PERIMITERS

An Exhibit by Basel, August 2005 to February 2006
Sponsored by Commission of Indigenous Affairs,
Kaohsiung City Government, Taiwan

A Roman month since Solstice. Three days in a Typhoon and then two weeks without electricity or water. I almost did not miss them. It is the worst storm I have seen strike these hills. Topsy-turvy waterworld carved by winds blown by all the Banshees of hell. Actual losses minimal, except for the emotional loss as I witness more weather damaged paintings, lost artworks and half created bits banished from existence.


The exhibit here depicts the wreckage of my mind just as the typhoon is the perfect event of destruction. Living on the mountain is to live amongst the chaos that nature provides us. The very wreckage of my mind and emotions is seen just as well on the faces of the people who survive year after year of flood and drought. And the trees and the earth that is their home are equally twisted and scarred by the vicissitudes of wind and water. The torrents wash new lines across the surface and new cracks and crevasses are formed. The weight of trees and earth like the weight of the flesh that hangs upon bones is upset and the effects of time are carved there as a text for others to read.

Stepping out of culture is to depart the sheltered enclave of the known. Socially and emotionally one is exposed at the perimeter of the known. All that is cherished as real melts into thin air. The world is a place of borders between the known. But each one who lives knows different tales, different myths and different signs. So in this place of difference there is always the familiar and the unknown. But to shift from the focus of knowing from one stage to another, is to open up an effect of destruction on the self and its consciousness and is analogous to a typhoon’s effect on the environment and the people who inhabit it. There is a force of sheer destruction that eventually clears to make way for another cycle of regeneration. In many ways my art reflects my sense and understanding of destruction and regeneration, an inevitable circle of life.

The modern revolution we know as abstract art is a reflection of destruction. The path I took in art and painting started there. Abstract art is the realm of the mind, the self, the personal and is detached from social conditions and the surrounding environment. Because, without a set of shared signs, totems, there is only the very personal event of consciousness. As your eyes move across these painted surfaces, you will see lines and textures that are uniquely those of the artist. But since five years ago when I found myself involved in the lives and cultural symbols of the Rukai, I knew that things for me had changed. Finding my wife and my life here, I knew that these new impressions would eventually become immutable realities for me. My painting changes and personal destruction of the past “me” continues through the storms of life’s changes.

Here in this exhibit you can see painted on the canvasses, boars’ teeth, the hundred paced snake, pots and human forms. Emerging as if from the shadows and outlines perceived through a thick fog they develop into people wearing their accoutrements and tribal regalia. Once only vaguely perceived, they become more defined as a head and it’s headdress, regalia and totems adorning the surrounding environment… things Rukai, becoming a new reality of perceptions that is strictly mine – on the perimeter.

For me I am the only Rukai-American, finding this out only through the event of painting, and only later, much later through life itself. In time I have gotten over the pain of difference and change and likewise my art reflects an emotionally more intimate expression of the faces and emotions surrounding me. Because in the end life is less about what goes on in one’s head and more about what is going on around us.

This exhibit is a collection of 65 works of art marking the evolution of an American consciousness in Formosa. The narrative that accompanies it contains social and cultural perspectives as well as reference to the highly personal psychology and emotions of the artist. In painting, the two are never separate.

The exhibit expresses the collision of all natural forces, inevitable because of the event of difference. When the heat and cold, wet and dry collide, there is the force of wind, just as when vessels of culture combine, there is the force of change made real by the awakening of self awareness.

The media of paint on canvas is an analogy of the field of experience through which all living beings must cross during the short time between life and death we each enjoy. Destruction, wreckage, the mounds of rotting matter are the places where all order, beauty and meaning grow from. The artistic experience can never be isolated or removed from the field of lived experience, In art we simply are allowed by an ancient social contract to define, express and record the experiences we encounter while living.

In this exhibit I have combined elements of my discipline which has spanned over 25 years. During this time I have traveled extensively including the year I walked barefoot around Asia. I have studied psychology, sociology, philosophy, art history, theory and criticism and this has finally culminated in a career as a painter and a professor of cultural tourism and leisure in Taiwan and in Jeju, Korea.

In painting it must be understood that there is an eternal gap between the image, the act of viewing and understanding between the painter and the viewer. If the image could be as tightly defined at an objective level as, say, other sign systems such as language then there would be no mystery and no need for painting as a means of expression. It would be relegated to the realm of meaningless scratches and marks left by animals such as chickens seeking grain in the dirt and shit of their surroundings, or the gnawed remains of a dog’s favorite bone. But the painted surface gives us another kind of understanding different from the texts created with the sign systems of language. There is memory visually conveyed – most of us recognize a ‘picture’ of a face, a pot, a snake or shapes that are round, curved, pointed or straight. But there is a deeper resonance that makes painting a physical experience. The visceral response to the energy of color and forms refracting light within a space is what makes art both sacred and sensual. Open up yourself to this experience.

But painting is not the only element of the exhibition. There are also various three dimensional objects. Over the years many painters will eventually choose to dind another means to transcend the flatness of the canvas and bring their work to life in three dimensions rather than only in the illusion of such.

All combined, a space lays out before you in reality and on the pages written here, to express the ongoing personal and social realities of my life, bringing it to you.

Perimeters is an outcome of dualisms. In this exhibit you will see many depictions of opposites, symmetrical contrasts, etc. Two women running hand in hand on the beach, two people engaged in a kiss… these paintings inspired directly by Picasso’s work as far back as 1921 express dualism as a visual metaphor. Other paintings in the exhibit put colors and forms in contrast and opposition in ways that are strictly mine, personally.