“Auguest 15th”   ◎  Lin Yi-Hsiu

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For the last year Chu ChunTeng has spent much of his time traveling between centers in Taipei and Hsinchu that care for patients with dementia. The individuals in these institutions have had their memories and identities wiped away by illness, with segments of short-term memory leading their bodies like a replay button, as they wander, hesitate and forget things before even remembering them. Memory lapses mean that every day they repeat the same self introduction as before, returning to the beginning of conversations while still in the middle. This is their daily life, a question repeatedly being asked.

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In recent years, Chu ChunTeng, who has a background in cinema, has adopted a creative methodology that involves “constructing a narrative through an installation.” By focusing on the contradictions between objects he examines the layered relationships between history, culture and society from his own perspective. On this occasion he takes “August 15” and a hospitalized senior suffering from Alzheimers as his starting point, asking questions through simple images. The installation image taken from monitor footage shows a senior who remains missing. The picture, which is labeled “August 15, 2016,” stops time in the moment before the person disappeared. The impersonal viewpoint of the monitor and the voices of family members describing their loved one, creates an imagined image for viewers, which together with the boundary marker-like installation point to the nowhere found “That-has-been” in the real world.

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We get a sense of Chu ChunTeng's film work from the dual frequency video that takes up most of the exhibition space. In one of his earlier cinematic pieces “The House of Sleeping Beauty,” the movement of the camera often seems to be “searching” for something and the director provides the audience with an answer when the shot stops moving. If we review the video recording the wanderings of an Alzheimers patient, then the line of the shot in the left picture is like an old piece of furniture, waiting for her to appear in the spaces she traverses each day. This use of camera shots is already very different to the fusion, overlapping and multi viewpoint editing of “The House of Sleeping Beauty.” At this point the sense of time and shot progress at the same speed, contrasting the direct physical sensation showcased in the right picture with the constant cycle seen in the left picture as the person passes through the space. The juxtaposition of the two videos played simultaneously creates a bizarre mirror image wherein the camera moves and it is still searching, though in this instance no answer is indicated.

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The video and the audio use an external montage that is woven into a larger narrative structure in the display area, with visitors able to traverse the scenes in the film, effectively reassembling and adjusting narrative relationships that are usually controlled by the artist. At the other end of the display area, subjects are shown in a different state of being filmed with three portrait-like pictures and it is here that Chu ChunTeng uses moving images for purposes of photography, so the individuals photographed are in the same state as before the picture is taken. That moment of waiting in front of the camera is transformed into a gaze whereby the patients stare at the viewers and the screen becomes a mirror image. In this way, the photographer/audience are the ones viewed and the process of gradually seeing oneself in the images, of which either the entrance or the exit, is the focal point for the question we've been asked repeatedly day after day.