Returning Sight － The Fissures of Moving Image: Curated by HSU Fong-Ray
In the returning gaze of imagery, the reading of language never transcends a silent gaze.
The display of imagery allows reality — moments that have passed — to reappear before one’s eyes. This version of reality, however, is never the same as what happened before the camera lens. What exists between the past and the present, when captured by the lens, becomes a subject for contemporary art that is explained and interpreted through text, in order to establish a legitimate connection with the viewer. A work of imagery then becomes contextualized for viewing and exhibition purposes. This is when imagery loses its prerogative to exist on its own, while text — be it artist statement or curatorial — bestows superfluous meaning upon the imagery. But it has been forgotten that only when imagery stands on its own, without text, does it speak volumes.
How does imagery speak to the viewer? Perhaps through this imaginary fissure which allows the moving image to segue between the viewer’s observation and perception. The exhibition Returning Sight — The Fissures of Moving Image attempts to take imagery out of its normal context, beckoning the viewer to explore it, free from symbolism, descriptive influences, and narrative influences. The reappearance of imagery is investigated through the works of Machine Whisper (2015) by WU I-YEH, The Presence of Silence by HOU I-Ting, Scenery Other End by TSENG Yu-Chin, Ten Minutes Left by NIU Chun-Chiang, and The Island by LIN Guan-Ming. The instinctive nature of these artists’ image aesthetics changes viewers’ perception of time in each individual work, where imagery reclaims its fundamental right to exist on its own, making the invisible visible, and silence heard.
The image is never a simply reality. Cinematic images are primarily operations, relations between the sayable and the visible, ways of playing with the before and after, cause and effect. These operations involve different image-function, different meanings of the word "image". Two cinematic shots or sequence of shots can thus pertain to a very different "imageness". Conversely, one cinematic shot can pertain to the same type of imagness as a novelistic sentence or a painting.
－Jacques Rancière
The distinction of images lies in its ability to recreate itself in the transition between mediums, not only as an imitation of reality, but also exhibitingplurality. Yet the attainment and designation of visual identity often implies a rejection of reproduction and a dependence on language for visible images, which connects knowledge, perception, action, contemplation, consciousness, and unconsciousness to the same level of activities. This is not only an attempt to align the experience between subject and spectator, but for latter to ignore mental trajectories, while the experience itself begins to fall apart. It imparts an imbalance between content and form, shifting towards a translated form of matter and text, altered into simple descriptive structure and textual content, to govern, entitle, and examine an image's relation between inception and intention. When the emancipation of images is directly linked to reproduced imitation and its subsequent displacement, its appearance of ambiguous perceptions fall into the tethers of language, and images become stories or uncracked visual codes, reproduced equally and uniformly, which disrupts existing systems.
The operation of images is an examination of reproduction, where real experiences are resistant to constructed rationality, which force images to lose their meaning, overcome by knowledge and language. We can therefore call into question: How does the audience comprehend the meaning of images, through a mixture of constructed rationality and lived experience? The display of images is a summoning of absence, making concealed sensuality visible and touchable, but this is in fact the inhibition and duality of reproduction－unfolding between the grey area of the visible and invisible, presence and absence. Images break through silence only when they no longer speak to their spectators. In other words, when images are replaced by language, they become voice pipes, transmitted through mutated bodies. In contrast, when images are silent, its form becomes the content of art, escaping the bounds of language, and retains its body. We can perhaps imagine a crack within reproductions, allowing images to reflect between observation and perception. That is representation constructed by time and motion, which allows images to move beyond the constraints of concept to instinctual perception.
The exhibition "Returning Sight — The Fissures of Moving Image" attempts to elevate representation in moving images, allowing images to explore environmental qualities outside of symbolism, exposition, and description. The momentum of which comes from condensed, frozen time and the motion of moving images, coated between movement and stillness. This action appears to sever the connection between representation and reproduction, enabling images to embody truth and preserve their power, revealing indiscernible strength and voicing the inaudible.
In the returning gaze of images, the reading of language never surpasses silent gaze.
