Cheng-Ta YU

CHENG-TA YUb. 1983 in Tainan, Taiwan Currently works and lives in Taipei, Taiwan.

Taipei Arts Awards (First Place), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, TaiwanS-An Aesthetics Praise-Arts Creation Support in the category of Plastic Arts, S-An cultural Foundation, Taiwan Project Grants, The National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan Outstanding Art Work Prize, Fine Arts Department of Taipei National University of the Arts, Taipei, Taiwan Kaohsiung Awards in the category of Mixed Media, Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung, Taiwan S-An Aesthetics Praise-Arts Creation Support in the category of Plastic Arts, S-An cultural Foundation, Taiwan

2008

20072006

Ventriloquists : Introduction, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan2008

Artists in Residence Programme, ISCP ( International Studio and Curatorial Program), New York, U.S.A OPENSPACE, Summer Art Camp, Kunsthochschule, Kassel, GermanyTaipei National University of the Arts, M.F.A., Taipei, TaiwanTaipei National University of the Arts, B.F.A., Taipei, Taiwan

200920072006-2006

AWARD, PRIZE AND GRANT

COLLECTION

contect info:chengta227@gmail.comwww.yuchengta.comyuchengta.blogspot.com+886-926-763-183

EDUCATION

Taiwan Cultural Council of Affairs Artists in Residence Programme, ISCP, New York, U.S.AOPEN SPACE, Summer Art Camp, Kunsthochschule Kassel, GermanyThe New Taiwanese-Digital Witnesses, Curator assistant, Kuandu museum of fine arts, Taipei, TaiwanNijinsky’s, Curator assistant, Kuandu museum of fine arts, Taipei, Taiwan

200920072005

PARTICIPATED PROJECTS

The 53rd Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion : Foreign Affairs:Artists from Taiwan, Pallazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, ItalyWelcome to the Desert of the Real, TungHai University Art Gallery, Taichung, TaiwanBiennale Cuvée - World Selection of Contemporary Art, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, AustriaCode Share - 5 Continents 10 Biennales 20 Artists, Contemporary Arts Center, Vilnius, LithuaniaSocially Disorganised, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, AustraliaThe View From Elsewhere, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, AustraliaTaiwan-Israel Young Artists Interchanging Exhibition 2, Kuandu museum of fine arts, Taipei, Taiwan

2009

GROUP EXHIBITION

The Sixth Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, TaiwanTaipei Arts Awards Exhibition, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, TaiwanAsia Students and Young Artists Art Festival, Seoul Station Old Bldg, Seoul, KoreaGrooving : New Wave of Taiwan Contemporary Art, Project Fulfill Art Space, Taipei, TaiwanBorderline.Mirrorlike: Taiwan-Israel Young Artists, Kuandu museum of fine arts, Taipei, TaiwanXiao Mei Hurts, Underground Gallery, Taipei, TaiwanNo Error Lost, NanHai Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

2008

Art Party, Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, JapanTaipei - Fukuoka Interchanging Art Exhibition, Kuandu museum of fine arts, Taipei, TaiwanOPEN SPACE, Kunsthochschule Kassel, Kassel, Germany0 – 0, National Taipei University of Education Bombproof Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

2007

Intermedatine, NTUA, Taipei County, TaiwanGUAN C PARK, Underground Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

2006

Art Taiwan- The Fourth Artist Fair continues, Chinese Culture and Movie Center, Taipei, TaiwanThe New Taiwanese - Digital Witnesses, Kuandu museum of fine arts, Taipei, Taiwan

2005

The process of imagining the relationships between different entangled forms in life, for me, involves rethinking the distance between others and myself, and beginning to determine my own position therein. In my works, I attempt to address the imagined relationship between a subject and an other, through the subtle cracks that may exist within culture, language or identity, and the differ-ences that exist within those cracks. This creates the possibility for a new kind of relationship. I do not attempt to express the conflicts and contradictions that lie within differences, but use humour as a means to make connections, or produce accidents. In the series “Ventriloquists”, I address the cracks that exist within the differences between language systems by playing the role of a transparent yet visible interpreter who uses bodily manipulation and the voice to express a new form of politics and a new dialogue of foreign relations.

Ventriloquists: Introduction is a series of works filmed on the streets of Taipei, with the participation of foreigners who are on short-term travel excursions in Taiwan. In each video I hide behind a tourist who is not particularly familiar with the Mandarin language, and began to voice made-up and stereotyped self-intro-ductions for them, based on the impressions they gave me. For someone from a different land, the voice is a tool for conveying information and communicating, but in this circumstance, it becomes a towering wall. The many different tiny fissures of dissonance and misunderstanding begin to create an interesting and ridiculous adverse relationship between myself and the person in front of me.

