Chen Chieh-jen’s Aesthetic of Horror and his Bodily Memories of History*

中文版

Joyce C. H. Liu

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There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.

 

—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror [1]

 

Is the dark abyss of wounds not the very crack that we need to pass through so as to arrive at the state of full-realization and self-abandonment?

—Chen Chieh-jen, “About the Forms of My Works”[2]

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Chen Chieh-jen's photo-images of horror have had great impact not just on Taiwanese audiences but on Western viewers as well in recent years. Starting in 1996, Chen Chieh-jen embarked on a project, Revolt of Body and Soul. This series of works depicting cruel torture and violence, which has been exhibited internationally [3] , has attracted interest in the West in part because Chen in Genealogy of the Self (Ill . n° 1) uses a photograph of lingchi (“death by slow slicing”) [4] that Georges Bataille reproduced in Tears of Eros. [5] My concern in this essay is not with the history of the aesthetic of horror in the West, which other scholars have already studied[6], and which can be illustrated with the hundreds of photos and postcards of “primitive” Chinese customs printed and circulated among Westerners[7](Ill. n° 2). My concern, rather, is to consider what happens when a historic document of a lingchi execution—which in Bataille’s usage reveals an anthropological, even touristic Western curiosity about this primitive Chinese form of execution—circulates back into the Chinese realm of representation. For the significance that Chen Chieh-jen’s images of horror have for Western viewers than is different from the impact they have on a Taiwanese audience. This essay is about Chen’s particular aesthetic of horror in relation to his project of reinterpreting Chinese modernity, first in response to the Western gaze, then as a commentary on Chinese forms of state modernity.

I、 Images of Horror

Chen Chieh-jen was born in 1960 in Taiwan, the second generation of those who moved with the Kuomintang (Guomindang, KMT) regime from China to Taiwan in 1949. His father was forced to join Chiang Kai-shek’s troops when he was in his teens, was moved from one battlefield to another, and could never return home. The village to which he was transplanted consisted entirely of low-ranking veterans like his father whose military service deprived them of family, property, and whatever wealth they had had. When they arrived in Taiwan and were allowed to form new families, they could not afford the dowry required for a proper marriage, which meant that most married poor orphans, aboriginals, and physically and even mentally handicapped women. Most households in Chen’s village had at least twelve children, some of whom were retarded. One of the boys in his class at school was. Closer to home, one of own brothers was not only retarded, but paralyzed. The boy lay naked on his bed until his death at the age of thirteen or fourteen. Chen shared a bedroom with this younger brother, lived with him, and watched his death. The retarded figure that recurs in Chen’s photo-images reverberates with his childhood visual experience in his own family.

 

圖一：周孟德《雲變》（左圖）

圖二：陳界仁《內暴圖1947-1998》的裝置場所（右圖）

      

 

   Chen Chieh-jen's neighborhood was located near the Military Tribunal and Military Prison at Xindian, a suburb in the southern part of Taibei county. Here political prisoners were interrogated and put on trial, including those arrested in the Gaoxiong (Kaohsiung) Incident of 1979.[8] Chen has said that ever since he was a child, he was curious to know who was kept in the prison. The images he places before us in Revolt of Body and Soul can thus be seen as the images of what he sees through the tall walls of the Military Tribunal. In an interview, he has observed that, for those who grew up under Martial Law, its effects were invisible: “Martial Law period was not a period of public persecution, but the condition that nothing real could be seen or heard.”[9] Forcing his viewers to see the worse that the criminal justice system can do, he seeks to reverse the silencing and dismembering that modernization has brought about in Taiwan. “Through the process of modernization, history has been lingchi-ed; that is, chopped up and severed just like a human body.”[10]

