Liang Shang-Huei From Artwork to Art Documentation and Back Again: On Chen Chieh-jen’s The Bianwen Book I 1

Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen he Bianwen Book I, one of Chen Chieh-jen’s most recent projects Book I, installation view at the 2014 Shanghai Biennale. and his most complex and multifaceted project to date, is Courtesy of the artist. envisioned by the artist as a “three-dimensional spatial book” that T 2 the audience can walk through. The work is dated 2002 to 2014, covering the same time span as the development of Chen Chieh-jen’s idiosyncratic mode of video production, one with affinities to grassroots organizing.3 The first complete iteration of The Bianwen Book I was presented at the 10th Shanghai Biennale in 2014, when it was titled Transformation Text (Book of Bianwen). Late in 2015, TheCube Project Space in Taipei brought the work home to Taipei where the artist lives and works, and organized a solo exhibition entitled The Bianwen Book, Images, Productions, Action and Documents of Chen Chieh-jen. In mid-2016, another iteration of The Bianwen Book I, similar to its first presentation at the Shanghai Biennale, was shown at the 20th Biennale of Sydney. This essay owes much to Chen Chieh-jen’s timely solo exhibition The Bianwen Book I, held at Lin & Lin Gallery in Taipei, to which I paid several visits in January 2017. As malleable as this project has proven to be in its many iterations to date, overall, The Bianwen Book I gathers the artist’s writings over the years, photographic stills from his video works, records of production processes, documentation of site-specific screening events, found objects, and most of the time also incorporates projection installations that vary according to each exhibition venue. In examining the evolution of The Bianwen Book I, I intend to address questions about art documentation and archiving that are

Vol. 16 No. 3 37 38 Vol. 16 No. 3 The Bianwen Book: Images, particularly germane within current discourses of art history, theory, and Productions, Action, and 4 Documents of Chen Chieh-jen, practice. installatioin view at TheCube Project Space, Taipei, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. The Task of the Artist as Translator It would be helpful first of all to examine the term bianwen, since it continues to be present in the artwork and exhibition titles. Bianwen, the vernacular written Buddhist Sutra, is often considered together with the term sujiang, which refers to the oral interpretation of Buddhist scripture performed by a group of monks. While bianwen and sujiang can be literally translated as transformation text and vernacular talk, Chen Chieh-jen, acting as an artist rather than as an etymologist, interprets those two terms in his own way and redefines them.5 Bianwen and sujiang thereby take on new significance. In the artist’s understanding, or one might call it a purposeful misinterpretation, the sujiang monk’s role is not simply that of translator or interpreter, but, most importantly, cultural transformer. Chen Chieh-jen draws an analogy between contemporary performance artists and sujiang monks, who used to tell Buddhist stories through a particular

Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen way of performing that might be understood as story-singing. According Book I, installation view at to Chen Chieh-jen, in the course of re-telling/singing, sujiang monks are the 2016 Sydney Biennale. Courtesy of the artist. actually “constructing a discursive field” that is non-normative, and they are “promoters of open-ended stories and indefinite narrative forms.”6 With this task in mind, Chen Chieh-jen has long regarded himself as a contemporary sujiang monk.

The task of the sujiang monk is actually akin to what Walter Benjamin aptly describes in “The Task of the Translator” (1921):

The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect (Intention) upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original. . . . Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the centre of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at the single spot where the echo is able to be given, in its own Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book I, installation view at Lin language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.7 & Lin Gallery, Taipei, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Echo and reverberation, two significant words that Benjamin uses to describe the aim of translation are closely associated with Chen Chieh- jen’s idea of re-performing histories—witness the title of his first video piece, Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002), or his recent video work, Realm of Reverberation (2014). In both works, one departing from an early-twentieth-century photograph of Chinese torture and the other from the much more current event of the Losheng sanatorium’s preservation movement—both involving an extensive use of archival materials—the artist encourages the audience to put their own interpretation and assign meanings to the artworks. In the same manner, Chen Chieh-jen’s references to bianwen texts and sujiang monks, I believe, are meant to emphasize an openness of interpretation, as well as how stories and histories can be carried over and transformed through time and space.