Filmed at the Won Won Building in Taipei Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su is a film of two women from the Philippines who married into Taiwan-ese families. Having lived in this foreign land for over a decade both women have come to use the local language as an essential tool in everyday life, but because of their different backgrounds they use the language in different ways. When interacting with Liang Mei-Lan, I attempted to converse with her in three languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese and English). When communicating with Em-ily, who has no Taiwanese citizenship, I used Mandarin and English. All three of us were using forms of voice that were not particularly “official or standardised”. It was a conversation within the cracks of language and unable to always convey what we meant situations of miscommunication and dissonance occasionally arose. Eventually I asked them to sing a Chinese song, in an attempt to liber-ate them from the intangible box that inherently exists in the give-and-take of language, and to set free the poignant images of the disparity between foreign cultures.

STATEMENT

Ventriloquists: Introduction, video installation, 2008, Taipei Biennial

Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su , video installation, 2009, Venice Biennale

Essay

Cheng-Ta Yu belongs to a generation too young to have ex-perienced the severe battle of public opinion that raged around the question of “identity” in Taiwan during and after the 1987 lifting of martial law. Nonetheless, he lives in an era framed by a host of problems surrounding the coexistence of different ethnic groups, and because of this, the special quality of his art lies in his artistic imagination being able, in a state removed from historical developments, to engage in a highly limpid and profound dialogue with the realities of society regarding history. In his works The Ventriloquist (2007), She is My Aunt (2008) and Ventriloquists: Introduction (2008), a focal point clearly emerged, which com-mentators have characterised as “self-fracturing political intimation”. Its form is a kind of mise-en-l’abîme: creating fissures that generate disparate meanings. For example, in The Ventriloquist and Ventriloquists: Introduction, Yu hides behind a featured “speaker” who directly faces the camera, and it is in fact Yu that then provides “voice” and “text”. A kind of inverted relationship appears between the power relationships of language and the power relationships of the body. Simi-larly, in She is My Aunt, audio and video that have developed dissonance due to a lack of historical connection are stitched back together, yet they also corre-spondingly highlight an internal inability to reunite. The political allusions in Yu’s works become a non-deliberate “surfacing” of political consciousness, or political nature. What unintentionally appears are the traces of a bio-politique that exists between incidents and phenomena. In other words, “evasion – implication” must exist within the various kinds of “self-fracturing” forms conjured in the work. For example, using familial relations to reference the extreme display of hysteria, or perhaps using the bodies and voices of outsiders to depict one’s own “fiction”, constantly creating a kind of fold, in which politicality appears in the contrast between the two sides of the fold that is formed, and also in the gap carved-out by evasive circumnavigation. Indubitably, this gap is the extra space that appears in the activation of the imagination. It causes the artist’s political concern to become

The Topological Foreign Affairs of VoiceThe “Photo – Art” of Cheng-Ta Yu

Huang Chien-Hung

vague – through this circumnavigation the artist’s “cold feelings” toward politics are expressed, yet Yu does not consequently erect a barrier blocking out “politi-cality”. On the contrary, his creations allow these gaps to form virtual connec-tions, by bringing together starting points for notions that are entirely unsubstan-tiated and imaginary. This new form of political art – which does not demand a homogeneity between political ideology and artistic image – directly addresses a form of “foreign affairs” extraneous to foreign affairs.

In addition to creating a giant portrait of international relations, the notion of foreign affairs, in individual imaginative constructions, is an issue that involves numbers (the collective re-creation of countries) and extension (the transcen-dence of national boundaries). But such discrepancy has always made use of a “projective” (geometrical) method to complete the uniformity between the indi-vidual and the country in foreign affairs. Yu’s latest work, Ventriloquists : Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su is an expansion of his 2008 undertaking, Ventriloquists: Introduction, which embarked on an exploration of a different kind of “numeri-cal” problem. In other words, in Ventriloquists: Introduction, an unnamed self and an other, whose common nationality is unverifiable, serve as the units of extension that shift between friendly cooperative relations and the slips of vo-calisation. Through numbers (vocalising individuals) the contours of a different, compound, fissured form of the self are sketched out. In other words, the artist does not treat the geometrical projective relationships between number and

number, but rather allows the connections between individual and individual to be rendered as internal differentiations, expressing a single numerality within the framework of foreign relations, or a kind of micro-foreign affairs. This “language” achieved through an “exchange of voice” or even the topological foreign affairs undertaken through behaviour and the “singing voice”, form a powerful contrast with the foreign affairs achieved through text and contract within the system of designated appointment (or, one might say, macro-foreign affairs), or even possi-bly an oppositional relationship formed as art confronts politics.

