Deconstructing ideologies

Cheng’s early work Colour Chart, which comprises five sets of photographs, accentuates the absurdities inherent in the construction and categorization of images. This series arose from her experience in London, where she collected many examples of Western orientalism—European conceptions of Asian foods and utensils—in local supermarkets. Cheng arranged the objects as if they were commercial displays. Exhibiting her photo­graphs both with and without frames, she purposely distinguished between “perfect framed views” and “unframed scenes in the making,” where process was emphasized through the inclusion of color scales and lopsided backgrounds. All this was intended to help her audience reflect on the “constructed image of Asia.”

Unlike reportage photographers, who seek to repres­­­ent facts directly, Cheng sets out to challenge estab­lished ideas of history through her manipulation of images. Radically modifying our viewing habits, she invites us to think about our relationships with history, memory, and processes of construction. On the one hand, she is inspired by “concept photo­graphy”—which calls factual reportage into question—to consider the non-transparency of imagery and to lay bare the power dynamics and ideologies implicated in the “constructed” nature of photographs. On the other hand, in her recent work she has returned to the relation­ship between photography and reality. However, instead of merely asking her audience to “gaze” on her work as traditional photographers do, she resorts to an immersive approach, combining visual images with “walking and sounds.”

A scene from an exhibition of The Colour Chart at Daegu Art Factory in South Korea, 2019.

Referencing historical memories

Cheng’s new work TAKTH AWAY offers an immersive tour of Lane 60 of Dengshan Street in Kaohsiung City, using mobile phones, audio guides, and in-situ installations to usher the audience into an “everyday theater” she has created. As the tour unfolds, we are joined by the “ghosts” of two Europeans who came to live in Taiwan, and who died and were buried here. In a friendly manner, these 19th-century ghosts tell us about their lives and chat with us as we walk, guiding us to their gravestones and helping us re-experience the past. The area is the former site of Kaohsiung’s foreign cemetery, and the name of Cheng’s work is taken from the inscription on one of the gravestones there, which reads, “The Lord givth the Lord takth away.”

During the tour, we come across many of the docu­ments and old photographs Cheng collected while researching her topic. Installed in the lane, old photo­graphs of local landscapes, commercial labels, and other materials serve to establish connections between the place and the ghosts’ narratives. The physical space is thus “relocalized,” while stereotypical views of the locality are rejected. It is worth mentioning that these old photographs do not lend themselves to Cheng’s erstwhile interest in revealing the fictionality of constructed images. Rather, they bear witness to the “refer­ential­ity” of photography, shedding light on history, the memories of immigrants, and the relations between immigrants and local people. Interestingly, though, it is only with the support of Cheng’s “narratives” that these photographs can perform their referential role.

A scene from TAKTH AWAY, 2021.

Conjuring up specters

However, Cheng’s narratives are not official collective histories on a grand, national scale. Rather, they are intimate stories full of personal feelings and subject­ive imaginings. These revisitings enable us to feel for “others” who have been excluded from the collective memory of the Taiwanese people—that is, the ghosts of immigrants who were here a century ago, who were not born in Taiwan but who nevertheless came here to live, and died here. Cheng thus brings in the issue of identity, something in which she has long been interested. Exactly what does being “Taiwanese” mean? Are “foreigners” who have lived many years in Taiwan not “Taiwanese”? These questions lead us to reconsider the frameworks within which we construct our own identities and to challenge narratives that reinforce monolithic ideas of nationhood.

Cheng’s recent creative projects draw on archival work and field research to open up possibilities of “renarration.” She summons up specters that haunt the margins of historical documents, enabling them to speak again, and using their voices to help her audi­ence interact physically with the street space. This “immersive somaticity” is an experience that differs significantly from Facebook “check-ins,” which are products of the “consumerist gaze.” While walking with these specters, we are able to rethink familiar things in our daily lives. Connecting with gravestones and ghosts in this way helps us resist our national amnesia. Thanks to these alternative narratives, we start to recover those precious memories that are being buried in our culture of consumerism. At the end of the tour, the oral his­tories will have taken root in our memories. Every time their stories are renarrated, the ghosts are called back to life in vivid detail. I was deeply impressed at how, towards the end of the tour, these spirits talked to me in a poetic way, inviting me to ponder the ­interpenetration of place, history, memory, the legacy of immigrants, and myself.

“Fear not. We are not actually ghosts. We exist in your consciousness. We emerge from the country’s collective consciousness to engage in this conversation. If people forget us, we begin to gradually disappear. But we verily exist. We are as real as the ground beneath your feet, or the walls you touch. We are the birdsong that you hear, the unpleasant smell that happens to be wafted to your nose. We live beneath you, above you, and inside you. Like you, we cannot own this land forever. But we, like you, belong here. We are the future you, and you are what we once were.”    

A scene from TAKTH AWAY, 2021.

A Scene from TAKTH AWAY, 2021.

A Scene from TAKTH AWAY, 2021.

A Scene from TAKTH AWAY, 2021.

A Scene from TAKTH AWAY, 2021.

A visitor at TAKTH AWAY. (courtesy of Pier-2 Art Center)

A visitor at TAKTH AWAY, 2021. (photo by Huang Pei Wei)