Lung-Bin Chen, Paper Buddha
Fu Chia-Wen Lien
Lung-Bin Chen studied at the Tung Hai University of Taipei and received his MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts. He has received numerous distinguished fellowships including one from New York’s Joan Mitchell Foundation, as well as Japan’s Silver Prize of the Osaka Triennial. He has completed artist residencies at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, California; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; and the Sarabhai House, Ahmedabad, India. His work has been featured in exhibitions in the United States, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Italy and is in many private collections. Following his Kidspace residency, Chen has been invited to participate in projects in Brazil and Hong Kong.
Chen will come to North Adams from Taiwan to complete an artist residency at Kidspace and with the local schools. Kidspace, a contemporary art gallery and art-making space, is a joint program of the Williams College Museum of Art, the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, and Mass MoCA. From October 11 through November 4, he will conduct art-making workshops with students in grades Pre-K to 5th in Brayton, Greylock and Sullivan Elementary Schools.
Fu Chia-Wen Lien: Let us start from here and now. Can you discuss your residency program and your current exhibition in Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA)?
Lung-Bin Chen: I have been to quite a few traveling residency programs in Italy, India, Japan and different places in the United States. This is a considerably good experience. In Mass MoCA, I got a professional installation team with four to five people to support. I need a lot of technical support for works such as Hanging Angel to Buddha Bookshelf. The installation of the whole retrospective and a kid workshop took only three weeks, which is quite efficient.
FCWL: When was your last retrospective exhibition?
LBC: It was in 1997 in Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Eight years later, my skill has matured. My concept and direction are also better developed.
FCWL: Are there particular exciting experiences or breakthroughs in this exhibition?
LBC: It is quite exciting that I developed my Buddha Bookshelf from the structure of a box to a chair and table. For me, these architectural structures for my reading sculptures have much greater potential than ever. Buddha Hurricane is also very popular.
FCWL: Buddha Hurricane seems to be the combination of two forms which you developed in the past–the Hurricane piece and the series of "Cultural Warrior."
LBC: Exactly. In the entire show, I exhibited Buddha Heads, Hanging Angel, and Twisted Angel. I also did Roman Figures with NY telephone books in which I wish to bring the Romans back to New York. These Roman figures remind me of the education of a Classical canon they use to teach in art school with the plaster cast of Greek and Roman portrait busts. The wide adaptation of western educational model reflected the emergence of global culture.
FCWL: How do you associate telephone books to Buddha?
LBC: Buddha is a religious icon that involves mass culture and mass media. People face this icon everyday. Buddha has many messages to give to people. My Buddha head sculpture made of phone books represents a microcosm containing a macrocosm of society with millions of messages. Each Buddha head is where a lot of people meet inside a small sculpture.
The images of Buddha are also very complex. Pakistan Buddha was influenced by Roman sculpture. From Indian, Tibet, China to Japan, the images of Buddha are all different and are specific cultural icons. Tang Dynasty has a monumental style of Buddha. Ming and Sing Buddha images are more delicate and feminine.
FCWL: So you are looking for specificity in your sculpted images rather than the more abstract folk images in your earlier "Reading Sculpture" series?
LBC: In 2003, when I started to sculpt Buddha in my reading sculpture in Snug Harbor residency program and exhibition, I faced some conflicts about how to reflect the different generational styles of Buddha. In an antique market, one might find the chopped heads of Buddha in the West, while the body remains in the East. My problems became how to combine head and body as well as the East and the West, responding to the prevalent issues involving colonialism. For example, twelve statues of zodiac signs in Yuan Ming Yuang in Bejing were spread to different countries. The images we find can be fake or appropriated Buddha, which involve complex issues related to market, culture, power, originality and authenticity.
On the political level, I make Buddha sculpture to reflect cultural misunderstanding. A lot of the buyers of Buddha heads are not real Buddhists. Buddha is a popular image today and I think there is a trend of globalization of Buddha images. It can be traced back to how I started to use books with political messages such as China Can Say No. I contemplate on how patriotism in China makes some Chinese people go against Western culture and colonialism, and how China wants to buy back all the cultural objects from the West.
FCWL: From what I remember, you have been working with recycling phonebooks for more than ten years since your second or third year of studying at School of Visual Art (SVA)? First, let me ask you what is the coincidence of your discovery of the material of phonebooks?
LBC: While I was studying in School of Visual Art in 1993, I found textbooks were very expensive. However, on recycling days, all magazines and books are scattered around for anyone to pick up. These maybe the times when I started to be interested in making art with recycled telephone directories, books, magazines and newspapers. There are two reasons for me to start my "Reading Sculptures." First, when I picked up all these recycled reading materials, I felt I could not process all this information by reading or preserving them. Second, like many book artists, in the era when computers become very popular, books seem to become less and less important. I started to think about using books to sculpt a head with an explosion of knowledge.
I am one of the few artists using telephone books to make art. Some people question whether my technique and material are original. Traveling around the world, I find people think my work is unique in its form and material.
There are some other artists using telephone books in their collage. My methodology is different. I treat books as carving material. I reuse and recreate the form and image. The texture and meaning are totally different. It is like the difference between carving stone and using stone as collage material. There is the process of transforming and recycling the material. The finished works look like woodcarvings, yet they are soft and can even be flipped through.
FCWL: During these ten years or so, how many different stages of experimentation with "Reading Sculpture" works have you been through? And what are the concepts you have been trying to push through? I remember you have started human figures, and you have also made maps, different forms of abstract sculptures such as the Brancusi-like column, figurative works such as colored classical statues "Cultural Warrior" series, then the installations of bookshelf with Buddha image and recently the transforming digital Buddha?
