A fascinating unfurling
Visitors to the festival pass through an outdoor installation before entering the indoor portion of the exhibition. Curator Eric Chen drew on the idea of city streets and made use of the park’s old railway tracks and factory space to create his Urban Archipelago, ten floating “islands” arranged in a way that recalls temple processions and parades. With folksy names such as “Generals’ Island,” “Heavenly Empress Island,” and “Holy Child Island,” the islands display works by folk artist Hung Tung and photographers Chang Chao-tang and Lin Bo-liang, as well as photographs from the collection of the Tainan Museum of Fine Arts that document temple rituals and god processions from long ago.
The traditional and contemporary works exhibited indoors are equally fascinating. Visitors first see a mural that painter Chen Chiu-shan created for the Tsu-chi Temple at the time of its restoration. Another area displays sketches, letters and other works that show how Chen, a passionate social critic, breaks with traditional practice by incorporating present-day political figures and events into temple paintings that more commonly take historical scenes as their subjects.
Another gallery displays paintings of temple door gods done on paper by Liao Qing-zhang.
Liao, who studied temple painting with Tainan masters Ding Qingshi and Chen Bingshen, generally takes people as his subjects, and has depicted Confucius expounding his philosophy and classic ghost stories in his work. He began committing temple paintings to paper after being awed by the human figures in the murals he saw while visiting Shanxi Province’s Yongle Temple, slowly developing his drawing skills and use of color.
Temple paintings are usually impossible to exhibit because of their large size, the challenges of dismantling them, and the difficulty of conserving them. Using paper as a medium for the style resolves all of these issues.
The festival’s Co-opposite Atelier gallery exhibits pieces in which artists have applied contemporary approaches to the depiction of folk-religious arts and performances. Gong explains that the curators used a technique often applied to temple construction in assembling the atelier. Temples often have two different crews work simultaneously, not only to shorten the time to completion, but also to get the crews’ competitive juices flowing and keep them on their toes.
The atelier aimed to promote contemporary art and ignite the fires of creativity in a similar fashion. When the curators had artists Li Jiun-yang, Lin Shu-kai, Zhang Xu Zhan, and Ciou Zih-yan work together in the atelier for three months in the second half of 2016, sparks flew. Each produced pieces that hint at the presence of the other three artists. Those traces are especially apparent in the works that Li and Lin exhibited on facing walls. Although the two artists differ in style, composition, use of line, and choice of subject matter, both produced pieces drawing on elements present in the other’s work.
The festival’s Epiphany Theatre focuses on photographic installations, pulling together the work of photographers Lin Bo-liang and Shen Chao-liang, and artists Yao Jui-chung and Chihiro Minato.
Lin Bo-liang spent more than three months photographing craftsmen producing jiannian ceramic sculptures for the Dajia Tsu-chi Temple in Rende District, a place he’d visited in his youth. Literally meaning “cut and paste,” jiannian is a sculptural style in which sculpted forms are finished with a mosaic of colored ceramic fragments. He then assembled the photos into Vis-à-vis, a series that he hopes will make the public more aware of the beauty of the craftsmen’s work and heighten people’s appreciation of the spirit and value of traditional crafts.
Lin’s photos have brought new attention to the exquisite work of master jiannian sculptor He Jinlong and his apprentice Wang Baoyuan, examples of which include depictions of Xiang Zhuang’s tension-filled sword dance and of the storied Yang family. The dusky hall also includes works from Shen Chao-liang’s 2006‡2014 Stage series, as well as Yao Jui-chung’s Links Between Colossal Deities, which consists of photos of giant images of gods from around Taiwan. Removed from the context of traditional religion, the dozens of black-and-white images ponder modern humanity’s endless pursuit of objects and desires.
In Omnipresent, artist Tu Wei-cheng satirizes Taiwan’s educational system by putting his own face on a sculpture of Confucius.