Draft:Tang Huang-Chen

Tang Huang-Chen (Chinese:湯皇珍 tāng huáng zhēn) born February 24, 1958) is a Taiwanese female performance artist. Her works tend to blend performance art and spatial interaction to prompt reflection on human circumstances across disciplines such as sociology, linguistics, and performance art. An important work of Tang is I Go Traveling V: Part 2 Taiwan, which won her the fourth Taishin Art Award. As for her participation in cultural movements, Tang strived for the development of the Huashan district in 1997, and promoted the establishment of the Art Creators Trade Union in 2009.

Early Life and Education

Tang Huang-Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan on February 24, 1958. In 1973, she graduated from what is now the University of Taipei. In a lecture, she mentioned that she was inspired by ink-wash painting when she was in her fourth year of college and developed it into her main work type in her early career.

After graduating from the University of Taipei, she began teaching for 4 years. Afterward, she resigned from her teaching job and enrolled in the Fine Arts Department of the National Normal University, graduating in 1983.

In 1987, she went to Paris for further studies and graduated from the Department of Plastic Arts at Paris VIII University in 1990. Before pursuing her studies in France, she had worked in a theater and accumulated a variety of experience in filmmaking and directing. After she returned to Taiwan, she became an artistic creator, theater worker, and writer. The types of her creations included watercolor paintings, scripts, performances, translations, and publications.

Contribution to Cultural Movements

1997-Strive for Huashan District

In 1997, a group of artists led by Tang Huang-Chen established a promotion association, hoping to reuse and transform the previous space of the Taipei Winery factory (which belonged to Taiwan Tobacco & Liquor Corporation) that had been idle for ten years into an art center.

During the time that Tang Huang-Chen and other artists were striving for Huashan, the founder of Golden Bough Theatre, Wang Rong-yu, was arrested since he did not get approval from Taiwan Tobacco & Liquor Corporation to use the space of the old winery for their performance. At this moment, due to the support of Tang Huang-Chen and Lin Hwai-min in consultation with public representatives, Wang Rong-Yu could release on bail, and this incident also made the public pay more attention to Huashan. In 1998, at the appeal of Tang Huang-Chen, Lin Hwai-min, and other artists, the Ministry of Culture officially took over the Huashan district and entrusted the management of the Association of Culture Environment Reform, which was established and run by artists.

2008-Plant Art Act

During the time after the Association of Culture Environment Reform took over the operation and management of Huashan, in order to sustainably operate the district, they decided to employ contracting models, including ROT (Rent, Operate, Transfer), BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer), and OT (Operate, Transfer). After that, Taiwan Creative Industry Development Co., Ltd. obtained the ROT project for the next 15 years and the construction and operation rights for the next 10 years. However, Tang Huang-Chen and other artists opposed this approach, considering it inappropriate for commercial entities to lead the operation of an art and cultural venue. In May 2008, the day before the presidential inauguration, Tang Huang-Chen performed an action play called “The Crow and The Bottle” with other art workers outside the Taipei Arena. She used the moral of fairy tales to hope that the government would reform and ensure artistic freedom through systems. Subsequently, they organized a series of protests and performance actions at Huashan called the “Plant Art Act”.

2009-Organizing the Art Creators Trade Union

After the Plant Art Act in 2008, since at that time, artist recognition was not seen as a profession within Taiwan's society and bureaucracy, Tang Huang-Chen initiated a movement in 2009 to advocate for the artists' trade union. However, they were rejected by the Executive Yuan Labor Committee since the professional affiliation of artistic creators had yet to be determined. Therefore, Tang Huang-Chen invited artists to raise demands, countersignature, and submit petitions to the Association of Culture Environment Reform. Their advocacy activities involved multiple approaches, including discussions, petitions, creating short films, lobbying with representatives, and seeking negotiation opportunities with relevant authorities. On the other hand, they also engaged with the artist community on issues such as union definitions, functions, membership criteria, and advocacy guidelines. These efforts finally led to the establishment of the Art Creators Trade Union in 2011, which not only allowed creators to have medical, occupational disaster, and pension insurance, but also improved society’s negative stereotypes about art workers and established the identity of future art workers.

Style

She combined performance with spatial interaction to create a series of artworks that awoke human beings to face their situations. Besides, her works crossed the fields of sociology and linguistics, and the elements used in her works incorporate behavior, performance, text, and interpretation in performance art.

She commonly includes the application of specific numbers, the repetition of actions, the temporality of the process, and physical labor in her creation. In addition, she repeatedly uses daily necessities such as flour, eggs, paper, sugar cubes, and bottles , and through behaviors like drinking, collecting, and reciting to endow a whole new meaning that transcends the original material functionality for these objects.

Work

Early Works

In 1911, Tang Huang-Chen returned to Taiwan from France and constantly published new works every year. She is one of the few female artists with a specialization in performance art in Taiwan. Her early works usually depict the conflict between the individual, society, and the environment, such as 72 in 1991 and I Love You in 1992.

• 72, 1991

The presentation of "throwing eggs"  in  72  symbolizes the death of life entities being crushed and reflects the phenomenon of protests in Taiwanese society at that time. (People would throw eggs to express their discontent.)  She wanted to convey that social repression and different values between people caused their inability to express opinions, leading to a disharmonious relationship.

• I Love You, 1992

In the artwork I Love You, she used a lot of grape juice bottles consumed in her work to display the process of people being unconsciously materialized in the consumer society. Besides, to present this artwork, the artist sat in the corner of the exhibition venue and kept repeating "I love you" in France for 90 minutes to rethink herself-being with repeating actions. Simultaneously, she also reflected on many exhibition restrictions in art museums, like no painting walls and nailing.