LBC: Ten years ago, I didn’t know if I could go on with this experimentation. Some artists give up a certain form because of lack of financial support. Now, I start to find that my works actually have global market value. The market is smaller than traditional oil paintings and sculptures, but there is interesting potential from different countries where I traveled to and where people are drawn to the interest of the material and form I use.
I have also developed from folk art images to more specific images. When I started, I was already dealing with the iconology, but technically I cannot solve the problem. In the Snug Harbor show, the interior of my bookshelf installation can accommodate four people. I have advanced its architectural structure and the establishment of the icon. I think the bookshelf works have a lot of directions to explore.
FCWL: How do you think your work is related to deconstruction theory or the postmodernist idea of the death of the author? When you cut books and phonebooks, what does knowledge or communication codes mean to you? Do you intend to express critical thinking toward mass media in your work?
LBC: I do not refer to theory while I work. I think it is the works of critics. Early on, I was interested in the theory about mass-media proposed by Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. For example, he discussed how President Roosevelt drew attention to his speech on radio and how John F. Kennedy gained his popularity with his handsome face broadcasted through television nationwide.
FCWL: Nowadays, these issues become even more complicated because a lot of the information, messages or communication codes are stored in computers. They are not in object forms and they become more hidden and not so easy to be fetishized as books. How do you reflect on all these phenomena with your works? I see you using the words "digital" in your titles in the show "Buddha-DNA" in Frederieke Taylor Gallery.
LBC: In my perspective, the elitism in the 80s theory is over. The scholarship has transformed. The idea of "the death of the author" can be further extended because today everyone can get knowledge from their computer and create their own form and language. A small community can create their own language, such as the worship of the myth of i-Pod. There are more diverse groups around. New generations emerge with new technology and the globalization of network to get their profit from the circle. In the previous decade, white Jewish gay got their place. Now it is more multiplicity. The rise of Chinese and mainland artists and artists from the other countries can get into the contemporary art scenes in New York. Where is the center of the globe? Internet, UPS, DHL became the major medium. I can stay anywhere and do my work in different places. So there is no hierarchy and no more elite culture. Some sub-culture has emerged and people get involved in this new phase. People collecting the comic books might become millionaire and creates their own website through internet. Collecting Hello Kitty may become one’s career. These people became leader in their community. We observe that new generation of Japanese artists use comic icons. It sounds absurd. The profound philosophy or aesthetics are not valued as much as in the past.
FCWL: How do you reconcile between object-oriented work and your conceptual undertaking? Because your work can often look really intriguing concerning its crafty aspect as well as the interesting material with its great fluidity (soft and touchable), flexibility (possible to be stacked, twisted and flipped), transience (changeable, non-permanent), sometimes it can almost overshadow the profoundly serious idea and critical thinking underneath?
LBC: In my viewpoint, artwork should be an interesting object too. I have deep doubt about conceptual art, which ignores the handmade process. It loses the specialty in the art of making. I also think there is a great potential to bring craft into contemporary art. Ironically, in my exhibition in Taiwan, the curator avoided seeing the figurative aspect of my work and photographing the back of my "Cultural Warrior" series to emphasize the conceptual and abstract quality. The bias exists such as this–if one is dealing with figuration than it is not contemporary art.
FCWL: What does scale mean to you?
LBC: There are limitations of the sizes of the books. If I continue to use books and telephone books, the size creates a certain degree of confinement. The material is soft, it cannot support. Weight becomes a big challenge. Very few book artists do huge sculpture. When I did hanging sculpture, I developed a form to break out the confinement of space. I also applied joinery from Chinese furniture and architecture to create more complicated and larger forms such as in the series of "Cultural Warrior."
"Information Hurricane." Those works have even more complicated process in which I use glue bonding to support the softness of the book.
When I found out the limitation of book material, I was also facing the difficulties to find sponsorship to do larger-scale works. There are possibilities that I can go toward the direction of even smaller work which actually can be convenient for traveling. "Reading Jewelry" series from the Kids workshop in the education program of Mass MoCA can lead to a new direction for experimentation.
FCWL: Your work is really tactile and you do use a lot of handicraft and craft with power tools. Can you describe your working process and what is really challenging technically?
LBC: A lot of people have asked this question. Maybe, I would rather keep it as a secret. There are larger tool for cutting big forms and different tools for details.
FCWL: What do you think about today’s art? You have traveled to different countries for different workshops or visiting programs, what have you observed? I am reflecting on some interesting artists these days. Their works seem to be so intriguing and the ideas are so witty, yet I am not sure whether they are pursuing any profound meaning or we are really in the era of negating profundity or significance.
LBC: A more meaningful aspect is that art today is made not for the nation and not for the people anymore. People in power are from the generation after the baby boom. They are well-educated and have not been through war or struggle. In the generation of the kids and grandkids of baby boom, inflation is past. Over-production and over-education became a problem. The grandkids of baby boom are called the strawberry generation and choose to get into consumer or labor production. The concept of adulthood does not exit anymore. The extension of youth culture happens in this generation. The division and hierarchy of many aspects of previous generation are blurred.
FCWL: At the end, it is always good to ask, "What’s next?"
LBC: I aim to make bigger bookshelf works and I will need more support. I plan to develop my work in Greek Roman Column form and totem pole with chair form extended from my bookshelf chair. I will continue with "Island Hurricane" series which I first did in Taiwan.
Reading Sculpture will be open from October 6, 2005 to January 22, 2006
MASS MoCA, the largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the United States, is located on Marshall Street in North Adams on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings.