圖三：陳界仁《內暴圖1947-1998》

The concept of “lingchi-d history,” of a troubled history bodily imagined, is the theme of Chen Chieh-jen’s artistic work. Our knowledge or ignorance of the past has eebn caused and constructed by the state during the process of modernization, he suggests; consequently there are gaps or ruptures in our knowledge of history. Recurring motifs of self-destructive Siamese twins and severed body parts reinforce this bodily imaginary of a lingchi-ed, or distorted and partially erased, history. The Communist/Nationalist rivalry during the liquidation period in the 1930s and the long civil war in the 1940s, the cold war of the 1950s on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, and the cruel punishments the state executed upon its people during Martial Law: all constitute Chen's lingchi-ed history. The process of lingchi is simultaneously the process of modernization, through which the state institutionalizes social stigmatization and forgetfulness. Against this pressure to set aside or forget, Chen has connected images and events in the past and the present: the veterans' village, his Martial Law childhood, his Military Tribunal neighborhood, his own identity as the son of the veteran and a hard-working mother, the brother of an incapacitated boy. Chen's digital photo-texts interpret these historical conditions in which he was situated (Ill. n° 3).[11] Chen has explained in an interview that the purposes of his project of Revolt of Body and Soul are twofold.[12] The first half of the series presents historical photographs taken between 1900 and 1950,[13] from the beginning of the modern era in China arbitrarily dated to the beginning of the century, to the year in which Martial Law was declared on Taiwan. The second half fictionalizes the state of affairs this internalized violence has produced.[14] Through these two sets of photographic images, Chen shows the cycling of violence and brutality, moving from external acts to internalized and institutionalized malice, from witnessed scenes of brutality to imagined sites of madness.


Looking at how Chen has modified his photo-images, we immediately notice ironies and critiques. Genealogy of Self could be taken as the first Chinese response, through artistic adaptation and representation, to the longlasting Western fascination for supplices chinois. In the original photograph, the head of the victim is turned upward toward the sky, dazed, suggesting at lest to Georges Bataille an ambiguous conjunction of extreme horror and erotic ecstasy. The duplication of the victim’s head in Genealogy of Self turns this gesture of horror and ecstasy into incredulity.

Furthermore, by placing his own image on the left side of the background as one of the onlookers, where he calmly observes the rest of the audience turning their attentive gaze to the executioner in order to participate in the moment of thrill, Chen creates a third dimension of gaze. This play of the gaze imparts irony to the picture: the gaze of the people within the frame absorbed by the execution, the gaze of the camera/the West and the apparatus of the power system involved, and the contrasting gaze of the modern onlooker which highlights the temporal uniqueness of the execution, the moment in which Chinese modernity is about to begin.


Being Castrated, (Ill. n° 4) continues the theme of the Western gaze presented in Genealogy of Self. In the text, the figures are lined up by the side of the victim, posed in front of the camera, looking into the eye of the camera and inviting the viewer's gaze. This picture is derived from a photograph taken in a Shanghai street sometime between 1904 and 1910, photographer unknown. The original photograph includes the foreigners in neat suits to the right, reputedly consular officials, and the executioners on the left. This gesture of implicit invitation to those who appeared in the original photo—the foreign ambassadors, the executioners, the onlookers—brings them into the same position as participants in this ritual, as collaborators. Chen has added two figures in the background, himself the model, who watch the scene, and another two on both sides in the foreground, modeled again on himself, to suffer of the punishment of castration. These double figures frame the spectacular scene. The “real” spectacle in the original photo has actually been hidden in the back in a cage; according to Chen, the original photograph was not of castration. In his digitalized photo-text, however, the punishment has been changed into an exaggerated scene of castration and placed in the foreground. The castrated organs of the two sufferers in the front gaze back at us, disrupting the circulation between the consumer's interest and the spectacular image. Chen Chieh-jen also seems to suggest that the gaze caught in the photograph, which responds to the photographer’s camera-gaze, a Western instrument recording the exotic moment, reflects the historical moment in which the West showed its greatest intrusive interest in China, the moment that foreign concessions had been forced upon China, mirror-like back on the West.


The Western gaze that Chen presents in Genealogy of Self and Being Castrated is what, in some sense, caused the split and castrated condition of modern China. The formation of the foreign concessions paradoxically is also the moment at which China’s modernization was launched. A sense of being intruded, castrated, and amputated leads to the urge for a new order, a new nation, and hence a revolution. This revolution, and with it the consequent rise of conflict within the state, have caused the disruption and sterility in the history of modern China.


Looking through his later works, we see that Chen is concerned not just to respond to the Western gaze but to critique Chinese modernity. The title Genealogy of Self by pointing to the “anteriority of life” repeats the crime of lingchi within the state apparatus throughout history, and with it the project of modernity.


