Something in the eye catches a correspondence that the rational mind does not usually process immediately, but which is perceived intuitively as a similarity that precedes language and belongs to a more immediate form of knowledge.
This intuitive perception is characteristic of the human eye and carries no significant cultural implications, except in the type of representations associated with it.
In the Eastern tradition, the categories of thought linked to specific images reflect the conception of a fusion between the human body and plant nature, as a deep conceptual device rather than a decorative one. The idea that flesh and flower share the same logic of existence is circumscribed within a theoretical and iconographic horizon that places “Tender Tension”, the photographic project by Chieh-Lin Wu, within the aesthetic current of academic photography.
The artist inherits its visual and technical aspects, translating into sequences of images arranged by similarity and analogy an instinctive intuition that connects two categories of representation within a well-established visual language. Her images create a tension that oscillates between the transience of the human body and that of the vegetal, generating and questioning the immanence of the photographic object within an aesthetic and philosophical field in which the subject emerges as a temporary form.
It is a tradition that completely overturns the Cartesian division between subject and object, between observer and observed, dominant in Western thought the dichotomous separation collapses into a totalising organicity. A profound philosophical difference separates the thought and representation of the body and natural elements between the Western and Eastern traditions: a holistic and, precisely, non-dual conception.
The Western philosophical tradition regards the representation of the phenomenal as a dual, Cartesian concept, whereas the Eastern tradition considers the manifestation of the phenomenon as all-encompassing, one that does not separate one category from another but instead approaches reality by abolishing the categories of separation within a unitary order.
The photographic project of Chieh-Lin Wu belongs to that Great Tradition of photography mentioned by Susan Sontag in her famous essay “On Photography”, respecting an academic yet non-narrative aesthetic, presenting a clean and concise visual language governed by an analogical and similitude-based order that brings together without comparing, but rather through dialogue the central themes of the history of visual representation: those of the body and of nature.
The theme of the project, which originates from an autonomous vision of the two subjects and culminates in an intuition about the meaning of resemblance, employs the diptych to construct a discourse on the memento mori. Memento mori is a Latin refereing to an artistic and philosophical tradition, from its Roman origins through seventeenth-century Flemish painting, that uses symbols of decay such aswilting flowers to remind the viewer of the transience of life. In the artist’s philosophical project, this concept survives and manifests itself both at the level of representation and within the theoretical and research dimension.
Examining the subjects in detail, the artist juxtaposes particulars of the anatomical body with elements of the vegetal world to narrate the transience of the body, the elusiveness of time, the inevitability of death. The texture of nearly withered flowers and plants is placed alongside that of skin and hair, in a strongly contrasted black and white that amplifies the sense of drama and scenic impact.
“Tender Tension” by Chieh-Lin Wu emerges as an autonomous project, the result of prior careful observation of nature and bodily form, yet it is capable of traversing the great founding themes of traditional Western figurative representation such as the classical vanitas and the mortal body within a technical presentation informed by Taoist thought: the body is part of the natural world and is subject to the same cycle of life: birth, growth, death. The artist’s dry and formal technique does not suppress the intensity of the themes addressed: it respects and expands them, organising representation as a discourse that evolves through similarities, is observed with a sense of duality, and is re-read by affirming resemblances over differences.
The choice of working through diptychs recalls the practice of visual comparison that Karl Blossfeldt had made celebrated at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his plates from “Urformen der Kunst” (1928), Blossfeldt juxtaposed enlarged plant morphologies with architectural and ornamental structures, revealing how nature already contained within itself the forms that human beings would later reinvent. Chieh-Lin Wu proposes an inverse idea: she restores a visual equality to both subjects, allowing the dialogue to unfold without a hierarchical dimension. The diptych does not establish a demonstration but proposes a cohabitation of two different manifestations of biological reality, in which resemblances emerge slowly, returning the central themes of the classical tradition of representation to a natural lexicon.”Tender Tension” is a delicate and elegant observation, capable of synthesising Western and Eastern traditions and of proposing, in a linear sequence, a narrative frequency that represents the natural phenomenon in a continuity of forms, textures and details. Chieh-Lin Wu does not stop at technique, however, and combines an accurate art-historical language with the theme of vulnerability and an implacable power of Time.
Chiara Causo
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