the director and the actor, the show gets started on the canvas, a model that carries the painter’s embedded internal image. “…Somewhere on the wall need a smear of bright white, and here should bear a wide patch of red…” (Note2) The painter may even start his creative process without any structure at all. When Tang faces a canvas, he is also seeing other canvases in his periphery. Looking at the canvases against the walls in the studio, the painter searches for the right place to be for the colors or shapes in his mind. The inspirations he has got from somewhere can always find the right place to be somewhere on a canvas after the painter’s conscious searching.
For Tang, art creation is a process of the symbiosis between the self and the counterpart. It is as if a soul and its double are both looking for a body that it could rest in. The canvas and paints provide the painter the fertile soil to cultivate his artistic seeds in his minds and daily rituals. With his eyes that are sometimes as sharp as those of an eagle and sometimes as innocent as those of a child, the painter watches his painting grow in his hands, allowing him and the self to acquaint amidst the emotional responses and rational judgment. After a magical and eventful journey, voila the spontaneous encounter. If you have a chance to touch his canvas, a fiber board that are smooth on both sides but seem to also have small air breathers, you would know why they can present the elongated lines and vibrating strokes of the painter’s brush to such perfection. The painter can extend, swirl, wrinkle, rub, scrape, and smear the paint on the canvas freely. Whenever he is out for his artistic journeys, these painting skills are his "ge-shi"(Note3) to document his emotions in the time of hunger or satisfaction, and in the time of ecstasy and distress. However, viewers must not interpret the paintings of these journeys as travelogues and rush to sift out the translucent messages. If you cannot imagine a journey with the painter while viewing, you see nothing.
Tang Jo-Hung acquired his M.A. in Arts at Salamanca University in Spain and his B.A. in the Department of Fine Arts at Tunghai University. His experiences in these schools established the foundations of his creative philosophy, which sees creation as a response to life and a search for a way out for life. Everything just fell into place naturally, and painting became his means for the pursuit of excellence and the only way for him to create and exercise the Self. According to Tang, it is not his intention to carry the weight of the history in his works. The formation of his cultural identity and aesthetics feeds on the nutrients provided by both the life experiences in the west and in the east without any intentional selections. However, we can still perceive the eventful and hard-to-digest historical legacy in his paintings. He did not play on the theme of orientalism, but the context of his paintings looks like that in an ink and wash landscape. He did not aim at European glamour, but the readers perceive complicated patterns that remind one of a classical opera. He was not thinking Cubism or Expressionism, but sitting on the table behind Cookey is a landscape that looks similar to one found in a Cubism painting (Note4). His organic strokes and angular structures form the whole perspective of a painting and the Self. He wanted to come back to the humbleness and candidness of a novice. However, his mature skills imbue his fluent strokes with a sense of simplicity and the steady pace with a rush of impulse, and thus give his paintings the power to conquer the eyes of many intellectual viewers.
Tang’s works in 2005 showed that he used the frame of a painting as a window, in which his imagination was spoken in a lineal, one-dimensional pictorial language. In 2008, his paintings started to imply a sense of space that resembles that of a theater stage. Nowadays, Tang’s paintings has rid off the patterns that look like decorations and develop multiple layers of pictorial finesse. It is indeed very interesting to observe the transformation of the spatial experiences in his paintings. The journey of Tang’s in real life also has a subtle connection with his creative journey. However, the lines and landscapes in his paintings are not necessarily the loyal recreation of any place he has been, be it the Dadu Mountain, Salamanca, Oxford, Waishuang River, or Xindian, but the traces of things or experiences in his daily life. “They could be the white tiles in my studio sink, or the textiles of the cheap curtain in my Oxford room” (Note5). The friends who Tang visited yesterday or a passerby he randomly chats with can all become characters in his creative play. Their encounters clashes into new structures and form new relationships in his creations.
Surfing on the internet is also another equaling appealing source of “landscape” outside of the real life. The cyber world opens a window on Tang’s desk, provides him the resources he need to prepare for a new creative process and also another way to undertake his voyages. From the painting to the desktop landscape, from the spades in the Vase of Flowers collection to the suit and mountains; the combination of dog and human, the twin image of a lonely man, tears and rain drops, cities and landscapes, national flags and playing cards, truck drivers and police officers, Mickey mouse and the game of snipers. Words in life and messages on the internet have conversed in the physical life of Tang’s. These conversations reflect the life of the painter and also reflect how he drew from literature, political identity, and pop culture a wider vareity of creative nutrients.