Self Destruction (Ill. n° 5) and the trilogy Lost Voice (Ill. n° 6) stress once again the self-destructiveness of the process of modernization and the legal methods of social exclusion conducted by the state. In Self Destruction the artist has juxtaposed two historical photographs in this picture. The right-hand part of this picture uses Jay Calvin Huston’s photo taken during the purge of 1927, a scene in which Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers slaughtered Communists in Canton. The left-hand part uses a photo of about 1928 taken in the Northeast, again during the purge, by an unknown photographer. The theme of self-destructive violence is struck by the Siamese twins in the center, fiercely but happily killing each other. The Siamese twin motif and the doubling that first appeared in Genealogy of Self and Being Castrated recur here and point directly to the split bodies of the state and of the people. Again, Chen Chieh-jen has placed his own image in the picture: on the Siamese twins in the center, as the falling head in the foreground, and as one of the background spectators. The references suggest that the KMT’s liquidation of the Communists is an act of abjection, cleansing away the bad part in oneself but consequently destroying oneself.


The trilogy Lost Voice reaches a pnnacle in the display of the eme horror of the intra-ethnic malice. These pictures are based on a photo taken in 1946 during the Civil War period, when the Communist armies captured Chongli, about 150 kilometers north of Zhangjiakou, and slaughtered the whole village.[15] The scene of corpses already makes the original photo resemble hell. Masturbating and self-mutilating figures modeled on Chen Chieh-jen himself, among whom again are the Siamese twins, dance on the corpses in transports of joy, looking back at us. The ecstacy on their faces in such an extremely painful scene pushes the viewer to exasperation.


A Picture of Rebellion 1947-1998, an installation Chen exhibited at the February 28th Commemorative Exhibition in 1998 in the Taipei Fine Art Museum, presents a summation of his critique of the split body of the state and the malice hidden in the state apparatus. The realism of his presentation of the traumatic massacre of February 28, 1947, is not what makes watching this installation a weird and unsettling experience[16]; rather, it is the mixture of the realistic and the unrealistic. In this installation, Chen projected a huge computerized photographic image in the center of the hall, surrounded by four stone tablets hanging on the walls, with muffled whispering human voices behind the screen. The effect is to situate the audience in front of the historical scene as though it were a vision of hell. When we come closer to the screen and observe the photographic image, however, we realize that it is not at all a realistic presentation. If the photo actually portrayed the historical moment, then the image would not be so disturbing, because the audience would immediately detect the “past-ness” of it. The “real” of the historical event is indeed frightful, but what disturbs us is that there is something more than the “real” in the picture. In the foreground lies a corpse, turning its head away from the audience and holding a skull that faces us. The figure of this corpse is as realistic as we could demand. Nevertheless, in the middle ground stand three pairs of Siamese twins, fighting, cutting, and slicing each other, and at the same time enjoying their moment of self-mutilation.
The excess of joy on the faces of these figures and the mixing of the realistic with the unreal is exasperating, just the sort of viewing experience that James Elkins has identified as being "close to something I know I cannot or must not see.[17]" What I cannot or must not see in this picture is not only the gapping holes on the bodies that stare back at me, but also the excessive sadistic and masochistic pleasure the Siamese twins enjoy. The exact Chinese title of this piece, Neibao tu 1947-1998 (Internal revolt 1947-1998), indicates that what Chen Chieh-jen intends to reveal in this work is the condition of internal schism and revolt, the split between the state apparatus and the people under Martial Law, between the KMT and the early settlers, as well as the perverse pleasure the state expressed in its power to control and exclude. These internal feuds link to the themes of liquidation, civil war,[18] cold war, totalitarianism, and the intra-ethnic slaughters among the Taiwanese aboriginals[19] that have dominated the experience of modern Chinese/Taiwanese, all of which Chen takes to be themes of modernization. These splits of modernity are what Chen is pointing to when he says, as already quoted, “History has been lingchi-ed, that is, chopped and severed as human bodies. Violence has also been gradually internalized, institutionalized and hidden. We do not see where we are and what preceded us. We do not see the violence of history, nor of the state either. That is why we need to look at these images of horror and see through them.”[20] He equates lingchi with the violence the state executes, institutionally and invisibly, upon the people.