Vol. 16 No. 3 39 Chen Chieh-jen, Lingchi— Echoes of a Historical Photograph, installation view at the 2002 Taipei Biennial. Photo: Dubby Tu. Courtesy of the artist.

In The Bianwen Book I, Chen Chieh-jen also pays a special attention to a form of performance called hesheng, which can be traced to the Tang dynasty. Hesheng combines opera, storytelling, chanting, and dancing, but its exact form is still a mystery to scholars today. However, precisely because of its ambiguity, the term hesheng opens up questions and invites interpretations. Chen Chieh-jen not only understands hesheng by its literal meaning as “coming together” and “continual happening” but pushes forward his interpretation from today’s vantage point, as he writes:

If we imagine a little further and place hesheng in our contemporary context of biopolitical neoliberalism, then it could be an [idea] of multiple dialectics and heterogeneous assembly. This is similar to Laozi’s concept of one, which is not the same one as we see in mathematics, but, rather, means the sustained production of multiple dialectics from the one moment a dialectic starts. A simplified and commonly understood notion of dialectic can perhaps definitively be the meaning to which hesheng refers regardless of its performance format. The term hesheng still has the power to inspire. It is a word difficult to define and continually produces new dialectics.8

In re-formulating hesheng Chen Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book I—A Genealogy of My Chieh-jen is in the process of Cultural References, 2002–14. Courtesy of the artist. developing a working prototype of multiple dialectics that later emerges as A Diagram of Multiple Dialectics (2015). Appropriating the symbol of yin and yang in Chinese philosophy, Chen Chieh-jen creates an image that is “neither yin nor yang” but suggests what he terms “naïve, idealistic, and materialistic dialectics.”9 Once again Chen Chieh-jen is articulating the potentialities of a form of thinking, one which has been embedded in Chinese thought for centuries and which the Western language in both artistic practice and discourse has replaced.10 Within the heterogeneity of temporal and spatial elements, A Diagram of

40 Vol. 16 No. 3 Multiple Dialectics appears coeval with the sociocultural possibility for a previously unthinkable experience of a democracy of diversity, as well as the art historical potentiality of mediation between art and nature, idea and materiality.

Chen Chieh-jen, A Diagram of Along with bianwen and sujiang Multiple Dialectics. Courtesy of the artist. The diagram monks as well as hesheng, ten more is based on the taijitu (yin- yang symbol) taken from the cultural references are covered in founder of Neo-Confucian philosophy Zhou Dunyi’s “History of the Production of Folk (1017–1073) book Taiji Tushuo, (Explanations of the Diagram Culture”—one of six chapters that of the Supreme Ultimate), which blends concepts from structure the three-dimensional Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Chen Chieh- spatial book at the Shanghai jen appropriated the taijitu, overlapping the separate Biennale. For the first time via sections representing yin and yang to create an image that is a concept map, Chen Chieh-jen neither yin nor yang but rather showcases his ruminations on those implies naive, idealistic, and materialist dialectics. These cultural references, which have three dialectics invoke and contrast one another to form a continued to inspire and motivate multiple dialectic. him to make art. Later renamed “The Bianwen Book I: A Genealogy of My Cultural References” and included in the printed catalogue presented in the solo exhibitions at the TheCube Project Space and Lin & Lin Gallery, this single chapter enables the audience to grasp the complex cosmology that has allowed the artist for more than a decade to intertwine and overlap folkloric traditions with a sociopolitical history of resistance. By providing the audience with these cultural references upon which he has continued to reflect and interpret, Chen Chieh-jen insists that the work or exhibition itself, like those cultural terms with indefinite meanings, can trigger the audience’s imagination to go beyond the artist’s intention.

