Draft:Tang Huang-Chen

Tang Huang-Chen (Chinese:湯皇珍, pinyin: tāng huáng zhēn) born February 24, 1958) is a Taiwanese female performance artist. Her works tend to blend performance art and spatial interaction to prompt reflection on human circumstances across disciplines such as sociology, linguistics, and performance art. An important work of Tang is I Go Traveling V: Part 2 Taiwan, which won her the Taishin Art Award. As for the participation in cultural movements, Tang strived for the development of the Huashan district in 1997, and promoted the establishment of the Art Creators Trade Union in 2009.

Early Life and Education

Tang Huang-Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan on February 24, 1958. In 1973, she graduated from the University of Taipei. She was inspired by ink-wash painting when she was in her fourth year of college and developed it into her main work type in her early career. After graduating from the University of Taipei, she began teaching for 4 years. Afterward, she resigned from her teaching job and enrolled in the Fine Arts Department of the National Normal University, graduating in 1983.She had worked in a theater and accumulated experience in filmmaking and directing. In 1987, she went to the Department of Plastic Arts at Paris VIII University for graduate study in 1990. After returning back to Taiwan, she became an artistic creator, theater worker, and writer. The types of her creations included watercolor paintings, scripts, performances, translations, and publications.

Contribution to Cultural Movements

1997-Strive for Huashan District

In 1997, a group of artists led by Tang Huang-Chen established an association, hoping to reuse and transform the Taipei Winery factory (which belonged to Taiwan Tobacco & Liquor Corporation) into an art center, now known as Huashan.During the time that Tang Huang-Chen and other artists were striving for Huashan, the founder of Golden Bough Theatre, Wang Rong-yu, was arrested without approval from Taiwan Tobacco & Liquor Corporation by using the space of the old winery for their performance. At this moment, due to the support of Tang Huang-Chen and Lin Hwai-min in consultation with public representatives, Wang Rong-Yu could be released on bail, raising the public awareness to Huashan. In 1998, at the appeal of Tang Huang-Chen, Lin Hwai-min, and other artists, the Ministry of Culture officially took over the Huashan district and entrusted the management of the Association of Culture Environment Reform, which was established and run by artists.

2009-Organizing the Art Creators Trade Union

After the Plant Art Act in 2008, since at that time, artist recognition was not seen as a profession within Taiwan's society and bureaucracy, Tang Huang-Chen initiated a movement in 2009 to advocate for the artists' trade union. However, they were rejected by the Executive Yuan Labor Committee since the professional affiliation of artistic creators had yet to be determined. Therefore, Tang Huang-Chen invited artists to raise demands, countersignature, and submit petitions to the Association of Culture Environment Reform. Their advocacy activities involved multiple approaches, including discussions, petitions, creating short films, lobbying with representatives, and seeking negotiation opportunities with relevant authorities. On the other hand, they also engaged with the artist community on issues such as union definitions, functions, membership criteria, and advocacy guidelines. These efforts finally led to the establishment of the Art Creators Trade Union in 2011, which not only allowed creators to have medical, occupational disaster, and pension insurance, but also improved society’s negative stereotypes about art workers and established the identity of future art workers.

Style

She combines performance with spatial interaction to create a series of artworks that awoke human beings to face their situations. Besides, her works crossed the fields of sociology and linguistics, and the elements used in her works incorporate behavior, performance, text, and interpretation in performance art. She includes the application of specific numbers, the repetition of actions, the temporality of the process, and physical labor in her creation. In addition, she repeatedly uses daily necessities such as flour, eggs, paper, sugar cubes, and bottles , and through behaviors like drinking, collecting, and reciting to transcends the original material functionality for these objects.

Works

Since 1991, Tang Huang-Chen have been publishing works every year. She is one of the artists with a specialization in performance art in Taiwan. Her works depict the conflict between the individual, society, and the environment, such as 72 in 1991 and I Love You in 1992.

• 72, 1991

The presentation of "throwing eggs"  in  72  symbolizes the death of life entities being crushed and reflects the phenomenon of protests in Taiwanese society at that time. (People would throw eggs to express their discontent.)  She wanted to convey that social repression and different values between people caused their inability to express opinions, leading to a disharmonious relationship.

