楊英風的「生態美學」與臺灣當代藝術中的「社會介入」：關於「社會造型」的一些想法Yuyu Yang's "Ecological Aesthetics" and the "Social Intervention" in the Taiwanese Contemporary Art: Some Thoughts on the "Social Modeling"
In the Taiwanese art history and the artist communities, no artists like Yuyu Yang with a stark and manifest social responsibility, the construction of aesthetic conception and the perseverance of implementation. It can be said that the manifesto of "ecology aesthetics" concludes his claim, also achieves his work's orientation and style. Compared with this, the social intervention of Taiwanese contemporary art under the current of globalization is another cultural production of time atmosphere. If we take Taiwanese art history as a mutable axis of continuing evolution, growth and metamorphosis,Yuyu Yang is a representative of the 1970s and the 1980s. It can be an interesting and meaningful connection and dialogue compared with the 1990s' Taiwanese artists' creation on social issues. Yang's conception of modeling contains a strong social consciousness and the mission of the public aesthetic mission. He purported that we should extract the traditional Chinese culture and then transform it into plastic elements. This traditional and modern modeling is a catalyst of influencing cultural environment, reaching the goal of art education. When a plastic modeling is put into the society, it will be like language or sings, functioning the aesthetic judgement, dialogue and connection... and finally forms the social modeling. Seeing and thinking are two sides of a coin, so the meaning of modeling is beyond its boundary. There are many functions of an artist's plastic creation; it even obtains a collective social connotation. Artists' professional contribution to the society is actually the social modeling. If we deem the complicated social modeling as a broad sense modeling or maximized modeling, which models the society. In this case, it is not so far between the two sides.
Keywords
Taiwanese art, Yuyu Yang, ecological aesthetics, social intervention, social modeling
Many reasons will cause degradations of wooden artifacts. For example, wood-decay fungi are parts of living cycle of nature world, but when they grow on artifacts, they become the bad things that conservators have to stop. Wood-decay fungi will not only affect wooden structure but also cause discoloration. When accompany with insect infestation, it will certainly accelerate degradation. The best way to prevent wood-decay fungi from growing is to control the temperature and relative humidity in the environment, which may be achievable in well-funded museum. However, many private museum and historical sites, which might be facing financial or environmental limits, found the environment hard to maintain. Therefore degradation caused by wood-decay fungi still exists and needs to be treated.
After conservations, including surface cleaning, consolidation, filling, retouching etc., wood structure will be stable again, and the broken area will be difficult to be distinguished with bare eye. And the artifact can keep carrying the responsibility of education, exhibition, collection and research.
The conceptual and technical development of photography in modern Taiwanese history can be traced back to the colonial rule of western powers and Japan and has been an integral part of modern art history and visual culture for more than a century. In those 100 years, whether anthropological photography, realistic photography, photoreportage, commercial photography, salon photography, pictorialism, rural photography, eco photography and even the popular digital photography of today, the visual history created by Taiwanese photography reflects the process of visual reconstruction based on the change from the colonial to post colonial era. Photography that should reflect the historical materialism of Taiwan, especially in the post war period and the beginning of the totalitarian rule of the KMT, came under the absolute control of unprecedented political forces and was therefore reduced to the role of“ other” having lost the power to observe, criticize, interpret and create thought provoking images and stripped of its visual identity.
Beginning in the 1980s realistic photography began to ask "What is Taiwan?" and engaged in a visual exploration that was long-term, involved multiple points of view and akin to field research in nature. On the one hand this involved recording the omnipresent otherness of "colonial ruins," on the other it used the visual process of rural and local people to reconstruct images and historical memory based on the elimination of otherness. This became the earliest experience in the search for a Taiwanese identity in the post war period. After the end of Martial Law and especially since the beginning the New Millennium rapid democratization, the removal of totalitarian control of society and changes in the way people reflected on Taiwanese values had a huge impact on Taiwanese photography. As a result Taiwanese photography entered an era in which it became far more critical on political, societal, communal, cultural and gender issues. At this point, photography became much more than a tool of consumption and was transformed into a vehicle for the showcasing of new ideas on the reformulation of history, opposition to otherness and the establishment of cultural subjectivity and identity in the post war period.
Keywords
Taiwanese modern photography, memory, de-othering, subjectivity, historical discourse power
As one of the members of the "Ton-Fan Group" (literally, the Orient Painting Society), Taiwanese veteran artist Chu Wei-Bor (1929- ) viewed the "Oriental Spirit" as the most important inspiration for his creation. Throughout Chu Wei-Bor's artwork over a period of six decades, it is apparent that the impact of facing Western art triggered his self-consciousness, which led him to turn to an Oriental philosophy which is the only way to shape his artistic thinking. The employment of the appropriation and transformation of symbols and imagery serve as a mean to convey his Oriental philosophy as a spiritual process. This paper is intended to explore the potential of Chu Wei-Bor's works on "Imagery Thinking" with other similar aesthetic concepts and clarify his focus on the subject works in terms of spirit awareness. The concept of "Realm Patterns" is proposed for interpreting the artistic performance of "Oriental Spirit" in Chu Wei-Bor's complex art work namely, "A square has no corners" in Tao and "Sunyata" in Zen. The language of his artwork can be considered as his respond and demonstration regarding the synthesis of the Traditional Orient and the Modern Occident. This is also a phasic conclusion of the six decades in the artist's career.
Keywords
Chu Wei-Bor, Realm Patterns, Space Aesthetics, Cultural Imagery, Complex Art
It could be found that Hakkanese architecture in Taiwan preserved many features of Hakka identity. Twin ridge beams is one of those features, which had been discussed in many treatises. By comparing the twin ridge beam structures in Taiwan and mainland China, and by investigating the architecture of Hakkanese, focus on its modernization. We realized the practice of twin ridge beams must relate to the folk custom of Hakka people. Moreover, double roofs and related wooden structures of ancient Chinese architectures are a kind of interior spatial forms, which shown how traditional Chinese insisted on the principle of harmony and symmetry in indoor space. It became a method of interior design and could be found all over south China. The question of structural degradation between double roofs and twin ridge beams may be made an intensive study in such context.
