ARTITUDE · No.57, June 2014 · Text / Wu Chia-hsuan · Images courtesy of AKI Gallery

I take certain things away, so that my work becomes purer and more concentrated — stripping out many elements and using only the features and the expression, like the difference between a novel and a poem…
— Lo Chan Peng

The Symbolic Person

From the several series named for the “Strawberry Generation” — “Strawberry Generation: A Youthful Diary,” “Strawberry Generation: Cell Division,” Strawberry Generation: The Great Melee and “Strawberry Generation: Night Parade of a Hundred Demons” — through to the recent “Ashen Face” series, the examination of Taiwan’s younger generation has always lain at the heart of Lo Chan Peng’s painting. Time and again, in the form and display of a portrait-gallery “collected biography,” he builds a kind of “visual sample of the survival-state of the youth of his age.” The outward, emphasised traits of these samples — the exaggerated, vivid make-up of glamorous young men and women, their cute or mocking posed gestures — became the visual vocabulary by which Lo interpreted the shared character of the “contemporary” he faced. And yet, for Lo, the surface, shallow impression the viewer grasps at first glance — like his earlier depictions of the “(young) Taiwanese” — can serve only as a shallow “appearance” for reading and understanding the contemporary young. These readily recognisable, classifiable images and details of dress (the taike, the costume) exist only to throw into relief the metaphor of the inner character and the forces of the age beneath the surface. The fashionable traditional-pattern tattoos that recur on the stylish young women of “A Youthful Diary,” for instance, stand for the traditional notions — even pressures — that the young, who hold the future, may still meet. In The Great Melee, a young man and woman wear caps bearing the emblems of the Communist and Nationalist parties, a pistol in one hand and a bubble-gun in the other, facing the viewer together in a manner half earnest, half flippant — Lo’s satirical view of a cross-strait political situation in which both sides join hands to press people into submission before those in power.

One may note here that Lo’s extremely lifelike, realist handling only strengthens the viewer’s reading of these “Strawberry” biographies: the fine, like-real depiction offers more cues to connect with the memory of real life, as though the younger generation “really is just so.” And precisely because of this “faithful” depiction, the viewer slides from recognition of the figures’ image (the shallow surface) to a deeper identification with their tangled, complex inner states. In other words, these portraits of a generation are a kind of “symbolic person”: the figures are not simply Lo’s realist re-presentation of “them”; more importantly, they stand as symbolic signs of a certain contemporary commonality. However different the faces, such symbolic persons in fact lack individual character, for they share a like exterior and all but vanish into their styling, poses and props. This inclination to address an image of the whole age through collected portraits is more marked still in the “Night Parade of a Hundred Demons” series — named for the procession of monsters that, in Japanese folklore, walks the summer night. Here, though, the contrast-and-foil device Lo once favoured to draw out metaphor disappears, replaced by direct, strange and startling images: on the girls’ youthful flesh appear all manner of uncanny, faintly “expressive” mouths and eyes, answering to their vivid, trend-conscious dress. In “Night Parade of a Hundred Demons 1: The Two-Mouthed Woman,” a seductively dressed girl has, on her unbuttoned chest, a second, half-open, alluring mouth. The “abnormal” state these mutated bodies reveal is a metaphor: that the young generation may all use some “normal” surface — in dress or in thought — to mask or suppress the existence of another, hidden self. In sum, across the “Strawberry Generation” series, what Lo explores is a reaction against the “flat,” “shallow” traits appended to — or, for Lo, more truly “forced upon” — that generation.

From the “Ashen Face” series — its name drawn from the nine-tailed fox in the Japanese comic The Magic Pony — Lo’s depiction of the “symbolic person” moves gradually to another register. The character of the symbolic person that the earlier “Strawberry” series made manifest through photorealist technique, bold colour and exaggerated, uncanny detail was undeniably very “overt”: through Lo’s hyperbolic visual vocabulary the viewer could easily perceive and identify the shared traits of the young generation the artist meant to bring out. In “Ashen Face,” although the figures still stand as symbolic signs of a contemporary commonality of suppressed character, the hyperbolic visual element Lo once favoured is greatly reduced. Most plainly, he strips away the vivid, even uncanny colour of his earlier work, turning instead to a palette keyed to grey, black, white and brown, so that the chiaroscuro sense of light and shade, and of drawing, grows stronger, while much of the exaggerated, accessory styling is set aside. Seen thus, the “Ashen Face” series asks the viewer to enter and immerse more fully in figures pale of face, or weary, or sorrowful, or lost in thought, stirring a subtle emotion the viewer cannot quite name. In sum, the “Ashen Face” series does possess an “unsayable,” ambiguous atmosphere and a dark air — not, however, to be explained as an analogy with the manner of cinema, but because Lo sets the emphasis of his depiction on how, through colour and brushwork, he finely arranges the emotional expression that escapes from his figures amid their frozen, still poses, which imply a sense of inward restraint.