Each day, Tang Jo-Hung weaves through numerous streets, stops at many traffic lights, navigates himself through crowds of strangers and cacophony of bustling traffic, and roams around almost half a city before going back to his studio, which is just a few flights of stairs below his home. By not going straight from home to work, he “pretends” to be an office worker. He starts everyday like other city dwellers, living like a real city person. This way of entering his studio through the city seems to be his creative ritual. As a city person, Tang is curious about every corner of the urban space and is comfortable being a part of it. He is at ease everywhere: cafés, cinemas, theaters, convenience stores, or simply on the streets. He is present everywhere, carefully registering the endless contemporary urban plays unfolding in front of his eyes.
An Urban Play without Drama
City dwellers are Tang’s main subjects. Since 2016, his paintings are teemed with all walks of life: connoisseurs, waiters, doctors, pilots, fairies, mages, lecturers, fortune-tellers, and painters. There are also pitchers, night-patrols, foreigners, mid-aged men, gamblers, and many other men and women, looking rushed and distracted. They often wear hats and striped trousers and step out in boots, their discrete facial expressions made ambiguous by a dust and their shapes randomly cut and reconstructed. They—even those who cultivate their spirituality like monks and popes—are authentic city dwellers, and the artist himself is one of them.
His 2018 grand piece, A Salute from A Man Came Back Late – Fallen Madonna, presents an impromptu play set in the streets. Tang’s quick sweeping brushstrokes control the scene, where everything is cloaked in a revolving mist. With the retreat of nature, the two main characters—the man who came back late and the fallen Madonna—become insignificant figures in a wasteland. They are like strangers brushing past each other or uninvited actors in a certain play. In his new works in 2019, The Goddess in Downward-Facing Dog is Looking in the Mirror at Herself and Napoleon Must Win , the “goddess” flexes her limbs exaggeratedly while “Napoleon” appears as an outlandish street boy. The entanglement of human characters and giant symbols form an enigmatic graphic vocabulary, akin to an urban play without drama, pale and clamorous.
The City as a Wasteland
A modern city is full of fragments. The patchy life experiences are reflected in the disorder Tang Jo-Hung depicts. The urban wasteland is perhaps not completely separated from our experiences of the reality, but the artist is compelled to come up with his own vocabularies to convey these fragmentary and complicated experiences, setting a certain order to his depiction of the surroundings so as to expose the essence and vanity of the modern city.
The urban landscape in modern cities produces a strange and peculiar world. Tang indulges in the glare of such urban theatricality, meeting different people in different places and conjuring up different desires and thoughts. He sits casually in cafés and convenience stores and savors life around him. He pauses on the streets and soaks in the urban surroundings, sometimes seeing mid-aged guys just like himself. Tempted by silence and a sense of mystery, he ventures into alleys where little fairies reside. Occasionally, he crosses the city to theaters and cinemas to see the “true shapes” of modern people. This odd world becomes an amalgamation of places frequented by him and endowed with a sense of nostalgia.
Tang has long been fascinated by the bountiful richness of this urban stage, where poetical vocabularies are combined with lights and sounds to create a distilled experience. The transformation brought forth by the artistic language facilitates the translation of multiple texts; characters transcend the confusion of the city and appear in less blurred contours. Immersed in this theatricality, Tang said: “I feel a sense of omnipresence. When you are watching a performance, at that instant you are also spontaneously analyzing, enjoying, and making associations. So many different psychological activities take place within a span of a few dozen minutes.”
At times, it’s difficult to tell apart whether you are living in a city or in a play. In Holding up the Hat While Running in a Stage Play , the main figures are undoubtedly characters from a play. But in Waiter on Roller Skates, A Red Indian Young Man, On a Small Boat – Girl Sailing Against the Wind , and other works, the characters seem to have not shed their theatrical skin. So are the other unobtrusive men and women in his paintings, who may have also simply wandered off the stage.
Creativity as Enigma
For Tang Jo-Hung, the act of creation is always an enigma. In a city, there is information flowing in from all directions and the ambience changes so fast and unpredictably. His paintings reflect such chaos, as the theme always frees itself and the meaning remains in flux. More often than not, it is unclear whether the characters in his paintings are other people or himself, whether the surrounding noises are his or others’ utterances. His creative process is always moving forward in uncertainty.
Even though there are “themes” in artistic creations, most of the times expression is a more pressing concern. Artists use their own artistic vocabularies to respond to the meaninglessness of the outside world. In inching towards the visible and the invisible, they find a way to endow their characters with depth and brilliance. Regarding his artistic vocabulary, Tang believes that it is a kind of language born out of a defect, which perfectly conveys the essence of his creativity. He does not draft or sketch beforehand. Before a work is born, there is nothing. He keeps his mind blank, avoiding being constrained by a particular train of thought in order to embrace the greatest creative possibilities. Each day, as soon as he steps into his studio, he begins to throw things onto his painting. Every round of this throwing game with the drawing board is limited to fifteen minutes. He expects that his very first throw opens a game, and once opened, a game leads to some drama. Otherwise, he would leave his drawing board and go back to the city. Repeating this routine-like clockwork, his creative process never points to a definitive ending. There is always something mysterious as every brushstroke is curious. Driven by such curiosity, he attempts to find a contextual expression to evoke subtle and flitting whims.
In Search of His Own Nostalgia
What are the “shapes” of city dwellers? The city itself looks rather turbid and murky, nothing distinct or comprehensible, much like how one can be blind of oneself. Those long-time city dwellers may have grown used to the fact that nothing can be remembered in this urban space. Tang Jo-Hung goes into a café, a cinema, a theater; he walks on the streets and explores every corner. He also uses the Internet, losing himself in the boundless virtual world. Sometimes he accidentally stumbles into the alley of little fairies. He always seems to be looking for his own nostalgia in the urban landscape.
In the face of a new world of wonders, our common expression seems insufficient and powerless. In fact, every form of nostalgia demands its own set of vocabulary. Once the formula of an acquired language is abandoned, Tang has to search for another set of vocabulary to open up a new context and give shape to his thoughts. By responding to the novelty of the world in this way, he reveals what underlies his nostalgia.
Instead of canvas, Tang chooses masonite that is smooth and firm—better at preserving the traces of the brushstrokes and the layers of the paint. With oil paints repeatedly applied and explored, he creates multi-coated and contorted images in a disordered and gravity-defying space. His paintings are often in an uncertain state, which is the unique tonality of his artistic expression. Permeating the air with an ambiance of gray-ish blue, gray-ish green, jujube red, and ivory black, there is a sense of urban theatricality, rich but also slightly melancholic.
The Shape of City Dwellers
Tang Jo-Hung is already a city person and an urban insider, deeply immersed to look for ways to communicate with the space. He is full of curiosity, always wanting to know what will be there waiting for him at the next bend. His world seems to be operated by absurdity. It is full of bizarre and intriguing people, and their shapes stir his paintbrushes, before they become figures of nostalgia in his paintings, swirling around in a space of anxiety and suspense.
Tang uses his brushes to measure the city he lives in. Each character in his paintings is a fragment of the city, an epitome of the whole. His city presents both reality and illusion, spatially confusing and temporally uncertain. His city dwellers mutate their shapes and look ambiguous, floating mid-air and putting on stage with the artist a series of absurd plays without borders. They are mysterious, esoteric, but at the same time, indescribably poetic. Even nostalgia, difficult to pin down, has its poetry. But what are the shapes of city dwellers really like? This seems to be the eternal subject in Tang’s artistic quest.