Exhibition in Action The Bianwen Book I strongly suggests the idea of an archive—the repository or collection of documents, records, objects, and materials, oftentimes retroactive and stable—that is waiting to be activated. Indeed, the multimedia admixture of The Bianwen Book I draws upon the form of art documentation. Art critic Boris Groys has keenly observed in contemporary art, particularly in recent decades, a shift of interest away from the artwork and toward art documentation. As he points out, art documentation can “take the form of paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, texts, and installations—that is to say, all the same forms and media in which art is usually presented—but in the case of art documentation these media do not

Vol. 16 No. 3 41 present art but merely document it.”11 In what ways can documentation- based exhibitions go beyond merely archiving and foster inspiration? How do exhibitions not only trace the creative process of the artist but also become part of that process itself? People Pushing (2007–08), one of the audiovisual installations included in the exhibition of The Bianwen Book I, is an interesting example since it brings to the fore that the exhibition is not just the documentation or end result of artistic practice but is itself part of that creative process.

The 5-minute-and-19-second-long video People Pushing, though presented Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book I—People Pushing, as an independent artwork, is actually a segment taken from the original 2007–08, installation view at Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei, 2016. 61-minute-and-43-second-long video Military Court and Prison (2007–08). Courtesy of the artist. To make a projection installation to be accommodated in the exhibition gallery, Chen Chieh-jen constructed a black, box-like booth made of sheet metal, which is a common material in the artist’s home country for building temporary houses, factories, and illegal rooftop structures. When the audience enters the black box, all that is seen are the backs of anonymous people’s heads and shoulders, and all that is heard is a low-frequency sound of crunching steel. The protagonists in the film endlessly push the sheet- metal wall back and forth, forming a kind of contemporary Sisyphean struggle. After the four-month exhibition at the Shanghai Biennale, the artist took a photograph demonstrating a 1.6-centimeter displacement of the sheet-metal structure. According to Chen Chieh-jen, the installation’s movement results mainly from the continuous vibration generated by the low-frequency audio humming throughout the course of the exhibition. Moving at an imperceptible speed, the installation’s displacement nevertheless powerfully demonstrates that the artwork itself is in action. One can argue further that the audience’s constant entering and exiting also contribute to the installation’s movement, therefore granting a participatory aspect to the work. While the audience encountered a tape measure on

42 Vol. 16 No. 3 Chen Chieh-jen, People Pushing, 2007–08, 35 mm film transferred to video. Courtesy of the artist.

Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book I—People Pushing, installation view at the 2014 Shanghai Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.

the floor at the various presentations of People Pushing, the overall bodily experiences beyond pure vision transformed audiences into participants in activating the artwork.

Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Although an archive is often Book I—People Pushing, installation view at Lin & Lin conceived as an inert repository and Gallery, Taipei, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. an exhibition room a temporary show vitrine, for Chen Chieh-jen, they can also be transformed into creative laboratories, not only tracing and documenting an artist’s work and practice but also inspiring the audience in the process. As Groys rightly asserts, in contrast with presenting art as “the end result of life,” art documentation “marks the attempt to use artistic media within art spaces to refer to life itself, that is, to a pure activity, to pure practice, to an artistic life, as it were, without wishing to present it directly.”12 When the artist’s working processes are made accessible to a wider audience through art documentation, it is those archival materials that provide the audience with special insight into the artist’s practice and thought processes—an artistic life in a broader sense.

The Afterlife of Documentation The Bianwen Book I is literally reified in the form of a book, as the exhibitions at TheCube Project Space and Lin & Lin Gallery both presented a printed book on view. I venture to consider the book as an artist’s book, itself no less interesting than the three-dimensional spatial book of the

Vol. 16 No. 3 43 exhibition, since in it there are assemblages of images and texts made by Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book I, printed book on view at the artist himself, according to his own way of thinking. In other words, TheCube Project Space, Taipei, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. the artist has demonstrated a high degree of control in which the book is intended not only as documentation but as a work of art in itself.