From the level of dialogue in Ventriloquists: Introduction, we can more clearly access the possibilities afforded in the works of Yu. The speech of the “human shadow” elicits not merely the re-representation of forms of “translation” and “heteronomy”, but even more fully, the tension produced through interaction, and a subjective posture of resistance when placed in a certain state of restriction – replication, dialogue, appropriation and severance – and moreover, accompanied with the reproduction of the body, allowing the reproduction of the body to con-nect to issues related to life and politics, Yu’s “human shadow” serves not simply as “scriptwriter” or “puppet master”, but also as a mask-like schizophrenic, whose “split” eschews projectivist foreign relations, attempting to permeate the “body” with sounds that are distorted and off-key. Yet in his new work of 2009, Ventrilo-quists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su, Yu not only expands on the theme of proxi-mal foreign affairs that he explored in Ventriloquists: Introduction, he also brings together the proximal action achieved through fiction that he employed in She is My Aunt. At Taipei’s Won Won Building, where Filipino labourers often congre-gate, Yu found several willing interviewees, or “collaborators”. In addition to do-ing a survey of their labour conditions and the experience of being an immigrant, the artist also experimented with a new “split” form. He no longer hides behind an “enunciator”, who is asked to narrate the “fiction” that the artist has constructed based on the speaker’s status and state, but instead Yu hides behind the camera and asks questions while standing in front of the interviewee. He also no longer

invents fictional language on behalf of the interviewee, but correspondingly col-lects real descriptions from the speakers. Slips in language no longer occur in “inferences” of vocalisation beyond the sphere of denotative meaning, but rather emanate from “confrontation”, from convoluted vocalisations and off-key sounds that occur in order to express meaning. Furthermore, the artist arranges videos of singing, forming an extremely different scenario of “liberation”. The introduction of song incites a different bodily expression in the labourer, a body set within re-ality yet “escaping” the conditions of labour. Using a different kind of language, a form of behaviour liberating oneself from the realities of labour and immigration, the hard work of the labourer’s body is no longer framed within a predetermined “tragic” or “marginalised” appearance or form; instead, the interviewee is relo-cated to an extemporaneous “dithyrambic” moment.

These “type – documentations” are what allow the work to transcend the status of a documentary, not the lens’ stylistic language or the theoretical delineation produced by the images. Because of the behavioural facets engendered by voice and language in the interviewee’s “off-key” vocalisations and narrations in the “transpositions” between different languages, and the performances they “can’t help” but give in response to the artist’s interrogative language, these issues of vocalisation incite a different kind of expressiveness. This expressiveness leads us to move beyond the limited number of topical images that customarily appear, and touch upon an alternative form of immediately present “labour”, a kind of “purely personal” labour: a moment when foreign workers at their place of work do not lack “self-expression”. And in a spontaneous moment, the artist takes part in the acting-out of a different kind of world: a foreign affairs of “broken language” that veers clear of elitist diplomatic rhetoric.

WORKS

Ventriloquists: Introduction, video installation, 2008

Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su , video installation, 2009

Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su

video installation HDV color/sound 2009

Filmed at the Won Won Building in Taipei Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su is a film of two women from the Philippines who married into Taiwanese families. Having lived in this foreign land for over a decade both women have come to use the local language as an essential tool in everyday life, but be-cause of their different backgrounds they use the language in different ways. When interacting with Liang Mei-Lan, I attempted to converse with her in three languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese and English). When communicating with Emily, who has no Taiwanese citizenship, I used Mandarin and English. All three of us were using forms of voice that were not particularly “official or standardised”. It was a conversation within the cracks of language and unable to always convey what we meant situations of miscommunication and dissonance occasionally arose. Eventually I asked them to sing a Chinese song, in an attempt to liberate them from the intangible box that inherently exists in the give-and-take of language, and to set free the poignant images of the disparity between foreign cultures.

Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-LanHDV

sound/color09:122009

Cora Billan

Her Chinese name is “Liang Mei-Lan”. She is 36 years old, coming from Carbiz City, the Philippines. She came to Taiwan in 1997 to marry a local Taiwanese. With the ability to communicate in both English and Taiwanese quite well, she also speaks Chinese to some degree. Now she lives in San-Hsia and runs a salon in Wan-Wan building, on Chung-Shan North Road, Taipei city.

Ventriloquists: Emily SuHDV

sound/color09:122009

Emily Rodriguez Su

She will become 40 this year, from Iloilo City, the Philippines. In 1998, she married a Taiwanese guy but still remain as a Filipino citizen. Speaking of language, she is fluent in both Chinese and English, but her Taiwanese remains poor.She resides in Chun-ho district and owns a grocery store recently in Wan-Wan building.

The 53rd Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion : Foreign Affairs:Artists from TaiwanPallazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy

E:you good good afternoon -I am Amy -I that English name is Emily Su -Ah..I married to a Taiwanese -He name is Shu Pong-Fu -We live in Chung-Hu -and -I have this shop for almost ten years

C:That say you came Taiwan a lot long?

E:I came Taiwan not much difference 15 years

C:15 years already -That you start time why will come here?

E:I came Taiwan 1995 year -original I came that is care a patient -Because in Philippines, be one Philippine nurse -but I came Taiwan, that one grandma already die. -but my boss still continued to hire me -but one condition is want help them in -market do business

C:do business

E:they selling garlic, ginger, with that vegetable. -in wan-tai market

C:wan tai market -wan tai market. -that to say, so you came Taiwan you are at there meet your husband? -is say what kind condition?

E:I in Taiwan met my husband -Because my husband still can talk English -talk…English….pretty good, -that he have, still have very many Filipino friends. -And then give us introduce

C:oh…so you are Taiwan in Taiwan introduce meet? -So thereafter, you then in Taiwan married.

E:no. - until my that -two years until. -I original want be sent back. -And then after my husband with me together back go. -With my mother talk want with me marry

C:Marry you?

E:Ya, come to follow me

C:Then after is in Philippines marry? Or is in Taiwan?

E:Correct, we are in Philippines marry. -Then after everything already passed by the interview and the embassy -Then after… -Have not much difference…not much difference -three months then he can bring me back

C:back come Taiwan?

E:correct. Come Taiwan

C:so you now have here’s ID?

E:No. I no apply

C:You no apply?

E:I no apply. -Because I often go out country.

C:So philippine’s passport relative good use?

E:Also is in Philippines have doing business. -Than after I not much difference -one month then back one time

About the subtitle in the videos:

The languages spoken in the film are Mandarin, Taiwanese and English. The subtitles are in English, color-coded green (for Mandarin), yellow (for Taiwanese) and white (for Eng-lish). And the translating Grammar is according to the language own struc-ture.

C:Philippines?

E:Correct. -Um.. I feel I apply in our there -Relatively have some trouble. -Because everytime you go -Still want applying visa -then after still want again pay 1200 -then after in our there -deals very inconveniently

C:so you opposite are you have is Philippine passport?

E:correct, philippine’s passport -then after in Taiwan I then use residence permit

C:that is spouse’s?

E:correct.-Because I feel I -no think want go any where up work.-I that is go do business.-So use that residence permit should pretty ok-Relatively no problem.

C:So that you have how many like this grocery store.

E:I in Wan Wan building here -I have six stores-But three I want rent to others.-Then after three I myself use-Then after be secondary landlady.C:Ha…so make very much money?

E:No make money.

C:That say, so, that say, you yourself this shop already open ten years?

E:This one have open -3, 4 years

C:3, 4 years already.

E:Correct. This one’s

C:That say, you have kids?

E:I…no kids -We no birth -But my husband he has first wife -She has three kids -Then after, two married -One have not, with us live together -I live with my parents-in law together -Then -The first and -The first child and second child have grandchildren -Not much difference…three grandchildren

C:So you then are “grand-ma”

E:Correct, be grandma already.

C:That to say, you in Taiwan, you live that long -You say, generally 15 years -That to say, normally in life relatively often use language is what?

E:Talk..a lot, that is Mandarin and Chinese -Ah, Mandarin and English

C:Mandarin and English. -That can or not can talk Taiwanese?

E:Taiwanese I listen understandably. -But, not very good talk.

C:Not very good talk. -Talk, talk no good.-Then after with parents-in-law(s)

E:Is talk Taiwanese -They have some Taiwanese -But they speaking Mandarin

C:Plus (similar to “speak”) Mandarin?

