Artist Talk: On the Ripples of Identity Politics
“All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that's more social, more collaborative, more real than art.” — Dan Graham, quoted in Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship.
When Images Can No Longer Remember
The beginning of Ching-Wei Wang (Way)’s practice is marked by the work I forgot something before I recalled it, a thirteen-page artist’s book. It began as an accidentally soaked roll of film kept in the fridge at home, until capturing a group of friends’s trip to Yilan in 2020. The film’s emulsion, its light-sensitive layer, broke and peeled away, dried and re-adhered to the film base, creating fragmented and splintered images of its own. Confronted with these affections, Way saw a reflection of incomplete and wounded memory, which led to the impulse to mend the photos through an intuitive gesture, stitching the surface with thread.
As the ruptured negatives floated away, glided against, and clung together in the developing tank, the memories they held became entangled and transmuted. With thread and needle, Way pierces and traces the edges of the emulsion, as an attempt to recover these memories while also questioning the bond between memory and image. What can photography serve when image can no longer evoke an exact memory? How dependent are we on photos to re-remember, reconstruct, or revive memory? And, to what extent are revived memories preserved or distorted by the photographs themselves, rather than by our own minds?
In 2022, Way presented the book at Taipei Art Book Fair, and later cosigned it to Printed Matter, New York. The labor involved in producing unique editions by hand prompted a reflection on the exchange between repetitive task and time. Although Way moved away from book as her primary medium after 2022, the intimacy and sensibilities of the hand-made process, and the critical distance from photography as a medium continue to inform her later works through a quiet and sharp mode of making.
I forgot something before I recalled it, artist’s book, 2020–2024. Image courtesy of Way.
Between Writing and Image
In 2023, Way began to use paper stencils to install text onto walls in Untitled, and continued the practice in 2024, for the work Country within Country. Tuning into the slowness of graphite, she often spent three to four days on-site with a single pencil, carefully tracing the stencil edges, and filling in each part one-by-one; first, a string of English words ending in the [ʃən] suffix in Untitled, then, alternating simplified and traditional Chinese characters in Country within Country. These site-specific works were installed particularly to each space, measured and realized through a slow and attentive process.
For viewers unfamiliar with Hanzi*, encountering Country within Country felt closer to viewing images than reading text. The pictorial quality of the characters became the primary entry point to understanding, allowing the installation to exist simultaneously as text and image. This work prompted Way’s now-ongoing inquiry— what is an image?
Shifting from artist’s books, which demanded repeated production, to text-based work, which called for incremental installation, Way’s practice continued to be shaped by labor and time, which gradually became the foundation for her practice and informed her subsequent performance works.
*technically, Kanji. Country within Country uses a Japanese typeface, Yu Mincho, which supports use of both characters originating from the Chinese logographs.
Country Within Country (detail), 2024. Photo by Kuan Hsieh. Image courtesy of Way.
Maintain Status Quo Indefinitely
Maintain Status Quo Indefinitely is a performance series which uses a ten by six-and-a-half foot print of a photograph of the 228 Incident, an anti-government uprising in 1947, Taiwan, that was violently suppressed by the Kuomintang regime. The photo, from Wikipedia Commons, is divided into six square panels, mounted on wood, and placed on the floor. For each performance, Way, barefoot and dressed in a beige slip dress, kneels on top of a single panel and sands its surface until the ink wears away into an ash-like dust. Each iteration of the performance lasts about twenty minutes.
As each performance proceeds, the image [] and fades, revealing the inherent instability of photos as a record of time and memory. Echoing questions raised in her earlier works, Maintain Status Quo Indefinitely challenges not only the function of images as vessels of memory, but the very possibility of preservation itself.
During the performances, the gallery space and street naturally filled with viewers. For Way, the relationship between the work and its audience was essential; each person became part of the work simply through their presence, and the live performance could only exist through their witnessing.
Video documentation, often employed to preserve performance, captures the event only with particular angles, durations, and camera settings. Rather than preservation, these recordings are more like a translation of the event. In contrast, the dust produced by sanding was collected after and became an index after each performance. This residue pointed to the ambiguity and instability embedded in images when they attempt to bear witness to/engage with reality.
The source image retrieved online bore visible digital artifacts when enlarged — ghostly reminders of its circulation through digital archives. These artifacts mirrored Way’s own experience of relearning history through online sources after leaving formal education. Yet, as the surface ink wore away, the pixelation blurred and paradoxically, were stripped of its digital noise/presence, appearing somehow more real, as if returned to a quieter and less mediated state without digitization.
At the close of each performance, when Way stood up, two untouched blind spots, shielded by the physical presence of the body during sanding, remained in their original color and digitized state. Shaped by bodily limits, these protected areas transformed the image itself into a surface/interface of history that one perpetually out of full reach. They spoke to the fundamental constraint at the core of memory and history: that something always remains inaccessible, beyond what can be seen, touched, or preserved.
Maintain Status Quo Indefinitely, performance, September 14, 2024. Photo by Kuan Hsieh. Image courtesy of Way.
Maintain Status Quo Indefinitely (detail), performance residue on pigment print on wood panel, 2024–2025. Image courtesy of Way.
黃榮燦，《恐怖的檢查》，木版畫，1947 年。圖片來源：維基百科。