In spite of this, the question of art documentation remains unresolved. While most of Chen Chieh-jen’s video works are intended to be installations of direct experience, admittedly, they are often mediated through their documentation in photography. If installation art requires the presence of a viewer, what does it mean when the majority of viewers see it only as photographs? As Monica E. McTighe has noted, “the history of ephemeral art objects and events, such as installation art, is filtered through the memories of the people who saw them first hand. These memories are often solidified or distorted by the documentation that is published alongside the work. Photographs mediate memory; history is a representation often constructed from these bits of evidence.”13 While installation art often overlaps in the practice of traditional archiving and collecting, contemporary artists have increasingly adopted the form of the archive and documentation, not in order to reconstruct a historical truth, but to question the nature of memory and history. Notable examples include Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (since the mid–1960s), Thomas Demand’s Archive (1995), and The Atlas Group’s We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask (2005), among many others.14 As Hal Foster argues in his 2004 article, “An Archival Impulse,” those works are part of an archival disposition that he believes is connected to a growth of interest in the issues of history and memory in contemporary art practice.15

With regard to the afterlife of documentation, the exhibition at TheCube Project Space is significant as it gathers the work Realm of Reverberations

44 Vol. 16 No. 3 The Bianwen Book: Images, Productions, Action, and Documents of Chen Chieh-jen, installatioin view at TheCube Project Space, Taipei, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

together with photographic stills, artifacts found on site, maps, and graphs related to the work’s site-specific screening event. On January 18, 2015, a year after the completion of Realm of Reverberations, a screening event entitled “Realm of Reverberations Returns to Losheng” took place on the Losheng sanatorium’s hilltop. As the layout of the video installation and the photographic documentation demonstrate, the whole process of the screening was ritually organized. The participants first followed the lead of a converted pick-up truck that served as a mobile screening platform showing part of Realm of Reverberations on an uphill path to the screening site near a columbarium. In Tree Planters, one of four films that comprise Realm of Reverberations, the protagonist Chou Fu-Tzu travels the same path at Losheng in her wheelchair, passing by the eight hundred trees that have been thoughtfully planted by her fellow residents but now no longer exist. Mrs. Chou then sings on the hilltop overlooking the cityscape and two enormous holes, one being the remains of Losheng sanatorium, the other the construction site of the Metro depot. Her song tells of the poor and the powerless before she trails off into indistinct words and humming. As for the screening event, Chen Chieh-jen also invited Mrs. Chou to give a few words and sing the song. Her lyrical accounts at the screening resonated with those that had been recorded in the film, continuing to reverberate over time and resisting the force of annihilation.

The screening event lasted about two hours, and it culminated in a ritualized journey from the city border to the city centre. Most participants, including the artist, voluntarily followed the lead of the truck traveling to the remains of old Taipei prison—the locale of the film Tracing Forward, which was on view along the journey. This unusual practice reminds me not only of Chen Chieh-jen’s early street actions in the 1980s, with his interventions into public spaces, but also of a culture-specific ritual called lo-deh sao. Taking in lo-deh sao as one of his cultural references, Chen Chieh-jen also offers the historical background and his own interpretation of the term in the following paragraph, which is worth citing at full length:

Vol. 16 No. 3 45 Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of Reverberations projected at Losheng Sanatorium, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of Reverberations projected at Losheng Sanatorium, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Historical Background

In pre-industrial times, Minnan farmers living in the Taiwan-Fujian region would sweep clean a spot in the village, perhaps under a tree, and perform simple operas during the non-growing season. This form of cultural production organized for villagers’ amusement was called lo-deh sao, meaning “to sweep the ground.” Along with the development of temple festivals, where statues and life-sized puppets of deities were paraded through villages, lo-deh sao became traveling performances featuring walking, performing and singing. Villagers often joined these traveling performances.

Contemporary Interpretation

In our increasingly atomized and alienated capitalist society, I believe lo-deh sao still has the power to inspire. In addition to being farmers, those performers took on the different identities of mythical figures or other characters they portrayed. Not only were farmers creating art during these performances, but, more importantly, they were afforded an opportunity to transcend their identities; or it could be said

46 Vol. 16 No. 3 that the multiple identities of farmer, performer (artist) and mythical figure converged in one individual. Furthermore, the performance spot became a mobile site of intersecting times and places. In [Chinese] history of peasant uprisings, these performances were often used to rally the masses for revolution.16

The ritual of film screening, especially the traveling screening that hits the streets, looks back to the form of lo-deh sao. They share the spirit of action as in performance. For Chen Chieh-jen, each screening prompts a temporary gathering with the audience about how to perform an action to continue creating sites of dialogue. Throughout his career, Chen Chieh- jen has always seen film making and screening as actions that can bring together the marginal and the other, as means of breaking through existing barriers between professionals and amateurs, and as experiments in forming heterogeneous communities.

