Shadow of past in new creations
2004/3/10
Karyn Hsiao, TAIPEI, Taiwan, The China Post

The National Palace Museum is opening up its ancient collections to modern artists to link the past and the present through new creations.
Yesterday, in a film presentation entitled "The New Life of the Historical Collections," museum director Tu Chen-Sheng said the responsibility and challenge of all contemporary museums is to introduce the past to people in the present in a way that is interesting and easily understood.

"To this end, we have been pushing digital advancements as we develop art education materials, and we've even created some digital collections," Tu said.

But technology aside, Tu said, another key way of keeping past art relevant is by putting it in front of artists who are creating works in the present.

"The past serves as excellent inspiration, as we see through all three foreigners we invited to come look at our collection," Tu said.

Beginning last September, Taiwan's premier museum recently opened its doors not only to France's ceramic master Jean Girel, Japan's fashion designer Ito Sachico and Holland's animator Gerrit van Dijk but also to students and faculty at Taipei's Shih Chien University.

The museum was able to document the outreach effort with the support of Taiwanese director Wang Hsiao-li, who made a Chinese-language film that telling each artist's story.

Here is a summary of the cross-cultural creative encounters across time.

Jean Girel: This master of ceramic art is a native of the Savoie region in France and never thought his work could end up looking so much like bronze, jade and gold.

His visits to the National Palace Museum led Girel to discover these three materials as the keystones of ancient Chinese art.

Accompanied by his wife, Valerie Hermans, Girel also collaborated with students and visited ceramic factories on the island to learn techniques to give ceramic the look and coloration of Chinese antiques.

"In my work, I've always tried to escape the ego and return to the natural state that we are destroying for our personal comfort," Girel said yesterday.

So the result of his stay in Taiwan is a series of 11 pieces consisting of a circular bowl resting upon a square base. They very in color to resemble pale jade to rusted bronze.

"These pieces render homage to the elements and to Chinese symbols," Girel explained. "The square bases refer to the square as the Chinese symbol of Earth and the circular bowls are a symbol of the sky."

Four turtles, being terrestrial animals, adorn the four corners of the base and two birds perch atop the bowl. Inside the bowl, Girel has added two fish in an almost ying-yang configuration.

So his simple lines seek to touch the elements of earth, sky and water.

"I'm going to return to my own atelier now and continue to work on these techniques for the next six months or year," said Girel. "Maybe you will see the influence of this visit in my work for a long time to come."

Ito Sachico: This renowned Japanese fashion designer has been practicing her craft for 30 years now, and her creations have graced movie screens and stages as well as crosswalks.

During her exposure to the National Palace Museum, she was most drawn to the garments of the Soong and Tang dynasties as they were depicted in the era's paintings.

The museum even allowed her to handle the originals.

"The flow of the fabric was so inspiring," says Sachico, who then searched high and low in Taipei for just the right textiles.

She displayed the results yesterday several exquisite pieces that could be layered according to Tang-dynasty tradition first hanging in front of a mirror, and then on a live model who displayed the flowing sleeves and glimmering fabrics.

"This work has both Japanese and Taiwanese influences," Ito said.

Gerrit van Dijk: While he was in Taiwan, the 66-year-old acclaimed animator sent postcards home everyday to Holland.

He says took several tours of the National Palace Museum's collections and asked many questions before animating a 16-second film that comprises several busy scenes.

In this short work, he tried to capture the movement he sensed from still Chinese paintings as well as pay homage to what he learned about the culture.

For example, he drew the green "walking man" of most Taipei crosswalks into the film, complete with the customary break into a run when the light is nearly changed.

In the fluid style that is the hallmark of van Dijk's work, the man morphs into the Chinese character for "walk" which, being an ideogram, began with the idea of depicting an actual walk.

"I hope I shall have another chance to visit Taiwan," said van Dijk yesterday, after taking out his own digital camera and photographing the Taiwanese journalists who were taking pictures of him.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/art/detail.asp?ID=46718&GRP=h

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Posted on Sun, Mar. 07, 2004

Taiwan's art films fight for viewers

By Lena Fung Warmack
Special to the Mercury News

TAIPEI - In the past 15 years, filmmaker Huang Ming-Chuan has built a devoted following by doing the unusual: making films that look at art, literature and history through the eyes of native Taiwanese and aboriginal groups, not the Chinese Nationalists who settled here after they fled the mainland in the late 1940s.

``I'm the night market of Taiwan,'' said the 48-year-old Huang, one of Taiwan's first independent filmmakers. ``You get to see everything you don't get to see in the daytime. I'm sort of a filmmaker-dash-artist or artist-slash-filmmaker.''

In a hyper-competitive industry, his longevity is entirely of his own making: He chooses his own projects, secures his own financing and distribution, and has his own equipment, crew of four and production company.

``Somehow, I found a niche market and survived,'' he said.

Now Huang is trying to cope with a change in public taste that prefers slick action movies from Hollywood and Hong Kong to his brand of slow-paced art films. At the same time, the celluloid world is being overtaken by the proliferation of cable television and computer animation.

