On the Man with the Film Projector

We invited the artist, the exhibition's curator Chou Yu-ling and curatorial assistant Marianna Tsionki to a Q&A on the upcoming exhibition.

Marianna: The influence from European avant-garde film is apparent in your practice (for example, essay films as a cinematic format). Can you discuss the various aspects of this inspiration? I have been reading some texts about your works and they all mention your motivation to resist the ‘first world visual-audio industry’, can you tell us more about it?

Can you please tell us more about the role of the spectator in your work?

Kao Chung-li: I will respond to your questions at once. If it were not for the invention of photography and the film camera, there wouldn’t have been the artistic contemporaneity and avant-garde in film or photography. Obviously, there was an imaging machine before mechanical images. In this case, from avant-garde films to the First Cinema (commercial movies, such as Badllywood (Hollywood)) the diversity of the development of the film industry created the possibility and creation of mechanical images. It’s more accurate to say that I am influenced by mechanical images. Secondly, I also appreciate other directors’ response to the world’s modernity and its relationship with visuality in their narratives and mechanical images.

The sense of time in films is based on the technique and the art of spatial senses – the eyes as well as temporal sense – the ears. So time, movements and narratives are events in the consciousness of the filmmaker and which generate the expansion of space and the extension of time in films. When audiences / spectators approach a mechanical image constructed by sound and light, there will be events formed in their consciousness too. Essay film is a widely recognized form and theory in recent years, and it has changed the passive behavior of film viewing; the watching and listening to a closed context in films. Through the sensibility and crossed layers of narratives, the closed contexts can be opened; opening the cinematic events to different audiences. About your question of ‘fighting against’ first world audio-visual industry: It’s heavy to use the word ‘fight against’. For someone like me – who didn’t inherit the tradition of the imaging machine – this is my armory, used to encourage myself. If you call it a conversation, it would seem a bit too easy. Owing to the imaging machine’s lack of heritage while I dive into the sea of mechanical images, I often feel like a subspecies who doesn’t have a mother language. After all, I am the ‘Other’ to the West if you look at me from the perspective of modernity. Whether they (those modern men) want to have a conversation with me, as a film native, it depends on what my imaging machine can offer.

M: Can you talk about the reasons behind the specific selection of works; are you following a specific curatorial technique?

Chou Yu-ling: Kao Chung-li often says he is loyal to the limitations of material conditions, which often shape his artistic production and aesthetics. I think working with Kao, you need to know and respect this principle and his almost-materialistic philosophy. He mentioned that he used to shoot 8mm films because it was cheap and affordable. This is important in the way that his selection of materials autonomously reflects the economic aspect of media and the way it is circulated in the economic society. Kao seldom screens his 8mm experimental films in these days, because they are in a fragile condition and need to be restored and digitized. The material conditions of the 8mm films stop these films from being circulated overseas. His self-modified projectors are also difficult to tour without the artist present, since Kao might be the only operator who knows how to make his machine work. He is a man who lives in the mechanical era and the mobility of his cinematic machines entirely relies on the mobility of the artist who in recent years has spent most of his time taking care of his 90-year-old father who has always been the core subject in his films. He has, however, digitized his films about his father and Chen Yingzhen (one of the most important leftist writers in post-war Taiwan) and made these films more accessible and easy to circulate; as if he would like to make the stories of his father and his mentor Chen Yingzhen seen and heard.

In this exhibition, I focus particularly on the way Kao uses films (or his slide-show cinema) to present the complex relationship between personal history (biography) and History. My Mentor, Chen Yingzhen (2010) is a film-diary based on Kao’s memories of Chen Yingzhen who devoted himself to leftist ideals and often clashed with both the right-wing authoritarian government and the mainly liberal intellectual community in 1960s and 70s Taiwan. Slideshow Cinema1: Taste of Human Flesh (2010–12) is an audio-visual installation that tells the story of Kao’s father (who was shot during the civil war in China around 1948) through the key motif of the bullet travelling through his father’s body. There is also an archival section that presents historic materials of the avant-garde in Taiwan including the pioneering Theatre Quarterly (1965–7), Kao’s early experimental film That Photograph (1984), stills of the artist performing in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) and his self-modified projector device “The Man with the Film Projector”, which inspired the title of the exhibition.

Image: Still from Lion du Iraq, 2003. Courtesy of the artist @ Kao Chung-li.

Kao Chung-li: The Man with the Film Projector
23 Apr 2015 – 5 May 2015
The Peltz Gallery, London