Photographer unknown, film screening held by Bitai Thoan, c. 1926–27. Courtesy of Lin Chang-feng.

Another culture-specific idea related to Chen Chieh-jen’s concept of film screening as action has to do with a traveling team of projectionists and silent film narrators known as Bitai Thoan. Specifically, in The Bianwen Book I, Chen Chieh-jen borrows Bitai Thoan’s cultural practice to demonstrate strategies for anti-imperialist and anti-colonial cultural activism. The historical background of Bitai Thoan can be traced to the time when Taiwan was under Japanese rule (1895–1945). The Taiwanese Cultural Association first founded the team in 1926 in order to promote education for the masses by means of cinematic language, particularly for workers and farmers who could not read.17 At the time when it was common for Japanese police officers to monitor film screening events run by Bitai Thoan, the film narrator, known as benshi, according to Chen Chieh-jen, “would use Taiwanese dialect, slang or sayings that only the local audience understood to create anti-colonial meaning in films where it never existed before. The audience would laugh, applaud, cheer, and gesture when they heard these deliberately twisted interpretations.”18 As a result, the space of screening could be transformed into a site gathering images, dialogues, and cultural actions.

Vol. 16 No. 3 47 The interaction between the film narrator and the mass audience, in Chen Chieh-jen’s interpretation, resembles closely “a dialogic performance” that relies on images and at the same time goes beyond images.19 Having been influenced by the film narrator’s verbal interpretations, audiences may have very different versions of particular films in mind and later retell various versions of the stories they contain according to their own understandings. Chen Chieh-jen has characterized the subversive power of verbal interpretations and the kind of audio-visual impressions or reverberations left in the audience’s mind as “non-material film”—a concept he attempts to insinuate into many of his films as well.20 Although the live narrations provided by the film narrator may be distorted and even ideological in nature, given their great potential for instigating mass riots or group conflicts, Chen Chieh-jen puts more emphasis on the active role the film narrator and the audience have performed. For Chen Chieh-jen, both of them are charged with “subjective agency” to enable one to “re-translate, re-imagine, and re-narrate” a story again and again based on their own understanding of a film.21

The idea of dialogic Chen Chieh-jen, Dysfunction No. 3, 1983, installation view at performance proves Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. to be useful when one attempts to grasp the afterlife of performance, namely through the documentation or representation of live performance. The exhibition at Lin & Lin Gallery features the rarely seen footage of Chen Chieh-Jen’s early performance piece titled Dysfunction No. 3, which is a guerilla-style art action that took place at Taipei’s main movie theatre district on October 20, 1983, when Taiwan was under martial law. As the newly restored footage unfolds, the five performers are dressed in white prisoner-like clothes, put on red execution hoods, and cover their eyes with black ribbons. They walk in single file for about five minutes before shouting, and then abruptly end their performance with a desperate cry, falling down one by one, prostrating themselves on the ground as if suffering from mental and physical torture. Rendering a strictly monitored street temporarily dysfunctional, this street action has been commonly interpreted as a form of resistance to the state’s legal control, which greatly affected the autonomy of the body. What is truly unusual and demands attention is Chen Chieh-jen’s recall of a profound sense of loss he felt when watching the documentation of Dysfunction No. 3:

Several days later [after the performance], the 8mm film documenting the event came back from the photo-lab. Naturally when I watched it I could only see the external manifestations of our action and the crowd, but not my inner transformation.22

48 Vol. 16 No. 3 Even though Chen Chieh-jen continues to say that it would take him another nineteen years before he has a real chance to explore inner experiences through filmmaking, his early doubt about the form of documentary has since actuated all his artistic career, and this doubt indeed points to the concern with the documentation of artistic practice within performance studies.23

