Wu Tien-chang was born in Changhua in 1956. Wu graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Chinese Culture University in 1980.In the early 1980s, Wu set up 101 Modern Art Group and Taipei Painting School along with his artist peers. With a clear concern for the practical side and criticism of society, Wu and his groups had unmasked the dominant ideological violence with their straightforward and sharp criticism. Art critics often described Wu Tien-chang as “the first man to break through the taboo” at the time of annihilating martial law in Taiwan. From the 1990s on, Wu challenged to break down the historical and political taboo had turned to the unconsciousness level of eroticism, harm and death. As for the mediums Wu adapted for his works, he had replaced handcrafted oil paintings with mixed mediums and photographic affectation and thus set up an aestheticism based on tackiness, ambiguity, and mutual reflections on actuality and fiction. From 2000 on, Wu began to apply digital photographic techniques which allowed more freedom to the creative format and made his decorative photographic more expandable. Wu continued his explorations in motifs of eroticism and incompletion with a more liberated and expandable style.
Wu Tien-chang’s Attachment to the Mundane World was inspired by the poster of Taiwanese director Hou Shiao-shian’s 1987 movie Dust in the Wind. Wu has transformed the original poetical “visual reality” and its intensive nostalgia into a theatrical parody show. Meanwhile, the collective memory of “the age of innocence” which the movie dwells upon has disappeared with the affectation of stage and the Sinicism of the characters—only the insincere ambiguous fantasy remains. In Attachment to the Mundane World the body language of the young man and woman seem to reveal certain “impure” desires; however, with their mouths and eyes covered, the couples in the work cannot communicate with their audiences. The work not only simulates the old image, the cheap and distinctive materials such as metallic fabrics and artificial flowers that were applied on the frame, which simulates the splendor of tackiness and replaces taste with affectation to indicate to a sensational experience. For Wu, this “insincere state of mind” has been his long term concern for Taiwanese culture.
Since Wu Tien-chang began his career as an artist in the 1980s, he has experienced the transformation of the politics from a time of martial law enforcement to democracy, the turnaround of economic from ascent to recession, and from localization to globalization within three decades. Wu’s major concerns have shifted from history, politics to more sophisticated culture consciousness. With the availability of new digital technology, Wu has been exploring with new mediums and new techniques in order to bring abundance and precision to the pictorial language of his works of art. Nearly every decade, Wu has a major style transformation or breakthrough in format. Since 2011, Wu has been developing new digital videotaping artwork, and his career as an artist still continues.
Chinese title: | 戀戀紅塵 |
English title: | Attachment to the Mundane World |
Decade: | 1997 |
Medium / Classification: | Mixed Media |
Dimensions: | 159.5×220 cm |
Artist: | WU Tien-chang |
Life-span: | 1956 - |
Collection Unit: | National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts |
Contact method for authorization: | Guide to the Use of Image Files and Data from the Online Collection Database |
Related Exhibition: | Unique Vision Ⅱ:Highlights from the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts Collection |