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A bartender's bar.
Bartenders come here to hangout after their shifts, so it opens till laaaate. Loving the vibe. Lots of interesting peculiarities - a small ktv room (broadcasted to live audience outside), coasters of dick drawings stuck on the ceiling, a few bras hanging at the back bar, black-litted toilet filled with glow in the dark graffiti. And most of all, pretty affordable drinks.
#angeltini #faroams Skinny's Lounge
【新刊發行 NEW RELEASE】
▒ Voices of Photography 攝影之聲 ▒
Issue 14 : 謎途 Journey Into Mystery
在這期開始之前，我們追思藝術家陳順築。
生於1963年的陳順築，其濃烈的家族記憶與原鄉羈愁所轉印建構的複合影像及攝影裝置作品，是當代台灣藝壇重要的標誌與代表。在台北市立美術館正為陳順築舉辦首次個人大型回顧展之際，他卻於2014年10月和我們告別遠行……。為了紀念他，我們重新刊載三年前在《攝影之聲》和陳順築的對話，並再收錄藝術家陳界仁與姚瑞中寫給順築的信，以及我們從他1989年至近期的個人札記中，節錄出的隨筆、塗鴉與奇想。他說，藝術就是心裡的事，而我們試著跟隨他的喃喃私語，想像他這一生創作總念念不忘的家。
本期我們特別介紹藝術家赤鹿麻耶、宇田川直寬和付羽，他們的作品令人陷入當代攝影看不清的謎霧中——赤鹿奇異佈局的詭祕時刻、宇田川在家庭照片上綿密塗畫的燥灼抒發，以及付羽冷峻枯寂的形骸景象，我們嘗試前往他們自身也難以剖解的影像謎團中尋路。專欄中，張世倫則以攝影家張乾琦的錄像新作《Side Chain》切入析論攝影的毀壞與創生 ; 顧錚書寫捷克攝影家斯沃博達的攝影生涯，追尋他的自傳性內心影像 ; 黃翰荻帶我們重返1940年代，細數台灣前輩攝影家張才在上海留下的鏡頭足跡。而這期夾帶的《SHOUT》第六輯，是台灣新一代攝影創作者鄭弘敬的獨白詩篇，他遊移於日常卻捉摸不定的破格視線，則是另一個謎題。
新的一年準備開始，我們也回顧2014年的攝影出版。在VOP編輯室被愈來愈多來自世界各地的攝影書淹沒的情況下，我們特別增加頁數、一口氣邀集了五位不同國家的攝影評論人與攝影書收藏者——陣容包括獨立攝影書庫創辦人Larissa Leclair、亞太攝影書資料庫創辦人Daniel Boetker-Smith、法國Le Bal藝術總監Sebastian Arthur Hau、德國卡塞爾攝影書節創辦人Dieter Neubert，以及日本資深藝評家大竹昭子——在2014年的攝影書海中，評選出他們最喜歡的攝影書單推薦給大家。如果你和我們一樣是攝影書迷，那麼絕對不能錯過這些精彩的書。
蕭永盛的「台灣攝影史」連載五，此次回望甲午戰爭時期日人龜井茲明與其寫真班在台灣留下的戰爭影像紀錄 ; Q單元，我們則專訪中國《老照片》主編馮克力，這份18年來由讀者投稿、蒐集整理民間照片資料的叢刊，是庶民影像史觀的珍貴報告。
然而在埋首編務的同時，我們接獲中國海關查禁《攝影之聲》並出動「文化市場執法總隊」接連查抄書店據點、全面下架雜誌的消息，其中更特別針對了《攝影之聲》上期的「抗議、行動與影像」專題，試圖以非法進口的理由在中國進行打壓淨化。此舉非但證實了中國政府對於出版與表意自由已更加限縮，同時也說明了即使是一份小小的刊物也足以讓強權畏怕。我們在這裡要再次聲明，《攝影之聲》將堅持獨立刊物的精神，寧做異音，也不會配合任何掌權者的和諧曲調。在此特別感謝關心及支持我們的讀者。
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This issue of VOP pays tribute to artist Chen Shun-Chu.
Born in 1963, Chen’s composite images and photographic installation art pieces, which capture the vivid memories of his family and longing for his ancestral home, are iconic pieces in Taiwanese contemporary art. Chen passed away in 2014 just as his major retrospective exhibition was being held in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. We interviewed him in 2011, and published the interview in the now out-of-print third issue of VOP. We decided to re-publish the interview in this issue, alongside letters to Chen Shun-Chu from artists Chen Chieh-Jen and Yao Jui-Chung, as well as some drawings, words and musings from his personal notebooks. He once said that art is something that comes from deep in his heart, and we try to imagine the home and family that were always on his mind from his murmurings.
Also in this issue, we introduce artists Akashika Maya, Utagawa Naohiro and Fu Yu, seeking a path through their mysterious images that perhaps even they themselves would find difficult to decipher—Akashika’s eccentric layouts, Utagawa’s frustrated graffiti on his family photos and Fu Yu’s indifferent images of animal remains. In their columns, Chang Shih-Lun analyses the deconstruction and creation of photography through Side Chain, a new film by photographer Chang Chian-Chi; Gu Zheng writes about the life and works of Czech photographer Jan Svoboda in search of the autobiographic images in his photographs; Huang Han-Di brings us back to the 1940s and shows us footprints of Taiwanese photographer Chang Tsai in Shanghai through his pictures. The 6th issue of the bonus zine SHOUT is a soliloquy by teikoukei, one of the new generation of Taiwanese photographers. Through his lenses, we enter yet another mysterious journey and break free of normal points of view.
At the start of 2015, we look back at the publications of 2014. The VOP team has been —gladly—overwhelmed by recommendations from all over the world. We decided to increase the number of pages for this issue and invited 5 photography critics and photobook collectors from 5 different countries to submit a list of their favorite photobook lists of 2014. The panel includes the founder of Indie Photobook Library Larissa Leclair, Director and founder of Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive Daniel Boetker-Smith, Creative Director of Le Bal Books Sebastian Arthur Hau from France, founder of Kassel Photobook Award Dieter Neubert from Germany and renowned critic Akiko Otake. If you, too, love photobooks, then these titles are definitely worth your time.
In “History of Photography in Taiwan” Part V, Hsiao Yong-Seng looks back at the wartime images left by Japanese photographer Kamei Koreaki and his Photography Unit in the army; Q features a special interview with Feng Keli, editor-in-chief for Old Photographs, a publication that has become a valuable archive of photography from the historical perspective of the common people through 18 years of collecting, organizing and publishing photographs sent in by its readers.
As we were busy working on this issue of VOP, we received word that VOP has been banned from import by China customs. In addition, the authorities have also sent the “Integrated Law Enforcement in Cultural Market Team” to VOP retailers in China to remove and confiscate issues of VOP from the stores, especially our recent issue on “Protests, Activism and Images”. This act confirms that the Chinese government is still oppressing freedom of speech and publishing, and also proves that even a small magazine like ours can cause great fear to a totalitarian regime. Although we are concerned about the impact of such a policy on cultural and ideological dialogue, as an independent magazine, VOP will continue on its path and risk being different, rather than dance to the tune of the oppressor. We sincerely thank our readers for your concern and support.
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Voices of Photography 攝影之聲
Issue 14 : 謎途 Journey Into Mystery
www.vopmagazine.com
Nobody’s Fool ( January 2011 )
Yoshitomo Nara
Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.
But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.
While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.
As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.
In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.
Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.
Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!
I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.
Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.
By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.
After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.
And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.
Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.
But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.
The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.
Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.
After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.
Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.
After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.
I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….