The continuous process of retelling and reinterpreting—the dialogic performance as Chen Chieh-jen understands it—is critical as it strives to counter historical erasures as well as the evidentiary function and the authority of documentation. Most importantly, every time when one diverges from the preceding point of interpretation, something new, something more, that is, transformation, is made possible. In this process of transformation, there is continuity and change. As Mechtild Widrich accurately points out in her discussion of re-enactment and re-performance, when watching a re-enactment or ourselves re-performing, we actually “refer back in time and simultaneously forward. . . . [We] construct an imaginary performance the markers of which (inferred original, documents, narration, new event) meld with our own being in time and that which we want to convey to the future.”24 Much like the task of translation, the ultimate essence of retelling and reinterpretation of artistic practice, achieved interestingly and paradoxically to a great extent through art documentation in The Bianwen Book I’s case, does not lie in striving for a likeness to the original. As Benjamin writes in his essay, “in its afterlife”—be it a text, a photograph, a film, an artwork, or a screening event—“the original undergoes a change.”25

Notes

1. Parts of this article are taken from my master’s thesis, submitted to the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am grateful to Nora Annesley Taylor, Jennifer Dorothy Lee, and Mechtild Widrich for their support and advice. 2. Social Factory: 10th Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai: Power Station of Art, 2014), 78. 3. From 2002 to 2014 Chen Chieh-jen produced eleven video works, including Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002), Factory (2003), Bade Area (2005), On Going (2006), The Route (2006), Military Court and Prison (2007–08), Empire’s Borders I (2008–09), Empire’s Border II—Western Enterprises, Inc. (2010), Happiness Building (2012), Friend Watan (2013), and Realm of Reverberations (2014). Wind Songs (2015) is the most recent video work, which developed from the screening ceremony of Realm of Reverberations. 4. It is not a coincidence that the 2016 Taipei Biennial, titled Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future, in which Chen Chieh-jen also participated, is themed with archival motifs. As the exhibition aims to involve “performing the archives” and “performing the retrospective,” it reveals nothing other than the active engagement of contemporary artists, critics, and curators with the transformation of the archive from a repository of documents to art medium. Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future: Taipei Biennial 2016 (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2016), 8. 5. The exhibition catalogue of the 10th Shanghai Biennale provides a comprehensive historical account of bianwen and sujiang: “Literary historians usually divide the history of Chinese narrative novel into four stages: first, records of the strange (zhiguai [志怪]) and of men (zhiren [志人]) during Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern dynasties (220–589); second, Tang dynasty (618–907) stories of the marvelous (chuanqi [傳奇]); third, vernacular stories (huaben [話本]) from Song dynasty (960– 1279); and, fourth, novels in chapters (zhanghui [章回]) from Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. The Tang dynasty was key to the emergence of huaben vernacular stories: at the time, classical Chinese prose (wenyan [文言]) was popular among the literati class, and in reaction, a new vernacular style—transformation text (bianwen [變文])—took hold among the populace. Bianwen was created to spread Buddhist teachings to the layman. Monks preached Buddhist stories using narration and song, in a way simple enough for ordinary people to understand. These popular lectures (sujiang [俗講]) in writing were called bianwen. The form became immensely popular and gradually shed its Buddhist tones, transforming into vernacular art forms—folk literature, opera, and story-singing (shuochang [說唱])—that reflect Chinese social realities. Yet, bianwen only became known in China in 1907, when English scholar Aurel Stein, French Sinologist