The questions Chen poses for us through his photographic images, whether intentionally or unintentionally, can be phrased as follows. The first set of questions is about the gaze: Who has the right to record or recount the past, with what instrument or apparatus? Whose eye looked through the camera and so dominated the power relations at the moment of record? What viewing position has the camera/power-system determined? How do we interpret the ambiguity in the relations between the gazing subject and the gazed object, between the photographer and the photographed, between executioners/onlookers/officials-accomplices and victim, and between the audience and the artwork? A second set of questions must then be asked: How do we read history? What has been hidden in our perception, or our narrative, of history? Can we resist the gaze that history and ideology determined? Can we uncover the surface of images and see the genealogy and inherent connectedness not only within all the massacres in history but also within institutionalized violence, and perhaps also within ourselves?


These questions help to deal with Chen Chieh-jen’s concept of the “lingchi-ed history.” For these historical photographs of KMT liquidation campaigns, civil war, Japanese colonial domination, police violence under Martial Law, and intra-ethnic fighting enable Chen to expose the histories of Chinese punishments and systems of imprisonment. By relying on recurring motifs of Siamese twins and doubling in his pictures, and by showing his figures experiencing these historical events as perverse enjoyment, Chen points to the splitting of the Chinese-Taiwanese condition and the ambiguity of the subject position in these acts of punishment and imprisonment. If there was “nothing to be seen” during Martial Law, that was because of the power of the institutional domination and exclusion of information to produce this “lingchi-ed history.” The gaze Chen inserts into these photo-images revolts against the state’s ideologically regulating, organizing, and dominating gaze, a gaze that orthodox history determines.

II、 Abjection and the Abject: A Process of Working-through

Even with the Foucauldian questions that Chen Chieh-jen’s photo-images raise, we are still faced with the images themselves of horror and fear. Georges Bataille’s understanding of the fear we experience in the presence of auto-mutilation or sacrifice is that this type of act is a “rejection of what had been appropriated by a person or by a group.” The repugnance we experience before such images, in Bataille’s words, is “only one of the forms of stupor caused by a horrifying eruption, by the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume.”[21] Bataille has described his own fascination and repulsion when looking at photographic images of a Chinese man being tortured in these terms: “as if I had wanted to stare at the sun, my eyes rebel.”[22] He loved the young and seductive Chinese man, he wrote, not because of a love of sadistic instinct, but because the excess of the victim’s pain compelled him to seek “to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.”[23] This love-fear ambivalence in his feelings toward ruin and destruction, and toward self-abandonment in ecstasy, is central to Bataille’s interpretation of the link between religious ecstasy and extreme horror.

圖四：左圖是《本生圖》所依據的照片﹐取自巴代耶 (Georges Bataille)《情慾的淚水》(Tears of Eros)

圖五：右圖是於天津印行的「中國酷刑系列」第三號明信片﹐蓋有一九一二年７月９日天津郵戳﹐取自《舊夢重驚：清代明信片選集》。

 

   

Julia Kristeva has clarified the mystical element in our ambivalence toward the fascinating and yet repulsive images of violated and ugly bodies through her theory of “abjection.” According to Kristeva, the artist at a boundary position goes through abjection, “whose intimate side is suffering and horror its public feature.”[24] The abject is the filthy parts that the body/culture/history wants to cleanse away. It is not its lack of cleanliness that causes abjection but “what disturbs identity, system, order; what does not respect borders, positions, and rules; the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”[25] We cannot tolerate the ambiguous within us, the violence, the terror, the madness—just as the culture executes its own purgation. Sliced-open corpses, torn-out eyes, and severed limbs are extreme abject conditions we fear to face. Through art or language, the artist sublimates abjection into scenes of violence, madness, and jouissance, through the process of working-out and “working-through.”[26] Going through or experiencing the process of the sublimation of abjection, we discover what has been suppressed or excluded within us. For both Bataille and Kristeva, gazing at scenes of horror connects ambivalently to our own bodily memories.

圖六：陳界仁《本生圖》

  

 

Chen's images of punishment and bodily mutilation seem similar and yet require a different explanation. Unlike his European counterparts, Chen’s artworks derive some of their material from Chinese folkloric concepts of purgatory and the human soul. Chen has said that traditional pictures of the underworld have fascinated him ever since his childhood. He has collected many versions of these pictures, and even drawn them himself. These pictures regularly depict the niejing, the Mirror of Sin, into which the judges of the underworld command the dead to gaze. In this mirror, the dead see their past behaviors and desires; nothing can escape its reflection. Chen has described his method of constructing The Revolt of Body and Soul as comparable to the mirror sin. Working on images from the historical past, he says that he felt all the past lives come back to him and collide within him. He has also said that he tried to explore the conditions of separate spirit egos, which according to the Chinese Daoist understanding of the soul simultaneously exist in one person. That is why he places several “I”s with the frames of his images.

