Homegrown aesthetics
Around the time that he graduated from Chinese Culture University in 1980, the decades-old martial law was starting to fray as social movements began to gather steam. Wu identified with this turn of events, and pitched his services to several oppositional party magazines, for which he rendered the cover art.
"I guess my work was pretty exciting, because even the KMT was calling me to request submissions. But I knew how tense things were, plus there was the 'Chiang Nan Incident' [the assassination of a writer who had published a biography critical of then-president Chiang Ching-kuo]. Even if you were broke and indifferent to politics, there's no way you'd stick your neck out trying to play for both sides!" he recalls. He claims that his political involvement was never especially deep. He and fellow artist Yang Maolin concerned themselves with aesthetic, rather than political, revolution, creating an outlet for their rebelliousness by founding the 101 Painting Society. They sought to import the neo-expressionism then reigning in the West, harnessing it to their own experience and social consciousness to challenge the ideology and artistic orthodoxy already under attack.
Two large-scale series from that time were Syndrome of Hurting , describing how society was changing despite the authoritarian system, and Four Eras, depicting political strongmen from both sides of the Taiwan Strait (Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping). Both series possessed such trenchant topical relevance that visitors thronged to his solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, jostling one another to catch a glimpse.
This "angry young man" phase was short-lived. When the grandmother who had brought him up single-handedly passed away, he quickly forsook political topics and shifted his attention to the theme of mortality. At the memorial service, the Taoist priest incanted a phrase from a Buddhist poem in Taiwanese: "The green hills mourn silently the passing of human life / Evanescent morning dew brightly sparkles / Though people pass on, the hills remain / All is but a fleeting dream."
The experience made him aware of how quickly life passes-how many religions teach of life's illusory nature yet are unable to break our worldly attachments? All of our successes and failures, highs and lows, our love, desires, and hate suffuse life with ineffable beauty.
This epiphany came when he was 40 years old, and it solidified the "in-between aesthetic" and "beautiful life aesthetic" that form the nucleus of his creative philosophy.
In 1993, he premiered Until We Meet Again! Spring and Autumn Pavilions, a mixed-media work that won a prize for contemporary art the following year at the Taipei Biennial held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Transcending the usual single-time-frame limitations of two-dimensional painting, he fashioned a work whose effect was akin to combining all four panels of a comic strip into one panel, stacking temporal layers to form a well-structured narrative.
Encased within a frame bedecked with fake diamond studs is a photograph of artist Hong Donglu dressed in a sailor's uniform and standing in front of a background painting of the popular Kaohsiung scenic spot the Spring and Autumn Pavilions. Fair of complexion, his lips besmeared with rouge, he stands at a rakish angle, his left hand stroking his sailor's tie while his right hand steadies a guitar leaning on the ground beside him. His eyes are covered by a bow tie and his trousers seem to be distended by an erection.
Until We Meet Again! Spring and Autumn Pavilions has been heralded as a representative work of Taiwanese contemporary art. It is a highly textured piece replete with symbolic criticism.
On the cultural front, Wu exposes Taiwan's unique penchant for allowing tawdry efficiency to trump cultural substance. Nowadays, Taiwanese typically use concrete as stand-in for lumber and bamboo when building gazebos in landscape projects. Sheet metal replaces traditional tile for the roofs. The completed buildings evince a meretricious beauty that cannot hope to conceal the core fakeness.
Politically speaking, even though Taiwan had by then ostensibly rid itself of authoritarianism, the juxtaposition of the 1990s with the bogus 1950s retro motifs recalls how prone people are to eulogizing "the good old days," as well as pointing to contemporary Taiwan's ambivalent interpretations of its history.
Finally, in aesthetic terms, the artist warns that desperately striving to preserve one's youth in photography is like pickling memories in formaldehyde: all that will remain is a faded, bleached version of the beauty that once was.
Four Eras is a representative early series. It portrays four political strongmen from both sides of the Taiwan Strait-Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping-in the guise of Chinese emperors from antiquity.