Door gods, jian­nian sculpture, processions…. Taiwanese are well acquainted with the trappings of temple culture. Now, those same elements are being turned into rich fodder for the contemporary arts.

The 2017 Sou­langh International Contemporary Art Festival is taking a new look at Taiwanese temple culture. Hosted by Tai­nan’s Sou­langh Culture Park, this year’s festival will bring together domestic and foreign artists for an examination of folk religion that bridges the traditional and the contemporary.

 

The festival’s five curators, including Gong Jow-jiun, dean of the doctoral program in art creation and theory at Tai­nan National University of the Arts.

It is a typically quiet May noon at the Sou­langh Culture Park, a cultural venue created from the remains of the old ­Jiali Sugar Mill in Tai­nan’s ­Jiali District. As we slip inside the first of its huge halls, we hear the voice of Gong Jow-jiun, one of the curators of the 2017 Sou­langh International Contemporary Art Festival. Gong is standing in front of a huge mural that Taiwanese painter Chen Chiu-shan created for the Da­jia Tsu-chi Temple in Tai­nan’s ­Rende District, explaining it to the 30 or 40 festival visitors clustered nearby.

The festival’s five curators, including Gong Jow-jiun, dean of the doctoral program in art creation and theory at Tai­nan National University of the Arts, photographer Chen Po-i, and architect Eric Chen, spent three years on the project at the behest of the Tai­nan City Cultural Affairs Bureau. Taking traditional folk religion as their theme, they gathered together 38 domestic and foreign artists to create pieces for the festival, and to mix traditional and contemporary elements within those works, which include large temple paintings, images of door gods, and photographs of paper arts.

Contemporary art takes on temple culture

Huang ­Chiung-ying, who heads the Tai­nan CAB’s Cultural Parks Management Division and worked behind the scenes to move the festival forward, notes that the one-time ­Jiali Sugar Mill already has an artists’ village that invites artists-in-residence to produce work that draws on local culture. “And temple culture and Wang Ye worship are important aspects of ­Jiali’s local culture,” says ­Huang.

Gong Jow-jiun and his team stumbled across the work of Taiwanese temple painter Pan Lishui at Tainan’s Shatao Temple. After making stone rubbings, they enlarged and recolored the images and put them on display at the Soulangh Culture Park.

In Omnipresent, artist Tu Wei-cheng satirizes Taiwan’s educational system by putting his own face on a sculpture of Confucius.

Few people realize how deeply rooted temple culture and Wang Ye worship are in ­Jiali District. Long settled by Han Chinese, the surrounding area is home to the Nan­kun­shen, Dai­tian and Tsu-chi Temples (in Bei­men, Ma­dou and ­Rende). The neighborhood around the Sou­langh Culture Park also hosts one of Tai­nan’s major religious processions, the Sou­langh Incense Ceremony.

Huang happened to attend that ceremony during her second year on the job. A non-local, she found it unique and fascinating, particularly the “hundred-man centipede formation” performed by 108 children, all in different outfits and makeup.

But ­Huang feels that the ceremony’s Guinness­-World-Record-setting “centipede formation” and ritual burning of Wang Ye’s boat deserve more attention than they get. Taiwanese folk rituals and temple culture may be hugely popular, but they have yet to find a place within Taiwanese fine arts, and are rarely depicted in the work of artists from the recognized arts community. The Sou­langh Culture Park has therefore used the 2017 iteration of the triennial ceremony to revisit temple culture through the lens of contemporary art.

Gong says that the festival’s Chinese name hints at its purpose: prefacing the formulaic “international contemporary arts festival” with the notion of “mutual companionship (kau-puê) in the near future.” “The Taiwanese expression ‘kau-puê’ originates with the old folk religious tradition of the ‘kau-puê realm’ [a geographical territory within which residents worship one primary deity],” explains Gong. 

A fascinating unfurling

Visitors to the festival pass through an outdoor installation before entering the indoor portion of the exhibition. Curator Eric Chen drew on the idea of city streets and made use of the park’s old railway tracks and factory space to create his Urban Archipelago, ten floating “islands” arranged in a way that recalls temple processions and parades. With folksy names such as “Generals’ Island,” “Heavenly Empress Island,” and “Holy Child Island,” the islands display works by folk artist Hung Tung and photographers ­Chang Chao-tang and Lin Bo-­liang, as well as photographs from the collection of the Tai­nan Museum of Fine Arts that document temple rituals and god processions from long ago.

Designer Ho Chia-hsing reveals the beauty of the written word by transforming and combining text written or printed in different fonts and calligraphic styles.

Gong Jow-jiun explains Japanese painter Chihiro Minato’s Ephiphany Drawing to visitors.

Lin Bo-liang’s photo series Vis-à-vis shows jiannian sculptors working on Tsu-chi Temple in Rende and Zhenxing Temple in Jiali.

The traditional and contemporary works exhibited indoors are equally fascinating. Visitors first see a mural that painter Chen Chiu-shan created for the Tsu-chi Temple at the time of its restoration. Another area displays sketches, letters and other works that show how Chen, a passionate social critic, breaks with traditional practice by incorporating present-day political figures and events into temple paintings that more commonly take historical scenes as their subjects.