 

圖七：左圖﹐陳界仁《去勢圖》所依據照片﹐攝影者不詳﹐亦刊於《中國攝影史》﹐56頁。陳界仁提供。

圖八：右圖﹐陳界仁《去勢圖》

   

Still, what is most significant about these past lives to Chen is the sense of history they embody. “The histories I am much concerned about are the histories excluded by the orthodox power, that is, the histories outside the history. Moreover, I’m even more concerned about the histories that survive in the realm of ecstasy, like lacunae among words, concealed in the midst of aphasia, infiltrated into our language, body, desire and smell.”[27] As we look into Chen’s photographic images, we see not only the past memories and past lives of Chinese-Taiwanese flashing back, but also something behind the scene of history, something related to the bodily memories. Chen has declared that he wants to “gaze” (ningshi) into the images of historical horror, as the dead gaze into the Mirror of Sin, so that he can “penetrate” them:

 

圖九：左圖﹐陳界仁《自殘圖》左半邊所依據之照片。攝影者不祥﹐東北清黨照片﹐陳界仁提供。

圖十：右圖﹐陳界仁《自殘圖》右半邊所依據之照片。Jay Calvin Huston一九二七年國民黨清黨時期在廣東所拍攝的照片﹐陳界仁提供。

  

 

I could not help but gazing at these photographic images of anonymous people being tortured and executed. It seemed that behind these images you could uncover another layer of image and unspoken hidden words. It seemed that there was another face emerging from each of the vague, faint faces, another shaking, unfixed body emerging from and overlapping on the fixed body . . . As I gazed at these historical photographic images, I found that the past looked back at me.  

圖十一：陳界仁《自殘圖》

 

Why images of horror? “Cruelty always obstructs spectators from looking at the photographic images,” Chen once observed; nevertheless, he asks, “is the dark abyss of wounds not the very crack that we need to pass through so as to arrive at self-abandonment?” What is this self-abandonment? It is the renunciation of subjecthood, the capacity to move inbetween intersubjective positions, to assume asubjectivity and nonidentity. The extremity of torture and dismemberment serves as the bridge between blindness and sudden realization, “the rupture and rebirth by which we pass through the fear in the mind.” To Chen, the art process is “a kind of voyage between blindness and sudden realization,” similar to Kristeva’s notion of “working-through.”  

圖十二：左圖﹐陳界仁《失聲圖》所依據照片﹐一九四六年內戰期間崇禮事件﹐中央通訊社１９４６年１２月照片(#2100)﹐陳界仁提供。

圖十三：右圖﹐陳界仁《失聲圖》

  

 

What then is this blindness? What realization can be obtained? By working through the historical images of horror, Chen has said, he enters into the layers of history he sees inscribed on his own body. These inscriptions are the past histories, past experiences, and past visions to which the state’s education makes us blind. This realization Chen acts on through his method of art production:

圖十四：陳界仁《法治圖》

 

I put these fuzzy historical photographic images into the computer and enlarged them on a very large scale. On the screen these enlarged images seemed like historical vestiges scattered in the mist. Indistinct images, vague faces, pieces of dismembered bodies, broken traces, with floating scents drifting in the mist. Who were they? When I intruded myself into the boundless space of image-specters, and tried to paint their faces according to my imagination, every stroke of my brush seemed to betray their original faces. The faces I painted seemed more like masks, bearing the brand of my own face, the face of the Other. But who is the real Other? As I painted the historical images, I also fused my body image and my body memories into the mist of images.

His artistic work thus brings Chen into an encounter with the pastness, the Other, the history that he has experienced in his own body.