Later, she started to use games as performative forms to interact with the audience, like Black Boxes in 1994 and Hom? in 1996.

• Black Boxes, 1994

The presenting way in the work of Black Boxes was through interacting with the audience and making them peer through a small hole inside the black box. The audience would gradually approach the wall until the light was blocked, symbolizing the disappearance of people's perspective. Additionally, when the audience imprinted the boxes with tongues or sweaty hands, a hidden sensor would be activated to record their actions without consciousness. Simultaneously, their actions would be played on a television screen at the other end through a cleverly arranged camera setup, which implies various possibilities for transforming "reading and being read" behavior.

• Hom?, 1996

Tang Huang-Chen arranged a marble-rolling game based on the steep three-story transition of the exhibition space, and the audience could throw colored marbles into the water pipes and let the marbles slide down rapidly with the pipes and fall.  The artist wanted to convey through this movement that  "The huge weight of reality"  suddenly fell into an unknown corner. The marbles passed through the narrow water pipe like time, demonstrating the state of humans on the set track day after day, like the marbles thrown onto the specific track. The fall of marble symbolizes the mental and physical difficulties surrounding lives, and it is inevitable for people to face all kinds of helplessness in real life at the moment of falling. Hence, in addition to escaping, perhaps the only way to understand one's limitations is through free-falling suicide.

In 1995, she conveyed her homesickness through the work Stinky River Lover -Paper boat Tainan-2.

• Stinky River Lover -Paper boat Tainan-2, 1995

Tang Huang-Chen used this work to convey the feeling of her homesickness and loss. (Her mother is from Tainan). Therefore, she used sugar cubes to build the castle, symbolizing the replacement of the declining traditional sugar industry by industrialization. The "paper boat" occupying an important part of the work represents Tainan's history of cross-sea immigration (Anping used to be the largest port in Taiwan.). These elements conveyed a vague memory, but a real sense of loss, and the image contained three levels of forgetfulness: forgetfulness of time and space, forgetfulness of the ship, and forgetfulness of the water. Subsequently, the audience would get into the labyrinth, which was a concept like the cycle of life. When the audience finally entered the labyrinth, they were like drifting on history and evoking their sense of homesickness and reminded of their hometown which they never returned to. Besides, many landing paper boats also represented the loss through past physical labor in history.

• Ulysses Machine

   From 1999 to 2014, Tang Huang-Chen released a total of 10 works in the I Go Traveling series in 15 years. Between 2014 and 2015, after a long period of time, this series finally ended with Ulysses Machine - Looking Back at Tang Huang-Chen's I Go Traveling Fifteen Years. In this work, Tang Huang-Chen summarized her fifteen-year artistic creation process. I Go Traveling was not only a journey she constructed herself, but also a journey in which the audience participated. In the exhibition of Ulysses Machine, she used the form of three exhibitions in different places, seven performances, and seven workshops with 19 experts in different fields. Tang Huang-Chen once again presented audio-visual installations and visual installations based on the fifteen-year action events of I Go Traveling. Through the intertwined body language and narrative time and space, Tang Huang-Chen condensed the complexity and speculative nature of contemporary action artworks. As for the name of the exhibition, she chose the Greece hero Ulysses as the main core in this series of artworks, hoping that even in a world with various kinds of temptations and bombarded by huge amounts of information, each person could still learn to know themselves and find the meaning of life like Ulysses in the Greece mythology and go back home at last.

Works

• I Go Traveling V 2005

   I Go Traveling V: A postcard Scenery (part 2-Taiwan) was a work that won the 4th Taishin Art Award. It was also the first work by artist Tang Huang-Chen to be shortlisted and win the Taishin Art Award. I Go Traveling V, the halfway station of the I Go Traveling series project, was a work based on a real journey. In this project, Tang Huang-Chen reconstructed an old photo, a well-known and famous old photo of Taiwan. In the background, there was a group of Taiwanese people standing on the seaside, a typical scenery in Taiwan. Since Tang Huang-Chen began to conceive of I Go Traveling V, she no longer looked at this old photo. Instead, she had her remaining memory of this image. She publicly solicited audiences to participate in this trip. A group of people who didn't know each other "really" traveled together and took photos. Every time they traveled to a place, the traveler would recreate the scene according to Tang Huang-Chen's description of the photo, and finally produce that "seaside scenery postcard" that resembles "rebirth". The Taishin Prize jury commented that her creation reproduces the concept of "social sculpture", creating an exchange relationship between "imagination" and "memories invented by imagination" and completing the form of artistic expression.

• Completely in Forgetting Old Lady 2019

This was a nominated work for the 19th Taishin Art Award. This work was inspired by Tang Huang-Chen’s experience of taking care of her elderly mother with dementia for many years, combined with the decline of Tang’s physical condition. She decided to demonstrate the change of mindset and physical condition when people are aging, which was the very beginning of Completely-in Forgetting Old Lady, who was a virtual character embracing the new circumstances when stepping into the last phase of life.

This work included several events, including exhibitions, performances, and tea parties with the elderly . In the performance Is the Completely-in-Forgetting Old Lady at Home? Tang Huang-Chen invited elderly people with dementia to join her performances. The entire performance presented the process from memory, forgetfulness and return to the source of life in the form of classical drama. She also launched several interviews with the elderly, trying to experience their state of mind. This allowed people to feel and think in multiple ways, face forgetfulness and disability, and welcome it with a complete mentality.