Paintings featured in All Happy Returns are all revolved around a character created by me – a taxidermist who is insentient to emotions, and thus different from most of the people, he has no way to attain any sense of belonging through love, the relationship with others and society.
One solution to his cogitation is to physically embody these emotions and abstract relationships. He starts garnering chunks and pieces about human beings and bringing them together with redefined objects from himself into a collage of human gestures nuancing variegated emotions ratified by generic cognition. By displaying all this in front of himself, the taxidermist self-imposes an era of re-education regarding human nature.
My subject matter has always been focusing on human behaviors and mental states. My observed persons are the exact reflection of our existence in society. Every behavior comes about for the sake of “Someone” ‘s existence. I transform this mode of life into varied elements and superimpose them on my created character. The scene in my works is taken from some everyday fragments through the process of exaggeration, while the collaged elements in the scene are taken from fragmented memories that once ran past our mind. Marrying the two parts sparks a distance that is both proximate to reality and yet inscrutable to common sense. I hope that my spectators, while standing in front of these much gravitated elements, would be struck instantly by a covert comfort through re-experiencing experienced moments; meanwhile, they would also feel constantly anxious about being surveilled. This is the totalitarian power from any civilized society – those who fall outside the default system failing to integrate into the set rhythm only feel overwrought; in the meantime, the violence of civilization sequesters anyone who fails to be incorporated outside reality as pariahs. We are, inconspicuously and collectively, sunk into an enormous lethargy because of our inveterate penchant for acting out our instrumentality to complete our society and for forgetting the quintessence of being itself.
此計劃一開始我先設定了一個角色-一位標本製作師。他無法體會到任何情緒,以至於無法像一般人一樣在日常生活中透過愛、透過與他人及社會的關係得到歸屬感。
在他的思考裡唯一的解決之道便是將這些情緒、這些抽象的關係具體實現,所以他開始蒐集人類的碎片,並將其與自己所定義過後的物件拼湊成常人認知中代表著各種情緒的姿態,然後一一將這一切呈現在自己的面前,對自己進行一場關於人性的再教育。
我創作的題材一直以來著重在人的行為與精神狀態,而這些被觀察的對象其實就是我們生存在這社會上的現狀,所有的行為都是為了證明“人”的存在。所以我將這樣的模式轉換成一個個元素並套用在我所創造出的人物身上。畫面的場景來自於異常放大過後的日常生活片段,畫面中拼湊的元素則來自於可能曾出現在所有人腦海間的瑣碎記憶,兩者的結合將會呈現出離現實不遠但卻不是基於常理可了解的差距,我期望讓觀者在這些龐大的元素中與自己曾發生的共同經驗相遇,當下會感到藏匿的安心,同時也會意識到分秒都被監視著的焦慮。文明社會場所就是具有這麼專制的力量,使融不進節拍裡的人在秩序下不知所措,同時也在操作著文明的暴力將不融於現實的人隔離在現實的環境外,就好像我們不知不覺間都陷入了一種集體巨大的疲憊中,因為我們一直習慣於去扮演一個讓這社會更加完整的工具而忘記身而為人的本質。