 

圖十五：左圖﹐陳界仁《恍惚相》；圖十六：右圖﹐陳界仁《連體魂》

  

 

圖十七：左圖﹐陳界仁《哪吒相》；圖十八：右圖﹐陳界仁《瘋癲城》

  

  The history Chen Chieh-jen mediates is a history of punishment and imprisonment. For him, his presentation of the images of punishment has nothing to do with “redemption.” The open wounds on the tortured bodies in lingchi—sliced-open breasts, cut knees, castrated organs, torn-out eyes, chopped-off heads—are the “real” in the object. By looking into these wounds, we see what has been absented, excluded, and effaced. We are then faced with violence and destruction as unsublimated performances of the obscenely real, the undecorated and the naked. Chen is not pursuing redemption, because for him this is not the redemption that the Buddhist concept of reincarnation supplies. Rather, he is interpreting human existence as history and experience infiltrate it. His magical and historical images expose the memories both of the histories in the first half of China’s twentieth century and of his own individual history and childhood. These two dimensions, the collective and the individual, collide on the surfaces of his photographic visions. What is more important, to me, is that his images hint at a special mode of gazing: the gaze of revolt, the gaze that leads us to question the flattened explanations of our history and to penetrate into the complex infrastructure of our past, to retrieve our memories, and at the same time to go underneath the symptom and work through our problems.

 

III、Bodily Memories of History

 

Aesthetically speaking, Chen Chieh-jen's Genealogy of Self carries on two visual traditions: one is the aesthetic of horror that he borrows from Georges Bataille's text, and the other is the vernacular or folkloric mode that he takes from the Chinese tradition. It is in this vernacular mode, which is the undercurrent of Chinese cultural forms excluded by the literati tradition, where we find verbal and visual representations of hell, depicted as a replica of the judicial system of the time, complete with its various methods of tortures. Chen encountered this folkloric tradition in his childhood at the funeral of his grandmother. The pictures of hell he saw on that occasion haunted and fascinated him. He deliberately collected different versions of these pictures, as well as historical accounts of judicial tortures. So when Chen came upon Bataille's book, he did not come upon something alien to his visual repertoire, but found something that was familiar and resonated deeply with his own visual experience. If we were to isolate this work from Chen’s personal background and the Chinese materials he collected on torture, Genealogy of Self could be viewed merely as a “Chinese variation” on the Bataille theme, an appendix to the Western interest in supplices chinois. But placed along with his other works and visual motifs, his Genealogy of Self can clearly be viewed as central to his critique of Chinese modernity.

 

For these reasons, Chen’s notion of “lingchi–ed history” speaks to a Chinese audience. People on the mainland and on Taiwan share different understandings of history and different emotional memories of it. Their bifurcated histories have been constructed by their political regimes through different systems of imprisonment that work culturally at the same level of technological sophistication that lingchi can be said to represent. This perspecitve on the ways in which the artist imagines and interprets his world declines to distinguish art from history and politics. Through his visual work, Chen makes the cuts and wounds on the bodies of the tortured signify not bodily cruelty, but his subjective emotion, certainly violent, also sado-masochistic, toward the object of his contemplation. He calls this artistic work “the process of writing the genealogy inside the body.” Working through the fear, the repugnance, and the ecstasy, according to Chen, leads him from blindness to a state of full realization.

 

Chen has also described his method of synchronizing images, of fusing his own body image with images from the past, as a state of trance. It is as though he were facing the mirror in hell and seeing this historical imagery as karmic flashback. “To me,” he says, “it is the re-emergence of the suppressed, repressed, and canceled memories.” The retarded and handicapped figures in Chen’s later wasteland images thus speak of the artist’s repeated childhood perception of his village, the Military Tribunal, and metaphorically also the historically conditioned and trapped space and time in which history has situated him. We come to realize also that Chen Chieh-jen’s photographic gaze—the gaze at the naked and obscene horror—allows the suppressed and repressed memories of the previous generations to return, painful and disgraceful memories that his parents’ generation would not like to and do not know how to talk about. Starting from his dismembered memories and truncated understanding of history, he takes us back through this “lingchi-ed” history to the moments and sites of the variations of the lingchi. He leads us to look at the bodily wounds, the most repulsive and sickening images which we tend to avoid, so that we too face the fragility and fluidity not only of the boundary between life and death, but also the point of difference between violence and joy, between institutional sadism and masochistic pleasure, between historical violence and its repetition.

 

 

Note:

[1]Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 1.

[2] Chen Chieh-jen’s statement, “About the Forms of My Works,” appears on the website: www.asa.de/Perf konf/Reader2/Reader2-1.htm#ChenAbout.