Vol. 16 No. 3 49 Paul Pelliot, and others illegally bought Buddhist manuscripts and documents found by Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu hidden in the Sutra Cave at the Dunhuang Grottoes. This discovery gave literary historians a better understanding of why huaben novellas became popular during Song, and the origins of numerous singing and storytelling forms.” Social Factory, 78. 6. Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book: Images, Production, Action, and Documents of Chen Chieh-jen (Taipei: TheCube Project Space, 2015), 12. 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 76. 8. Chen Cheih-jen, The Bianwen Book: Images, Production, Action, and Documents of Chen Chieh-jen, 19. 9. Ibid., 1. 10. The criticism of Chen Chieh-jen’s pandering to exoticism is, nonetheless, an issue worth addressing here. Originally exoticism, akin to Orientalism, was a criticism of the West’s generalization of its cultural other. However, as Chen Chieh-jen points out, more recently exoticism “has become a means of self censure for non-Western regions altogether.” Such self-censure prevents one from freely reinterpreting one’s own cultural tradition. The questions Chen Chieh-jen then poses are significant: “When Western artists use their own cultural traditions or the cultural traditions of the other, do they encounter this same problem?” “If exoticism includes elements of one’s own traditional culture, then why does tradition become exotic?” After all, Chen Chieh-jen is thinking about “how to find another kind of language” but not to pander to the West. As he continues to say, “Perhaps this language is mixed in the many impressions we have accumulated in the past … perhaps this is our chance to exercise our right to self-interpretation.” Amy Huei-hua Cheng, “Tenacious and Full of Imagination—A Conversation with Chen Chieh-jen,” in Artist Navigators: Selected Writings on Contemporary Taiwanese Artists, ed. Shu-ling Chen (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2007), 86. 11. Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,” trans. Steven Lindberg, in Documenta 11, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 108. 12. Ibid. 13. Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art (New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 2. 14. For more case studies and discussions of the use of the archive in contemporary art, see, for example, Okwui Enwezor, ed., Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: International Center of Photography, 2008); Jane Connarty and Josephine Lanyon, eds., Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video (Bristol: Picture This Moving Image, 2006); Simone Osthoff, Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium (New York, Dresden: Atropos Press, 2009); Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen, eds., Deep Storage (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1998); and Elisabeth Madlener and Elke Krasny, eds., Archiv X: Investigations of Contemporary Art (Linz: Centrum für Gegenwartskunst Oberösterreich, 1998). 15. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Autumn, 2004), 3–22. See also chapter 2, “Archival,” in Foster’s recent book, Bad New Days: Art Criticism, Emergency (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 31–60. 16. Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book: Images, Production, Action, and Documents of Chen Chieh-jen, 12–13. 17. The Taiwanese Cultural Association was founded in 1921 by the Taiwanese intellectual and doctor Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水1891–1931), who was one of the most important figures active in the resistance movement against Japanese occupation. Chen Chieh-jen also has an extensive discussion about the documentary of Chiang Wei-shui’s funeral, which he takes as a quintessential example of self-organized cultural action. See Chen Chieh-jen, “The Documentary of The Mass Funeral of Wei-shui Chiang: Some Thoughts on the Dissent Images Movement ‘From Confrontation Strategy to the Further Qualitative Change,’” Art Critique of Taiwan, no. 63 (July, 2015), 132–59. 18. Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book: Images, Production, Action, and Documents of Chen Chieh-jen, 13. 19. Ibid. 20. Tseng Chih-yun, “On Site-Multitute: Chen Chieh-jen on Realm of Reverberations,” trans. Au Sow- yee, Taiwan Docs Promotion Center News (April 20, 2016), http://docs.tfi.org.tw/news/22/. 21. Chen Chieh-jen, The Bianwen Book: Images, Production, Action, and Documents of Chen Chieh-jen, 13. 22. Interview with Chen Chieh-jen on Dysfunction No. 3, included in the exhibition pamphlet at Lin & Lin Gallery; text also accessible at https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/32719/. 23. The bibliography for performance in relation to the demand for documenting and archiving its practice on behalf of performance research can be exhaustive. See, for example, Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal, vol. 56, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 11–18; Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 28, no. 3 (September, 2006): 1–10; Barbara Clausen et al., After the Act: The Representation of Performance Art (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2007); and Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield eds., Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol; Chicago: Intellect, 2012). 24. Mechtild Widrich, “Is the ‘Re’ in Re-enactment the ‘Re’ in Re-performance?” in Performing the Sentence: Research and Teaching in Performative Fine Arts, eds. Carola Dertnig and Felicitas Thun- Hohenstein (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 145–46. 25. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 73.

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