Exhibition: Goodnight, see you later. So Yo Hen Solo Exhibition

Dates: 2021.08.28-11.13

Venue: TKG+

In the semi lockdown days during the months in mid 2021 outbreak of the pandemic in Taiwan, the involuntarily reduced living space also means that your sense of scale of daily realities were also drastically tilted. For me, the stray cats' roars and fighting above my neighbors' canopy became a daily street show from the windowstill; the eight-meter hall way from the living room to the kitchen was turned into a workout trail; the grocery shopping felt like a shielded crusade for a weekly trophy in a fridge. The mundane was ritualized, the trivial magnified, adorned with affective meanings that I had not experienced before. The original rhythm of life was suspended then prolonged. Yet this suspension aslo means the existence, at least anticipated, of a destination. An ending of such peculiar time, the « return» to normality. Not intervals, these moments are like trajectories from a takeoff to a landing.

Just when public space such as galleries reopened and you thought our special relations with our daily livings have come to an end, So Yo Hen's « Good night, see you later. » (2021) bring you back to such moments, and the distorted, suspended yet almost mesmerizing sense of scale of time and space are then evoked.

Upon entrance of the gallery space at the basement of TKG+, you are first welcomed with exhibition information and floor plan printed on plain white papers deprived of fancy graphic design. These sheets are casually folded into packs and loosely placed in a cardboard box. If you are Taiwansese then these paper packs might reminds you of Taiwanese household's dining table, where the tiny waste bins made from promotional leaflets are conveniently used for collecting fish bones and food remnants. The artist statement' is written in a personal and intimate language, preparing you an undertone of the exhibition as intimate, related to the daily realities. You walk down the plain gallery space deliberated deprived of any wooden structure, a quilt laying on the floor only enhance such impression. It is a white blanket, sitting on the grey floor as if it was just carefully folded by someone out of bed, or maybe the other way round, waiting to be unfolded by a groggy, sleepy-eyed. Under the quilt you then perceive the black strings and control bars often used in marionette puppetry. Just when you start to ponder the artists' intention to have yield almost the entire half of the exhibition space to such single item, the traces of the dimmed spots of light on the wall lead you to the second half of the space. There in a single-channel video was marionette theatre actors playing the quilt as if there was a living, moving figure squirming underneath. The title of the work, « Good night, see you later. » associate this moving creature with some sleepless night you had: the gentle move of the body in order not to disturb the one sleeping next to you, the irritation caused by the contact of the blanket and the skin, the buzzing silece of the night, the distressing wake that does not seem to end. Later you learn that the phrase is an intimate bedtime farewell of the artist to his son. Only after bidding goodnight to his family can So role shift from a father and husband to an artist. He would then resume his artistic work, the conceiving and producing of which oftentimes also means insomniac nights.

On the other corner of the gallery space was a folk guitar sitting on a stand. It does not require a closed-up look to discover the marks of the drastic damages and the labour of careful repair left on the guitar, together with the 400 NTD price tag remained on its neck. At this point you notice more dents on the walls. Those were left by So smashing the guitar in this space, before sending the instrument to be repaired. The cornerly location of the work as well as the bench against a pillar gives the work an inviting gesture. « Please do touch the work. » says in the artist statement. The audience are encourage to comfortably sit down and play the guitar to yourself. «minus edition » (2021) reminds of the contrast between an instant damage and the reassemblage of instrument's fragments and the time consuming repair that followed, as well as of the happenings on site when the work is displayed. Next to this work was a pile of poster with a miniature landscape oil painting printed on it. The title « Drawing on the outlook » (2021) is literal. When you flip to the other side of the poster, you realized this landscape painting was done by the artist on his mask shield in the park in the time of covid. The poster then was only a documentation of this performative act.

It took four years for So Yo Hen to have a solo exhibition after his previous solo show. The well-reclaimed "Plaster Gong"(2017) was a revisit and reenactment of a theatre piece that marks the Taiwanese avant-garde art in the 60s, speaking of the fleeting subjectivity of Taiwan intertwined with the martial law. The 2013 « Hua-shan-qiang » that fetched him a grand prize of the Taishin Art Award was based on his field research and historical investigation relating Taiwanese architecture history and folk culture with, with question of Taiwanese subjectivity and colonial history, with works evolving around a dark, whimsical video narrating figures of a miniature paper house designed for the dead. In « Good night, see you later. », historical settings was yielded for familial dailies. Those who knows So might relate this to the artist' personal life: starting a family, becoming a father of two boys over the past few years. Knowing that the exhibition making took place and was obliged to reschedule in the middle of the pandemic made would probably underline such association. However, a turn to the everyday lifes was not a retreat of So's artistic approach. Rather, the works evokes his even earlier works since the mid 2000s onward. From his « I'm Pluto, Yo! » (2009) that included works that made of daily objects such as platic egg packages (Lenchi Spa, 2009), ping pong balls and hairdryers (« universe ping pong ball, 2009) , or the gym equipment as painting tools (in the exhibition « Wonder Painting Association's Wonder Show » with two others members of his artist group Wonder Boys.)

For long time So has been showing great interests in the minor objects and happenings of the everyday lives, and how these make one question the sheer nature of art of today. He described this interest in an early year interview « paying tribute to an universe, with make-believe plays». However, it is not just the mundane objects and moments that So's curiosity falls in. More specially, it is what lies « in between » these trivialities and how their meanings could possibly become, art or non art, that forms great deal of his interest and artistic expression. In « Good night, see you later. », such state of « potentially becoming », of meaning making from one end to the other, was further more emphasized with the temporal and bodily association with the creators' absence, though evoked by the traces of his presence. A quilt becoming a sculpture, a guitar and its destroys and repair an installation, a mask shield a canvas, « Good night, see you later. » relates ones' daily with sculptural, the plastic, and the performative elements of artistic creations, but such path of meaning making were also constantly subverted by the works themselves. The quilt was performed into a moving sculpture, upon completion such highlights of performativity in turn dissolves the meaning of being performative ( Is the sleeping artist performing performativity? ) . Similarly, one could wonder, if an audience playing the guitar in «minus edition », can be seen as a shift of his role of a passive receiver of art, then when was the point of the completion of the work made? Can one really take the shifting material interfaces of the senses in « Drawing on the outlook » as a revenge of the tradition of landscape painting, since at the end it was still the painting/mask that enable our perception of the work ? Such suspension of completion of meaning was complicated by the publications available onsite. Full-length videos of performances of « Good night, see you later. » made into a DVD, visual documentations of the smashing and repair process of «minus edition » into a photo book, and « Drawing on the outlook », a poster, were all available on sale with affordable prices, casually placed in recycled cardboard boxes next to the work in the gallery. Like tricks of mise-en-abime, So Yo-Hen's works put the artist as well as the audience into a permanent meta state of meaning production and perception: just because of the attempt of articulation of meanings, the meaning making is suspended. 

(unpublished article)