歲月‧一瞥 (2)

( 韓國 首爾 仁寺洞 / 2009.7.1 / C.T )


黃永松1962年的身體高掛在牆上...
歲月匆匆,韓國個展又即將結束.















gallery NOW 藝廊位於此建築三樓,以攝影展覽聞名.















藝廊的策劃、宣傳、印刷等做得很周到、嚴謹.















一位韓國的風景攝影家告訴我說,
他在這個無首的影子上看到未來.
( 嚇了我一跳 ... )















歲月適合一個人安靜觀看 ...















安靜的來訪記者,安靜地坐着.













( gallery NOW / 2009.7.1 / Shiho )















開展當天,許多攝影同好來參加座談酒會,
韓國畫廊慣例將週三訂為首展日.















畫廊主人 李順心 Lee Soon-Shim (左)也是攝影家,
兩年前開始建立起這個聯繫/推展平台.















會場上好像上年紀的來賓比較多,
歲月來看歲月啊 ...















策展人 申暳瓊 Shin Hyekyung (左)是巴黎藝術史博士,
她說這些黑白灰色階的影像是一次意義深長的歷史航行.















資深攝影家 陸明心 Yook Ming-Shim (右)是英美文學舆攝影的大學教授,
他說這些圖像是時間舆空間、現實舆非現實的和諧幻象.















你知道他在指哪一張照片嗎?
不告訴你.















極富盛名的現代攝影家 具本昌 Koo Bohnchang (右)冷靜而熱情,
經他大力推薦下,台灣的歲月風景得以在阿里郎國度閃光.















該說些甚麼呢?
嗯..啊..咦..唉 ...















還是合照罷,
皆大歡喜.






















Chang ChaoTang: A Black-and-White Flight in Kairos
by 申暳瓊 Shin Hyekyung (Curator and critic)

Upon encountering Chang ChaoTang’s body of work for the first time, one cannot help but appreciate the Zeitgeist emanating from this Taiwanese photographer. By nature, photography has the intensity of maximizing the moment. Along with this characteristic, Chang’s works are also pregnant with the depth of multiple meanings of ‘reality’. As the artist transforms ordinary scenes of everyday life into ‘decisive moments,’ he bears testimony to half a century of Taiwanese history.

Photography, due to the mechanical nature of how the camera works, is an irrefutable frame of ‘then and there’, a splinter of ‘reality’ captured in a moment of freezing. Photographers prepare elaborately and wait tenaciously to capture this moment of ‘truth’. In his photography, Chang waits for the essence of ‘truth’ to reveal itself at its innermost depth. Chang says that when he encounters a rhinoceros that has not been tamed in his heart his breathing stops and the photographic time begins.

“I worked the night shift until four thirty in the morning and was waiting for the elevator by myself on the thirtieth floor. With my head still in the state of haziness, I lit a cigarette. The elevator was particularly slow in coming that day. The corridor was pitch-black. Just then, I thought I heard an odd noise, a collision of some kind. Finally, the elevator arrived. It opened, and what do I see but a rhinoceros jumping out...”

Chang’s earlier works were pictures mostly taken in the artist’s hometown Banchao and its surroundings. They are works that convey a cross-section of Taiwan of the 1960s with scenes of idyllic farming life as a background. In Shadow (1962), a man without head is standing; in Ruins (1963), we see children in front of a heap of ruins with no focus in their eyes; A Blind (1964) shows a portrait of a young man behind a curtain with a ghost-like face. These are all images taken from Banchao. The works from this period reveal, again and again, the melancholy of the era in Taiwan. His work Gazing (1963), in particular, which reminds the viewer of the era when the artist was a young man, clearly illustrates that the artist’s formative years are tangential to the historical repression and suffering in Taiwan.

From 1970 to 1985, Chang’s work goes through a change. Having shed the melancholy of his formative years in the 1960s, Chang begins to show works that combine the mildness of middle age and the decisiveness of an artist who can see through reality. Entering his mature age during this period, Chang begins to express Taiwan’s reality from an integrated perspective, and he also begins to borrow artistic styles from Modernism, which had enormous impact on Taiwanese culture in the 1960s. His work On the Beach (1979), which portrays a military training exercise, in particular, is a surrealist work inspired by Rene Magritte. Also, both A Rest (1984), which reminds the viewer of Joseph Kudelka’s works, and Mourner s(1985), which hints at an influence from Ingmar Bergman’s film aesthetics, reveal the breadth of Chang’s awareness of Modernist works and his curiosity.

From 1986, and throughout the 2000s, Chang’s works turn toward the abstract. Fortress (2003) and Endless Space (2004) are Minimalist landscape photographs in which beauty of lines comes to the fore. By 2000s, having been a photographer for half a century, it seems that Chang’s eyes are satisfied with abbreviated landscapes. Space becomes emptier as Chang repeats enlargement and abbreviation, maximizing an appreciation for the artist who has long come of age. The photographer Chang ChaoTang is a passionate artist, as Camus might be in his own words. “I only have to live with the entirety of my body and bear testimony with the entirety of my mind. Works of art will then follow.”

In the era of digital technology, the Bressonian ‘decisive moment’ arouses a pang of nostalgia as strong as the word ‘hometown’ does. That is because temporality in digital age has more to do with segmentation and assemblage than with waiting. The ancient Greeks had two categories of time, chronos and kairos, where chronos refers to chronological time and kairos signifies meaningful time in which something specific happens. Chang’s works belong to the category of absolute kairos, where one can feel the existential weight of the artist. The current exhibition of the leading Taiwanese Modernist photographer Chang ChaoTang will not only present a travel in kairos but also offer a special encounter in which the viewers can enjoy a full measure of gray tones from the variety of intense black-and- white photographs.


http://www.gallery-now.com/html/ex_now.html