E:Talk Mandarin.

C:Plus Mandarin. -So that you at here have very many Taiwanese friends.

E:Many Filipino friends. -Relatively more? -Correct. -Filipino friends also a lot, also have Taiwanese friends -Also have Taiwanese friends?

C:So that, but you today want sing is Taiwanese song

E:Correct, sing that ”I no drunk, I no drunk”

C:”I no drunk, I no drunk”-Is whose song? You know?

E:Ah..I not know

C:Jiang Huei’s

E:Correct.

C:You know this song it is singing what?

E:That is one lady, she is very frustrated in life -Then after she turned into drinking -Then after she said -Nobody understand her -But still good, much better the wine still can accompany her. -And understands what she feels.

C:So is one sad song.

E:Yes, it’s a very sad song.

C:So that, wait one second we then listen you sing this song

E:Okay -Good

Ventriloquists: Introduction

video installation 2008

Ventriloquists-Introduction is a series of work shot in the streets of Taipei. I hid behind the foreigners visit-ing in Taipei and directed them to look at the camera and repeat what I had said. What I had said… It was actually an imitation of tones, and these tones were put together as a forged self-introduction in Chinese. Because my foreigners are not familiar with Chinese, they were trying to imitate, just like an instrument. The instruments play out a language that is not really a language, and thus creates laughing points. I (the man in black behind them) am like the drifting power, which comes in and out of their body, resulting in the state of virtual identity and drifting subjectivity.

Richard Cilli (21, Italy) exchange student university campus 3:11

Natalie Allen (23, Australia) tennis player tennis court 1:50

Kumiko Takahashi (33, Japan) visitor MRT station 2:00

Tanner Brecheen (28, U.S.A) English teacher on the sidewalk 2:07

The project begins with a situation now globally experienced by people who travel to a country with little, or no linguistic competence of the local language. As an outsider, it can feel like this foreign language is as hefty a barrier as a brick wall. In addition the projections of another’s images and identities are apparently also filled with stereotypes, nonsense and assumptions. Yu Cheng-Ta took this experience one step further by speaking on behalf of different foreigners, but as a local in the first-person’s tone much like a ventriloquist. In the series of nine videos that make up Ven-triloquists – Introduction, he performs time and again as a ventriloquist, hiding behind foreigners in Taipei and having them repeat his words in Mandarin. His ‘puppets’ represent a wide range of outsiders encountered in various scenarios in Taipei. They include an American dance professor sitting in a restaurant, a young American male English teacher on a scooter, an Italian exchange student in the university campus, a Philippine maid with her friends spending a Sunday in the park, a Korean manager in front of a convenience store, etc. As the artist introduces each foreigner’s name, profession, purposes and interests in Taiwan in Mandarin, the foreigner repeats his statement word for word without understanding what is being said. Given the difficulties of mimicking Mandarin for these people, mistakes are simply unavoidable and can be outrageously hilarious. So “65 years-old” is easily mistaken as “a young lion which needs some sleep.” And, “professor” as “suburban guarded area,” etc. Yu takes advantage of the discrepancy of sound dubbing and bi-lingual subtitling (Chi-nese and English) in which his dubbed script makes complete sense to Mandarin speakers and the foreigner’s ill-pronounced words are open to absurd interpretations which are shown as subtitles. For those who do not understand Mandarin, as well as for those who do, these ‘self-introductions’ simply become an array of semantic anomalies and incomprehensible self-presentations that perhaps await more charitable social interactions – if our globalised world is to bring us closer to each other and make peace possible. The humour of being lost in translation has become a common experience in our time, whether we travel or stay at home. (Manray Hsu)

Code Share - 5 Continents 10 Biennales 20 ArtistsContemporary Arts Center, Vilnius, Lithuania

Phindi Peter (16, South Africa) visitor on the street 1:56

Kel Kelleher (63, Canada) visitor in the lane 1:32

Kin Jin-Hee (33, Korea) manager in front of a convenience store 2:23

Loretta Necir (38, Philippine) maid in the park 1:47

Code Share - 5 Continents 10 Biennales 20 ArtistsContemporary Arts Center, Vilnius, Lithuania

2008 Taipei BiennialTaipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan

Code Share - 5 Continents 10 Biennales 20 ArtistsContemporary Arts Center, Vilnius, Lithuania

The 53rd Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion : Foreign Affairs:Artists from TaiwanPallazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy

Biennale Cuvée - World Selection of Contemporary Art OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria