Timeless Love for What Will Age

I first came across TongChiao’s work on a university campus that I don’t even remember which. I was still doing my bachelor's degree in college in Taipei and, according to my vague impressions, I was visiting some other university that was not mine. His work was published on a signboard somewhere next to a bushy trail. At first glance, I fell in love with it.

Those words, which were inscribed at my heart profoundly, were his poem ‘My loved ones will age’. That punching, relentless but truthful, sad but alarming first line still move my heart, and many others today, being one of TongChiao’s most widely circulated poems:

In the interview today, TongChiao told me that no one has actually asked him about the story behind this poem. Most people thought it was about romance, but that was not the case. It was in fact about his parents. This reminds me of the well-known misunderstanding about the timeless piece in modern Chinese poetry by Chouyu Zheng, A Mistake, where Zheng meant to express his sentiments against the revolution, but many have interpreted it as subjecting romantic love. (2) Through TongChiao’s narration, he took me back to the scene where the determining four opening lines of the poem came to him. He was on the Métro platform in Paris. His ankle was wrenched, which made it difficult to get around, but in his mind were the classes at ENSAPC he needed to attend and the grocery shopping he had to do. The train was delayed. In that silent time and buzzing noises in the air, he thought of time, the meaning of time, and his parents. He recalled that each time they spoke via a video chat, he could see a few wrinkles added to their faces and their hair turning more grey. As an international student in Paris by himself, he pondered upon the concept of time presented in the Bible of his Christian faith, and that was how this beloved poem came into shape, as he contemplated through what time and love are as a conversation with the timeless divine.

As a poet and painter, TongChaio explored these two forms of art through two parallel but overlapping paths, as he transforms his thoughts and feelings into different expressions with the two media. His cultivation in poetry started earlier than painting. As a middle school young man, he has found passion and fascination for poetry, reading Chinese classic poems introduced by middle school teachers. Later on, he learned about Taiwanese poet Hsia Yu and Czech former president and poet Václav Havel and learned about the semiotics of poetry.

Compared to poetry, his training in fine art began relatively late since he started in high school. By the time he was studying in Paris, his poetic endeavors were already fairly mature, while his fine-art works had only become more ripened after he returned to Taiwan after his studies. Living in France where he was separated from his mother tongue, he was given more time and headspace for self-discovery and conversations with himself. In a foreign environment, where one can become more receptive to cultural stimuli, he has gradually discovered a more systematic and matured visual expression in his art, having digested what he has seen and received in French culture.

TongChiao mentioned that his art in his French period was more minimalistic with cleaner colors, while the style subtly changed once he returned home to Taiwan. The ‘chaotic’ vibe in Taiwanese is directly reflected in his visual works, “and yet the Taiwanese messiness is ‘chaos in orders’,” as TongChiao asserts: “It’s like how you have a messy room but you always know where your stuff is.” He started using more mixed colors in his works in the different energetic realm in Taiwan as if the color spontaneously reflected Taiwan’s humid air and its vibrant and disordered sceneries. Even the white he used changed. Back in Paris, the white background was the primer white, but in Taiwan, he started adding a hue into the white pigment.

TongChaio personally believes that his endeavors in fine art became more established only after he returned to Taiwan. He went back to his hometown Pingtung and was exposed to a very different scenery from what he was immersed in in France. The Taiwanese landscape was a key component in his self-seeking journey. The hot and humid air, nature, and the minute details of people’s interactions were all contributors to what came out on the canvas.

One of TongChiao’s renowned series is paintings of home, including his signature work, pink house with a pure color block on a fifty-nine square inch white canvas. Art critic Andy Wang (王振愷) wrote in an article TongChiao Chuang’s ‘Moonlight Over the Island Affects People Watching the Sea’ and The Testing of Weak Paintings (莊東橋「島嶼的月色影響看海的人」與弱繪畫之間的試探), “The image of home is the manifestation of TongChiao (家屋就是莊東橋的一個化身).” (3) Home is a frequently revisited motif for TongChiao as it is part of his internal quest of who he is as he set out to probe the meaning of sanctuary. To TongChiao, home as its spirit and home as a place are very different things. What he dedicated his quest against was the spiritual meanings of home, a place that encompasses both time and space. The understanding of time and space is what TongChiao largely contemplates, too. Along with his observation of how the distance between the ocean and mountains are uniquely close after returning from France, he argues: “The distance between the ocean and mountains is also the distance between time and space.” The unique geographical conditions of Taiwan, therefore, shaped what was reflected in his works and his pondering upon home.

When I asked TongChiao what semiotics means to him, he told me that the shapes that look like symbols in his paintings are in fact results of the simplification of the scenes he sees, and one of the reasons he has many color blocks in his landscape works is that signboards are very visible in the landscape of Taiwan.

TongChiao started his curation work back in 2013 at the prestigious art museum Ju Ming Museum in Taiwan. Different from the institutionally trained curators with training in theories of curation, he draws from his art administration experiences as an intern at Le Centre culturel de Taïwan en France (The Taiwan Cultural Center in Paris) and developed a curating style that is highly artists-focused when he started working at Ju Ming. What he is concerned the most about is whether he is responding to what each artist wants to say, whether they are able to tackle the issues they want to raise awareness of, and being able to work hand-in-hand with each artist. He depicts curating as “designating zodiac constellations in the skies. The stars are already there, but you are the ones linking them up with lines and say, this is the Leo constellation.” According to him, every artwork is like a diamond with many facets, and curating is to make visible one aspect of it.

While he deems curating more as a professional career, writing poetry and making art is a necessity to him. “It’s the same as drinking water,” TongChiao calmly asserts how he feels about his artistic endeavors: “I simply feel the need to do it.” While it can also be understood as his way to position his self-existential-definition, it seemed to me that, before asking a question, he is already creating art as the most natural response to his design.

At the end of the interview, I asked TongChiao whether he believes that there is anything an artist would prioritize before livelihood, but I heard the change in his tone with his immediate response that suggested how it is inevitable to prioritize livelihood, even for an artist. “You can do some research into the artists who have the privileges to fully concentrate on their art, you will find out most of them came from well-off backgrounds or they are very commercial.” He believes what an artist desires at their heart is a stable life with a stable income so that they can also have stable output. “An artist is simply a status. And you need to start making art before you are called an artist.”

He told me some of the artists he knows are fortunate to receive support from family and friends. “Sometimes when some people who studied fine art are no longer pursuing art, they would shed hope in those who are still making art and purchase some of their paintings.” But TongChiao said he would still prefer to depend on himself. Having loved ones to care for, he is now working at Tainan Art Museum as the supervisor at the curatorial department, spending the time when he is not making a living to deliver us beauty and his pondering upon what love, time, and home mean to him, and perhaps mutually to all of us.

TongChiao’s recent poetry work Moonlight Over the Island Affects People Watching the Sea (4):

TongChiao Chuang was born in 1981 in Pingtung, Taiwan. He is an ultra-contemporary artist and poet. He lived in France during the time he studied at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. TongChiao is currently living in Tainan, Taiwan.

Artist website: http://tongchiao.com/

References:
1) Translated by Jamie-May Minjie
2) https://news.cts.com.tw/cts/life/201003/201003310440424.html
3) https://absoluteart.space/14205073
4) The original text of Moonlight Over the Island Affects People Watching the Sea’: https://vocus.cc/article/60935452fd897800011ae3b2
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10157864872560798&set=a.10150459266895798