• I Love You, 1992

In the artwork I Love You, she exploited used grape juice bottles to display the process of people being unconsciously materialized in the consumer society. Besides, to present this artwork, the artist sat in the corner of the exhibition venue and kept repeating "I love you" in France for 90 minutes to rethink herself-being with repeating actions. Simultaneously, she also reflected on many exhibition restrictions in art museums, like no painting walls and nailing.

• Black Boxes, 1994

The presentation of Black Boxes was game-based through the interaction among the audience through a small hole inside the black box. The audience would gradually approach the wall until the light was blocked, symbolizing the disappearance of people's perspective. Additionally, when the audience imprinted the boxes with tongues or sweaty hands, a hidden sensor would be activated to record their actions without consciousness. Simultaneously, their actions would be played on a television screen at the other end through a cleverly arranged camera setup, which implies various possibilities for transforming "reading and being read" behavior.

• Hom?, 1996

Tang Huang-Chen arranged a marble-rolling game based on the steep three-story transition of the exhibition space, and the audience could throw colored marbles into the water pipes and let the marbles slide down with the pipes and fell.  The artist wanted to convey through this movement that  "The huge weight of reality"  suddenly fell into an unknown corner. The marbles passed through the narrow water pipe, demonstrating the state of humans on the set track day after day, like the marbles thrown onto the specific track. The fall of marble symbolizes the mental and physical difficulties surrounding lives, and people who had to face all kinds of helplessness in real life at the moment of falling. In 1995, she conveyed her homesickness through the work Stinky River Lover -Paper boat Tainan-2.

• Stinky River Lover -Paper boat Tainan-2, 1995

Tang Huang-Chen used this work to convey the feeling of her homesickness and loss toward her mother. She used sugar cubes to build the castle, symbolizing the replacement of the declining traditional sugar industry by industrialization. The paper boat occupying an important part of the work represents Tainan's history of cross-sea immigration in Tainan. These elements conveyed a personal memory with a real sense of loss, and the image contained three levels of forgetfulness: forgetfulness of time and space, forgetfulness of the ship, and forgetfulness of the water.

• Ulysses Machine

In this work, Tang Huang-Chen summarized her fifteen-year artistic creation process. I Go Traveling was not only a journey she constructed herself, but also a journey in which the audience participated. In the exhibition of Ulysses Machine, she used the form of three exhibitions in different places, seven performances, and seven workshops with 19 experts in different fields. Tang once again presented audio-visual installations and visual installations based on the fifteen-year action events of I Go Traveling. Through the intertwined body language and narrative time and space, Tang Huang-Chen condensed the complexity and speculative nature of contemporary action artworks. As for the name of the exhibition, she chose the Greece hero Ulysses as the main core in this series of artworks, hoping that even in a world with temptations and bombarded by information, each person could learn to know themselves and find the meaning of life like Ulysses in the Greek mythology and go back home at last.

Works

• I Go Traveling V 2005

   I Go Traveling V: A postcard Scenery (part 2-Taiwan) was a work that won the 4th Taishin Art Award, her first winning work. I Go Traveling V, the halfway station of the I Go Traveling series project, was a work based on a real journey. Every time they traveled to a place, the traveler would recreate the scene according to Tang Huang-Chen's description of the photo, and finally produce that "seaside scenery postcard" that resembles "rebirth". The Taishin Prize jury commented that her creation reproduces the concept of "social sculpture", creating an exchange between "imagination" and "memories invented by imagination" in terms of artistic expression.

• Completely in Forgetting Old Lady 2019

This was a nominated work for the 19th Taishin Art Award. This work was inspired by Tang experience of taking care of her mother with dementia for years, combined with the decline of her own physical condition. She demonstrated the change of mindset and physical condition when people are aging, which was the very beginning of Completely-in Forgetting Old Lady, a virtual character embracing the new circumstances when stepping into the last phase of life. This work included exhibitions, performances, and tea parties with the elderly . In the performance Is the Completely-in-Forgetting Old Lady at Home? Tang Huang-Chen invited elderly people with dementia to join her performances, illustrating the process from memory, forgetfulness and return to the source of life in the form of classical drama. She also conducted interviews with the elderly to document their aging experience.