Darkness in Metamorphosis and Take Me Somewhere Nice

We may begin by recalling Wang’s Metamorphosis, which won the Grand Prize at the 2015 Taipei Arts Awards. In Metamorphosis, we encounter solitary bodies and manmade or natural objects that emerge from dark and unfathomable backgrounds. Wang uses staging, lighting, and the concept of slow photography to construct and arrange her scenes. Her photographs bring into focus the tensions between the isolated objects (such as trees, flowers, sculptures, and human bodies) and the empty, dark backgrounds, communicating a sense of solitude to her viewers.

First sounded in Metamorphosis, this dark note, which is full of strangeness, is struck again in Take Me Somewhere Nice. But in the latter exhibition, darkness is no longer simply confined to the staging of the scenes inside the frames. Rather, it spills into the exhibition space, integ­rated as it is into Wang’s spatial deployment of darkness. Not only has Wang created a dark environment that accommodates her visual works, but she also makes use of projectors to produce glowing images.

Image-sound mirroring

When visitors enter the exhibition’s first gallery, what immediately greets them is a sensation of dimness. They are then exposed to Wang’s ingenious uses of various media and existing furnishings: for example, a bright gap of light projected onto a suspended piece of fine gauze, traditionally printed photographs, superimposed images cast from a projector and a slide projector, family photographs, old newspaper materials, and a video of a triangu­lar wood structure slowly burning by the sea. Going far beyond traditional exhibitions of printed and framed photographs, in Take Me Somewhere Nice Wang sets out to explore the rich possibilities of different media.   

The exhibition’s second gallery plunges us into a quandary, depriving us of visual references. There are only projected blank canvases, which are arranged as if the entire space is an exact replica of the first gallery, but emptied of its visual content. Unlike the first gallery, however, the space here is pervaded by Wang’s de­construc­tion­ist reworking of the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis’s Okho, a piece scored for djembes. We would feel as though we had entered a mirror, but this experience of duplication is imageless and complicated by sound. Breaking away from classical music with its melodic and tonal conventions, Wang, like Xenakis himself, adopts an experimental form of music that jettisons tonality and accentuates sequentiality, randomness, and constant repetition. Finding ourselves in this soundscape within a replicated gallery space where visual frames of reference are forfeited, we have to rely on our bodies to feel the non-directional blankness and the rhythmicity of the sounds.

To sum up, the “image gallery” makes us feel the passage of time and temporal overlapping and instability. The dark space is deployed in a way that enables us to immerse ourselves more deeply in the experience of our inner “time.” On the other hand, the “sound gallery” makes prodigal use of white light and deconstructionist music, allowing us to become conscious—from a detached perspect­ive—of the physical space that hosts the artworks.

Wang Hsiang Lin’s solo exhibition Take Me Somewhere Nice.

Resisting linear, homogenous time 

It is worth noticing that Wang’s images do not display the linear sense of time which governs our daily lives. Although most of her images contain natural objects and landscapes, they differ from run-of-the-mill landscape photographs, which take the external world as their refer­ent. Wang’s images are ambiguous, vague, abstract, and even delocalized, as if they were drifting in a remote corner inside our memories.

In other words, Wang chooses to reference the in­stabil­ity of people’s memories; therefore the exact loca­tions of her landscapes do not matter. Furthermore, not all of the exhibited landscapes are captured by her. Employing the cinematic technique of “found footage,” Wang actually obtained some of her images from flea markets.

Wang Hsiang Lin’s solo exhibition Take Me Somewhere Nice.

The instability of inner memory

Through overlaying, intersecting, and hybridizing photographs taken by herself and images she has acquired from other sources, Wang shares with her viewers an unstable process of remembrance. If, as Roland Barthes said, conventional photography references something that “has been”—“ça a été”—then Wang has opened up temporal fissures and reconstructed an extraordinary vision of time through ambiguous and elusive images.

Photographer Lee Yehlin’s work also draws on darkness, imagery, sound, and interiority, but he adopts a more localized approach to catch that sense of chaos which Taiwan conveys to him. Through images captured on the streets and through special editorial intervention, Lee forges a synesthesia that evokes dark, mercurial sounds. Wang Hsiang Lin, on the other hand, uses spatial deployment to present an indefinable status; through abstract and even invisible images, she actively reawakens those fragments of memory that we lose sight of in our daily lives.

Take Me Somewhere Nice foregrounds a dialectic between “gloomy darkness” and “projected light.” Here darkness—no longer merely an element of the formal structure of the images per se—becomes a funda­mental condition for the hosting of the visual works. This is intriguing because the very condition that makes projected light (images) possible is precisely a dark space. Groping in the dark, we enter the fissures of linear, homogenous time and start to imagine an alternative, unsteady and beyond-the-routine vision of time. From there, we may explore the possibility of perceiving reality in a new way.