推薦序
A Multiplicity of Experience
With professional commitments in Taipei and a family in State College, Pennsylvania, Ben Yu maintains residences in both countries. His large-scale color photographs, from the series entitled The Puppet Bridegroom, relate broadly to the complexities that arise from living in two different cultures.
A hand puppet dressed in traditional Chinese bridegroom's clothing is the central motif of his work. The puppet is photographed at places Ben believes embody American culture, such as a brewery, a suburban housing development, and a monumental roadside crucifix. Inspired partly by conceptual artist Eleanor Antin's postcard series 100 Boots (1971-73), in which she photographed one-hundred empty rubber boots at various locations as they traveled across the United States and ultimately landed in the Museum of Modern Art, the nomadic puppet wanders from place to place, dwarfed by the enormity of the American landscape. With an admirable consistency of vision, Ben mindfully considers the land, signs, highways, buildings and shops, and, with even more awareness, color. Vibrant greens, reds, and yellows abound in the images, shaping the commonplace into the exceptional.
Ben attended graduate school at the height of Post-modernism, during the mid-1980s when theorists proclaimed that "'reality' as a consequence could be understood as socially constructed" (Madeleine Grynsztejn, Carnegie International 99/ 00: VO, p. 116). The ubiquitous nature of photography led to a critique of representation by many artists at this time, and Ben was no exception. Photographs, for all their perceived "truthfulness," are fiction because they are disconnected from the time continuum of reality. Like much of the artwork created during this period, Ben's photography rests between the real and its referent, reflecting a belief in the authenticity of the puppet as it assumes life-like gestures and positions at odds with its surroundings. Indeed, he has transferred his persona onto the puppet with an ambivalence arising from foreign status, albeit compromised by marriage to an American. In each of the images cultural contradictions exist between fiction and documentary, and fabrication and nature.
His decision to insert the puppet into the landscape creates a complex reading culturally and formally. Bridegroom translates from Mandarin as new person, and Ben's work comments on the challenges of living in a foreign land where one is perpetually "new" and never fully assimilated. Creating compositions that at times fluctuate between what is perceived as real and what has been manipulated by the photographer, the distance between photographic representation and reality is deliberately confused within the frame. The puppet's placement acts as a barrier forcing a confrontation prior to entering the scene. Frequently, it is positioned at critical intersections such as a bend in the road, or an entrance way, furthering an outward visual push toward the exterior of the print. In Boalsburg (2001), for example, the puppet stands in a stark wooded environment defiantly dressed in brilliant red clothing. The few wooded forests that remain on the island of Taiwan are now protected as national parks, whereas much of Taiwan's natural beauty has succumbed to housing because of rapid population growth, limited space, and a shift from an agricultural society to one based in technology. By isolating cultural experience and association, Boalsburg is emblematic of Ben's ambivalence toward America.
To assert that Ben documents icons of middle-class American culture is far too simplistic. By utilizing popular forms of photography such as the snapshot and vacation pictures, he notices the unnoticeable, seeing details and configurations of signs, colors, and shapes that inhabitants may not, while looking for minute details of the American scene. Trailer parks, a soccer game, cornfields, and drive-ins are associated strongly with American culture but also beg the question "Are the places he chooses to photograph representative of American culture? And if so, whose?" Do the images belong to an African American culture, an Hispanic culture, and an Asian American culture equally along with the majority? Do images of Pennsylvania resonate with Southern culture or that of the Western states? The photographs hang silently, offering no answers only a glimpse into the eyes of the other.
Interpreting content is complicated further by the many years I lived as a foreigner in Taipei. After returning home and having to reexamine the familiar along with a multiplicity of experiences associated with re-entering society, Ben's photographs of Pennsylvania evoked a doubling of cultural associations for me. He was portraying American culture from the perspective of an outsider augmented by our relationship. Images depicting a row of storage sheds, a stone house with beautiful flower gardens in an affluent neighborhood, school busses parked for the summer, and an empty baseball field all quietly disclose a society of abundance and excess. Viewed as a series, the photographs are reminiscent of a desire I had as a photographer in Taiwan to seek out familiar spaces in the unfamiliar. Ultimately, our individual efforts to photographically scrutinize the middle classes of American and Taiwanese societies had become metaphors for personal identity and cultural alienation. As Italo Calvino writes, an image may appear "like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p.105).
In his mature work that encompasses three photographic series - Between Real and Unreal (1986 ~), French Chair in Taiwan (1997-1999), and The Puppet Bridegroom (1999-2002), Ben has created a strong sense of the essential textures and character of place, whether in Taiwan or the United States. Without satire or idealism, the images that comprise The Puppet Bridegroom, in particular, delineate the myth of America, imagined by both natives and foreigners, of self-expression, ownership, reinvention, and limitless opportunity. The work speaks to a universality of experience beyond personal references, and further illustrates the changing face of contemporary American society.
Karen Serago
September 2002
作者序
出版前言
十多年前自美返國，沒有回到美術界教職，反而進了比較注重文字思考和論述的傳播學領域。新環境裡，有形的學術氣圍讓文字表述的機會大烏增加，1986年春出版了生平的第一本文字書《論超現實攝影》。幾年下來，倒驚訝的發現，字裏行間的推敲與琢磨，不但能讓模糊的藝術概念得到沈澱，文字論述中的通輯訓練，更對創作的自理有異曲同工的效益。更重要的是，白紙黑字成了創作自省的最佳指標。於是，只要有機會，便常和學生分享這和圖、文並進的創作形式。 話雖如此，總覺得自己在藝術創作實體上一直未會太使勁。
1996年的「台北雙年展」，隔年中、獻藝術家的《你聽•我說》展，在和國內、外當代藝術家的互動過程中讓自己陷人人生規劃的長思：要繼續爬格子？還是走出研究去創作？原地踱步的原因也許和在職環境尚未能接受藝術家升退有關。
是生計考量？還是對自己劍作能力的疑慮？
模糊的日子卻已日復一日的度過。
已不記得是哪年的夏天，和政大現任鄧瑞成校長（當時的傳播學院院長）開聯人生觀時，讓自己類悟應該將中年生涯（重新）定位在藝術創作，大膽的以一位「藝術家教師」走在沒有藝術系的校關裡。
指南山下孤寂的藝術環境，倒是讓自己想出如何將教學活動和創作實體整合的生活態度：創作不再只是媒材玩耍，而可以是精神和生活的實踐。日子開始雙得有些忙碌，創造的腦筋時時都在運轉。此時，文字論述的內容多已調整成如何將“不可明言”的藝術創作，用自己的體驗試加以解說。
如果描述面對藝術當時是某種點的接觸，之後其他形式的討論便是和作品撞擊產生的線。接著，如果能再將討論内容予以文字化，更成面的形式。
藝術創作的起點，如果未能延長成線，再織成了面，點很快就會隨著時間而越來越模糊。
羅蘭．巴特認爲現代人有一種無需用手執筆的新書寫方法，雖然用身體的哪一部份來書寫也許還說不清楚。不過，即使是以機器代勞，總還得用眼睛看：人的身體依然經由視覺與書寫關聯在一起。因此，任何書本都可以用不同的方式進行原始的閱讀；如同古代的書法家一般，把文字看成身體的一種神秘投影。
2002秋，能出版《台灣新郎》一「編導式攝影」中的記錄思維，除了要感謝家人和周邊所有的朋友之外，更應感謝賜給我頻繁生活變化及挑戰的上天。生活實質的多方體驗，搭架出這些文字和影像的對話。
游本寬
2002年 / 秋 / 政大
TAAZE 讀冊生活
博客來
金石堂