Taken together, all of these trends are reducing the number of venues where the works of Huang and his indie colleagues are screened.

``I don't know if I can do this forever,'' he said.

After a surge in recognition in the 1970s and 1980s, Huang and other Taiwanese directors are having a hard time making much of an impression on or off the island. The most notable exception is Ang Lee, who directed the Hollywood blockbuster ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.''

Lee Daw-ming, a film director and professor at Taipei National University of the Arts, said the island's cinematic industry is in its worst state in years.

``It has lost its audience,'' he said. During the past five years, Lee said, ``Taiwan films are not making it.''

And many filmmakers are barely making it making their art.

Because an average feature film costs about $300,000 to make, it's not uncommon for filmmakers to use their homes as collateral, Lee said, and many directors now seek funding from Japan or France.

It's particularly hard for female filmmakers.

Huang Yushan produced the well-regarded feature film ``Twin Bracelets,'' based on a novel about the lesbian relationship of two married women. She still helps run a women's film festival she started 10 years ago, but to earn a living as she seeks money for future projects, she spends most of her time teaching at the Tainan National College of Arts in southern Taiwan

``It's very competitive in the film industry,'' she said. ``I want to encourage young generations to make film and video. I think we need more women filmmakers.''

Critic and scholar Robert Chen said local filmmakers have to change and adapt to cultivate new audiences if they are to survive in this fickle market.

``Taiwan cinema is famous for art cinema,'' said Chen. ``But we need to find our own market other than the Hollywood market. We need to draw a Taiwan audience to the films. Right now they only know Hollywood cinema.''

Chen said the majority of Taiwanese prefer special effects, fast-paced editing and action to the slower shots and quiet manner of many Taiwanese films. He expects that by piggybacking off the island's thriving high-tech sector, computer animation will become Taiwan's next big thing that might save the dying movie industry.

Helping it along, the government is creating a Digital Content Institute to train graphic designers, engineers and students in computer software, video games, and 3-D animation.

``The film industry is dead, so anything we can do to wake up the dead, we will try,'' Chen said. ``Right now we are looking to animation because we have a strong computer industry.''

For Huang, it's not a matter of meeting film trends but of preserving moments in the Taiwanese experience.

``My goal is to record something for the future,'' he said in the small office of his production company, Formosa Filmedia. ``This is a small island with a lot of complexities. It's not the kind of scene you can change. You are part of the ugly and the beautiful.''

His hallmark is that he's managed to place himself among native Taiwanese and aboriginal people who were exploited in the past. He records their histories to make sense of their struggles. He says Taiwanese culture must continue to be celebrated in film.

``He's a very important director for artists,'' said sculptor and avant-garde art gallery owner Tsong Pu. ``We all respect him as the only director that makes films about the art in Taiwan.''

Huang's vision can be seen in more than 40 documentaries and three moderately successful feature films that have been shown in small theaters around the island and at film festivals on both sides of the Pacific.

His first, released in 1989, was ``The Man From Island West,'' about the travails of aborigines after 50 years of Japanese occupation ends and mainland immigrants take over. That was followed in 1992 by ``Bodo,'' about Taiwanese soldiers during the days of martial law, and 1998's ``Flat Tyre,'' which addressed Taiwan's changing ideology through the story of a photographer obsessed with the island's public statuary.

``It's not how you operate the camera, it's about what happens in front of the camera,'' Huang said of his role as a director. ``I have no style.''

Despite that disclaimer, his style of filmmaking is closer to that of European directors than of Hollywood.

``He's experimental in his aesthetic approach,'' said Teresa Huang, international coordinator for the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. ``He uses as little dialogue as possible and he's more likely to rely on images.''

Huang's film career blossomed after an unlikely trajectory. He was born in central Taiwan to a father who was an ice cream vendor and a mother who worked in a sugar factory. After graduating from the island's top university with a law degree, he abruptly decided to switch paths.

``My mother cried over my decision not to become an attorney,'' he said. ``For a poor family, it's too much of a shock.''

Later, he was off on a decadelong sojourn in America. He studied lithography for one year at the Art Students League of New York and later fine-art painting and photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.

Huang then found work in New York as a well-paid photographer for ad agencies before deciding he had to come back to Taiwan to explore the island's many subcultures and make films.

``I wanted to be an artist. I failed,'' he said. ``I'm not so much into fine art, but sort of found myself in cinema. I like things in frames that move.''

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Lena Fung Warmack, a Knight Ridder intern, graduated recently from the master's degree program at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Adam Shemper is a student in the program. Their work, part of a project on covering Taiwan, will appear on www.mercurynews.com along with photo essays and digital television reports. Companion digital TV pieces will appear on the Washington Post Web site at www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/photo/ emergingvoices/index.html.

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Matthias Arnold M.A.
Digital Resources
Institute of Chinese Studies
University of Heidelberg
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Germany

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