[3] For example, the 48th Biennale di Venezia (Taiwan Pavalion) in 1999 in Venice; the International Photography Biennale, Centro de la Imagen, in Mexico in 1999; the 5th Biennale de Lyon Contemporary Art, Sharing Exoticisms, in Lyon in 2000; The Mind of the Edge, Photo Espana, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, in 2000; the 31st Rencontres Internationales de la Potographie, Abbaye de Montmajour, Arles, 2000. His works have been published in Warsaw in the magazine Max,1999, no. 6.

[4]Lingchi, torture by slicing, was supposed to inflict a thousand cuts on the body of the executed before he died. People gathered at the site of execution to obtain the victim’s blood and flesh for medicinal uses. See Wang Yongkuan, Zhongguo gudai kuxing.

[5]This picture and Bataille’s commentary appear in Bataille, The Tears of Eros, p. 204-207. Bataille notes that this picture was previously published by Dumas in Traite de psychologie (Paris, 1923) and by Carpeaux in Pekin qui s’en va (Paris, 1913). He follows Dumas in identifying the tormented figure as Fou-Tchou-Li, who is the figure in Carpeaux’s picture, but this is not correct (see Jerome Bourgon, “Bataille et le supplicie chinois: erreurs sur la personne”). Bataille recorded that he was given this picture in 1925 by the psychoanalyst Dr. Borel. “This photograph had a decisive role in my life,” he confessed. “I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic (?) and intolerable.” It led him to conclude his study of eroticism with the discovery that there existed an “identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.”

[6]Claire Margat's “Esthetique de l’horreur” presents a comprehensive account of this issue.

[7]The series of postcard was entitled as “Les Supplices Chinois.” This one was mailed in July the 9th of 1912, from Tien-tsin, to France. This postcard is taken from Jiumeng Chongjing, a collection of old postcards edited by Fang Ling, Chen Shouxiang, and Bei Ning.

[8] In the Gaoxiong Incident of 1979, the Nationalist military and police broke up the island's first major Human Rights Day celebration (10 December 1979), and subsequently arrested and imprisoned virtually all leading members of Taiwan's budding democratic movement, including current president Chen Shuibian and vice-president Liu Xiulian. The incident galvanized people’s political conscience both then and over the following years. An outcome in September 1986 was the formation of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as a full-fledged opposition party.

[9]All references to interview material are to the author’s unpublished interview with Chen Chieh-jen, 28 July 2000.

[10] Ibid.

[11]See for instance The Image of Identical Twins (1998).

[12]Ibid.

[13]Genealogy of Self (1996), Being Castrated (1996), Self-Destruction (1996), Rule of Law series (1997), Lost Voice series (1997).

[14] Image of An Absent Mind (1998), The Image of Identical Twins (1998), Na-Cha’s Body (1998), and A Way Going to An Insane City (1999).

[15]According to the Central News Agency, the photograph (#2100) was taken around the December of 1946, in the battle at Chongli. In fact, the battle took place on 9 November 1946, when the Communist army occupied Chongli, north of Zhangjiakou, killing several thousand civilians. Chen Chieh-jen says that the Central News Agency’s filing system might be wrong, because when he first looked at this picture, before they started their filing program, it was located among a group of pictures taken after Chiang Kai-shek’s armies took Yan’an.

[16]The February 28th Incident of 1947 caused the death of thousands of civilians, with estimates ranging from 18,000 to 28,000. The victims included local leaders—lawyers, doctors, scholars, and students—who helped the people to protest against the corrupt government that took over Taiwan after the end of the Second World War. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops arrived shortly and started forced suppression and massive execution throughout the island. Countless people were murdered, and many others kept in prison till the beginning of 1980s. The February 28th Incident was the beginning of the long period of White Terror and Martial Law, which started in 1950 and ended in 1987. For over forty years, this historical tragedy was silenced, effaced from history and popular consciousness.

[17] Elkins, The Object Stares Back, p. 115.

[18]The number of military deaths in one battle could reach up to 100,000, as it for example in the battles at Jinzhong and Jinan, 1948.

[19]Chen Chieh-jen deals with this theme in his Rules of Law.

[20]Chen Chieh-jen, “About the Forms of My Works.”

[21] Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,”in his Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, p. 70.

[22]Bataille, Inner Experience. p. 120.

[23] Ibid., p. 123.

[24]Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 140.

[25]Ibid. p. 4.

[26]Ibid., p. 26.

[27]This and the following quotations are all taken from Chen Chieh-jen, “About the Form of My Works”; see note 2