The mirror stage concept proposed by Jacque Lacan (1901-1981) look into the plurality of the self. It suggests that the image reflected in the mirror is not an authentic reflection of our physical being. Rather, the self we see in the mirror is fashioned by many existing cultural or linguistic concepts, and the mirror reflection is also used to form the Self. In many of Tang’s quasi-self-portraits or the defamatory non-self-portraits, the it seems to delineate the plural identities of the painter. The smoking man or the sniper are frequent figures in Tang’s paintings recently. However, these men are not the painter himself, but the testimonial spokesman on which the painter imbues his desire. The images of other men, numbers, and playing cards in the paintings are cultural codes that symbolize rules of the game through which the painter engage with the society. Mirror reflections of such complexity may be exactly the reason why the painter is able to live a normal life of no moral defect.
Other than being a painter, Tang is also a heavy-user of computer and photographer. He jokes that computers and photography are the screensavers of Tang’s works in 2005 showed that he used the frame of a painting as a window, in which his imagination was spoken in a lineal, one-dimensional pictorial language. In 2008, his paintings started to imply a sense of space that resembles that of a theater stage. Nowadays, Tang’s paintings has rid off the patterns that look like decorations and develop multiple layers of pictorial finesse. It is indeed very interesting to observe the transformation of the spatial experiences in his paintings. The journey of Tang’s in real life also has a subtle connection with his creative journey. However, the lines and landscapes in his paintings are not necessarily the loyal recreation of any place he has been, be it the Dadu Mountain, Salamanca, Oxford, Waishuang River, or Xindian, but the traces of things or experiences in his daily life. “They could be the white tiles in my studio sink, or the textiles of the cheap curtain in my Oxford room” (Note5). The friends who Tang visited yesterday or a passerby he randomly chats with can all become characters in his creative play. Their encounters clashes into new structures and form new relationships in his creations.
Surfing on the internet is also another equaling appealing source of “landscape” outside of the real life. The cyber world opens a window on Tang’s desk, provides him the resources he need to prepare for a new creative process and also another way to undertake his voyages. From the painting to the desktop landscape, from the spades in the Vase of Flowers collection to the suit and mountains; the combination of dog and human, the twin image of a lonely man, tears and rain drops, cities and landscapes, national flags and playing cards, truck drivers and police officers, Mickey mouse and the game of snipers. Words in life and messages on the internet have conversed in the physical life of Tang’s. These conversations reflect the life of the painter and also reflect how he drew from literature, political identity, and pop culture a wider vareity of creative nutrients.
The mirror stage concept proposed by Jacque Lacan (1901-1981) look into the plurality of the self. It suggests that the image reflected in the mirror is not an authentic reflection of our physical being. Rather, the self we see in the mirror is fashioned by many existing cultural or linguistic concepts, and the mirror reflection is also used to form the Self. In many of Tang’s quasi-self-portraits or the defamatory non-self-portraits, the it seems to delineate the plural identities of the painter. The smoking man or the sniper are frequent figures in Tang’s paintings recently. However, these men are not the painter himself, but the testimonial spokesman on which the painter imbues his desire. The images of other men, numbers, and playing cards in the paintings are cultural codes that symbolize rules of the game through which the painter engage with the society. Mirror reflections of such complexity may be exactly the reason why the painter is able to live a normal life of no moral defect.
Other than being a painter, Tang is also a heavy-user of computer and photographer. He jokes that computers and photography are the screensavers of
his life. When the screensavers are on, his life enters into a sleep/energy-saving mode, in which he can accumulate and cultivate the “energy” he will need for the next creative process. As a painter, Tang is able to navigate effortlessly in the gigantic historical legacies of painting the art. He also travels back and forth between the virtual and real world without any problem, as if he has some kind of protective device that blocks all the interfering noises that could help him hit the complicated information processing or relationships spot on. As a young artist, the thirty-six-year-old Tang has been complaining that he is increasingly confined to his own room. However, he is also making the most out of the freedom and spontaneity his artistic career has given him. Although the internet may provide information from all over the world, it is only in the studio where Tang can initiate the real journey of endless transformation. When he enters the exclusive world of plurality, he looks at himself and reflects, constructs, plays, entertains himself…to create a theater of the self that he himself can reflect on, and the opportunities for viewers to reflect on themselves.
(Translated by Grace Chih-chieh Huang)
