It was not too long ago while two airplanes crashed the New York landmark Twin Towers (the New York World Trade Center) on the 11th of September, 2001. People in those days were surrounded by terror with the newsreel of the explosions kept again and again bombed viewers’ daily life. Suicide attack seemed to be the ultimate weapon of the terrorists to confront European/American cultural imperialism. Seven years have gone by. Nowadays, we can still see non-stop terrorist attacks taking place all over the world from the international news coverage. However, public’s attention has gradually been switched from the political confrontation to the Hollywood blockbusters such as <Spider-Man>, <The Batman>, and <Superman>.
How mass media deals with the idea of “hero” fascinates both the Taiwanese artist Kuo I-Chen and the Korean artist Kijong Zin. Though growing up in different countries, these two artists have similar childhood memory with television. In their duet exhibition <Headline>, Kuo I-Chen and Kijong Zin discuss the juxtaposition between reality and its representation from the perspectives of “Hollywood heroism” and “televised reality v.s. virtual reality.”
KUO I-CHEN ‧SUPER HERO
Having just been demobilized from the required military service in the end of 2008, artist Kuo I-Chen’s latest series work <Super Heroes> is the reflection of his meditation on those sociologist books which became a great company to him during his military life. The experience of leading a strict military life makes him wonder “how the public voluntarily becomes the hostage of mass media.” He thus criticizes such a global brainwash conducted by Hollywood movies and its supporters – the US government.
Kuo I-Chen borrows the super hero images from public culture such as Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the Green Hulk, Daredevil, Spawn, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Man. These fictional characters are initially created in the United States but they soon become recognizable symbols in the whole world. The most significant trait of these super heroes is how they use their supernatural power to save the world. In the three video installations, he used oil to recapture the three of the most famous images – Superman, Batman, and Spiderman – and put them aside with three different video clips extracted from newsreel: 1.) terrorists and the held hostage; 2.) the 911 attack on the World Trade Center New York, and; 3.) the air raid in Afghanistan and Iraq during the US attack. The juxtaposition between the image extracted from the public culture and the video extracted from newsreel (which is commonly acknowledged as the truthfully representation of the reality) creates a powerful collision against our pre-existing knowledge. Such a collision leads to the re-examination and suspicion of the media credibility.
The other two stainless steel sculptures adopt the image of the Batman and Superman. One replaces the “S” symbol of Superman with the sign extracted from the Taliban flag; the other transforms the Batman into a veiled terrorist-like figure. While the publically acknowledged symbol of hero and symbol of terrorist are placed side by side, the clear-cut boundary seems to be no longer unshakable.
KIJONG ZIN‧ON AIR
As one of the most promising young video artist in Korea, Kijong Zin’s talent is noticed internationally. His works have been demonstrated at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe) in Germany and ICC in Japan. From Asia to Europe and back to Asia again, it is the first time for Kijong Zin to introduce his multi-media work <On Air> to the viewers in Taiwan. The history of how the society progressively embraces technology shares rare difference between Korea and Taiwan. Television, which only transmitted black-and-white images at the time, has played an irreplaceable role in Kijong Zin’s childhood. Nicknamed as “Idiot Box,” television has step by step become the main information/recreation provider. The owners of the television ironically turn themselves into the “Television Believers.” Such an obsession with television makes him give up the usual way to present video-art through projection. Instead, he chooses television as his mediator.
The series work <On Air> includes four separate video works <Aljazeera>, <CNN>, <Director’s Chair>, and <Screen Test Time>. Similar to what has been implied in Kuo I-Chen’s <Super Heroes>, Kijong Zin also makes a comment about the aftereffect of the 911 event. The non-stop repetition of the newsreel on CNN provided Asians a chance to virtually experience the cinema-like collapse of Twin Towers, regardless of the thousand-mile-distance in between. Meanwhile, Aljazeera provided another perspective which focused more on the unreasonable attack launched by the US to retaliate against their imagined enemy, i.e. Iraq. The scenery of jets flying overhead and bombs exploding without break was transmitted to the newsreel as if viewers were playing some kind of computer war game. In the works <Aljazeera> and <CNN>, Kijong Zin discusses the gap between the represented reality and the existed reality by juxtaposing the two completely opposite perspectives of these major news channels. The paper-made representation of the news studio and the reconstruction of the calamity will definitely make Taiwanese viewers thrilled. The Korean art critic Kim Won-Bang shares a perfect description about Kijong Zin’s work: “Here, viewers are intrigued and seduced before they discover.”
These two young artists both reside in places far away from the center of the terrorist attacks, but they coincidentally feel the desire to have a say on the 911 event and its hidden political power-play. Through the political message veiled by the television screen, they provide a standpoint to unveil the possibility to cross over from the fake to the real. Don’t lie to ourselves anymore. The world we get to know from the Web and television is actually a perfectly fabricated world.
The exhibition <Headline> invite artist Kuo I-Chen, artist Kijong Zin and professor Kuo Li-Hsin, who is mastering contemporary image and media phenomenon, to have a talk with viewers.
