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On Chen Chieh-Jen's the Bianwen Book

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On Chen Chieh-Jen's the Bianwen Book 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.
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