Another gallery displays paintings of temple door gods done on paper by Liao Qing-­zhang.

Liao, who studied temple painting with Tai­nan masters Ding Qing­shi and Chen Bing­shen, generally takes people as his subjects, and has depicted Confucius expounding his philosophy and classic ghost stories in his work. He began committing temple paintings to paper after being awed by the human figures in the murals he saw while visiting ­Shanxi Province’s ­Yongle Temple, slowly developing his drawing skills and use of color.

Temple paintings are usually impossible to exhibit because of their large size, the challenges of dismantling them, and the difficulty of conserving them. Using paper as a medium for the style resolves all of these issues.

The festival’s Co-opposite Atelier gallery exhibits pieces in which artists have applied contemporary approaches to the depiction of folk-religious arts and performances. Gong explains that the curators used a technique often applied to temple construction in assembling the atelier. Temples often have two different crews work simultaneously, not only to shorten the time to completion, but also to get the crews’ competitive juices flowing and keep them on their toes.

The atelier aimed to promote contemporary art and ignite the fires of creativity in a similar fashion. When the curators had artists Li Jiun-yang, Lin Shu-kai, ­Zhang Xu Zhan, and Ciou Zih-yan work together in the atelier for three months in the second half of 2016, sparks flew. Each produced pieces that hint at the presence of the other three artists. Those traces are especially apparent in the works that Li and Lin exhibited on facing walls. Although the two artists differ in style, composition, use of line, and choice of subject matter, both produced pieces drawing on elements present in the other’s work.

The festival’s Epiphany Theatre focuses on photo­graphic installations, pulling together the work of photographers Lin Bo-­liang and Shen Chao-­liang, and artists Yao Jui-­chung and Chi­hiro Mi­nato.

Lin Bo-­liang spent more than three months photographing craftsmen producing jian­nian ceramic sculptures for the Dajia Tsu-chi Temple in ­Rende District, a place he’d visited in his youth. Literally meaning “cut and paste,” jian­nian is a sculptural style in which sculpted forms are finished with a mosaic of colored ceramic fragments. He then assembled the photos into Vis-à-vis, a series that he hopes will make the public more aware of the beauty of the craftsmen’s work and heighten people’s appreciation of the spirit and value of traditional crafts.

Lin’s photos have brought new attention to the exquisite work of master jian­nian sculptor He Jin­long and his apprentice Wang Bao­yuan, examples of which include depictions of ­Xiang ­Zhuang’s tension-filled sword dance and of the storied Yang family. The dusky hall also includes works from Shen Chao-­liang’s 2006-2014 Stage series, as well as Yao Jui-­chung’s Links Between Colossal Deities, which consists of photos of giant images of gods from around Taiwan. Removed from the context of traditional religion, the dozens of black-and-white images ponder modern humanity’s endless pursuit of objects and desires.

Photographer Chen Po-i deliberately echoes the “asking the water” ceremony of Taiwanese folk religion by displaying his photos in bowls of water.

Artist Eric Chen drew on the idea of city streets to create his ten-island archipelago, laying it out in a way that recalls temple processions and parades.

From movement to creation

It isn’t just the works on display that are filled with the kau-puê spirit, it was also the whole process of comrades and artists jointly curating the festival.

During the three years the festival spent in development, Gong also carried out fieldwork at temples throughout Taiwan; planned, assembled, and published four issues of Kau-puê Art Associate magazine; and in 2016 organized both the “Kau-puê x Photography Forum: 2016 Tai­pei Biennial Exhibition Plan” and, with the Museum of Contemporary Art Tai­pei, the “Folk Art x Contemporary Art” talks as warmups for the coming year’s event. Unfortunately, a severe earthquake in Tai­nan in early 2016 disrupted his preparations for the Sou­langh festival, badly damaging the halls in which the festival was to be held and so delaying the start of the event. Fortunately, the quake had no impact on Eric Chen and his Archi­Blur Lab’s installation of the outdoor Urban Archipelago, which Chen Po-i photographed in the runup to the opening.

With the three-month-long Sou­langh International Contemporary Art Festival entering its final days, Gong admits that he was initially worried that the culture park’s relatively out-of-the-way location would negatively affect attendance. But groups of people began hiring buses to travel to the venue as soon as the festival opened. Interestingly, enthusiasm for the festival has extended beyond the arts community to members of Taiwan’s older generation, who have taken great pleasure in seeing childhood memories of temple parades and god processions rekindled and recast as contemporary art.

The festival hasn’t just used art to reflect on temple culture, it has also sought to seek out new creative possibilities transcending those offered by the large religious festivals of the 1990s and the more recent appropriation of religious sites and events to promote tourism.

Are temples and god processions merely the traditional religion of the people? A visit to the Sou­langh International Contemporary Art Festival to check out its ten halls, four alleys, and ten-island Urban Archipelago may change your mind.