Ed Pien: Drawing Hauntology
"Ed Pien: Drawing Hauntology" by Laiwan, Summer 2007, pp. 62-67
As we have said before, it attacked in the name of the Revolution, what? the Revolution….There were no longer giants against colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons attacked, spectres resisted…
—Victor Hugo
…haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated…Untimely, it does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day, Europe, as if the latter, at a certain moment of its history, had begun to suffer from a certain evil, to let itself be inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted by a foreign guest.
—Jacques Derrida
These Foreign Guests! It is not how they attack but how we are haunted. Revolution here is not solely a historical event but the turning of a cycle, a change in our consciousness of how we live and breathe as beings within, or outside, our material economy. Where in a world of apparition that we perceive as inhabited by lost demons, they now resist, as in revolutionary resistance. They reside in a state of perfect harmonic and demonic glee— sensual, bacchanalian and visceral, if ethereal—vocalizing, yelling, chattering, thriving beside our world. We can witness in political terror and violence our increasing fear of them, our panic and impoverishment, both spiritually and humanly.
The art of Ed Pien fully describes the embodied, multifaceted world of these demons, investigating what I read as a phenomenological manifestation of what Jacques Derrida termed hauntology. It is ironic how embodied and present they are— within their ethereality—in contrast to our increasing bodily and material obsolescence and sedation as mortals within virtuality and simulacra.
Pien labours within this realm of variable, mutating and expansive space, and exteriorizes his labour with intimacy and tenderness. He draws on, paints on and cuts subtly textured paper—every gentle sheet is home to gruesome and gleeful configurations of bodily contortions, non-individuated identities, somapathic birthings, sociopathic abnormalities, polysexualities and herniated fistulas depicted with childlike wonder and horror. All contest the homogeneity of polite form. All vehemently announce their presence: “I am here, I am here!” Housed in life-size sculptures, giant spirit-houses, befriended by their maker as if they possess an everyday nature, knowing they are not other to us but equals, understood and given space, heard. We would know less of this hauntology if not for Pien’s close listening.
Pien’s work is not about aesthetic perfectionism or market obsession. Nor is it culturally specific representation in the name of identity politics, although it can be and most probably is often read within these contexts. Instead, it embodies a sophisticated understanding of a philosophical aesthetic that befriends the state of being haunted, the premise of Derrida’s hauntology. With Pien we have a model of a modest, humble approach that is also intriguingly rigorous—a living labour dedicated to portraying a time and place in history. In a time when portraiture is fabricated and reduced to media delusions, Pien’s characters appear as apparitions. Fabulous and flamboyantly grotesque, they remind us of all we are not and can never physically be. Instead, these spirits are free and wild, beautifully ugly. They embarrass us by showing us how controlling and micromanaged we have become in our petty perfectionism. When I experience Pien’s hauntology, I understand resistance: I enjoy its revolution. It is alive. We feel it in every installation that Pien conjures, and this is the joie de vivre of his haunting. I care for his characters. I care for his portraits. I want to know what their lives are like.
Pien encourages us to consider whimsy as an occupation to be approached with attention, a form of labour in the service of something unexplainable, non-functional, nonsensical, imaginable yet larger than ourselves. We can take this as a serious, postlinguistic practice that manifests bodily presence. It is beyond words, beyond description, beyond explanation. It is existence beyond a narcissistic, intellectual understanding—a state of commonality, communing with abnormality and polymorphologies without discrimination, predetermination or systemic profiling.
Beauty, made banal after postmodernism, is returned to us through Pien’s imagination, reincarnated into a wild, free, demonic beast. She never repeats herself. There is always a sense of something new and fresh, so that the hair at the nape of your neck stands up. We are struck bodily as it envelops us. We discover joy in the pleasures of this haunt: ironically, it is through the pleasure of presence, after haunting, after melancholy, that we relearn beauty—an embodied beauty, not a narcissistic mirror.
She can be sweetly ugly, happily cherubic, solitarily melancholic, painfully vulnerable, sensitive to the fear of mortals, yet still demonic. It is the same with Pien’s work—and I must emphasize its performative nature; it cannot be seen solely as drawing, painting or sculpture—the hauntology just is. It has no mission, no moralizing binary. In this, it succeeds in differentiating itself from previous approaches to similar subjects and objects, transforming what Pien investigates, as Derrida correctly observed the performative should.
Beauty flourishes in the giant spirit-houses Pien builds. They are flexible, light, temporary, airy, yurt- and tent-like, circular. In their incredible lightness, Pien’s structures embody a model of fleeting and fluid temporality. It is a nomadic aesthetic that understands plight and peril while treading with the lightest of steps—sustainable, unencumbered, energy-efficient, an architecture with the roundness of lateral thinking, bodily and mortally sized, alive! The haunting thrives. In Pien’s careful designs, beauty and beast are no longer binaries but are one, no longer either neglected or betrayed but drawn with tenderness, love and attention to all delicacies and delights and frights, improvisationally automatist in a surreal tradition but not surreal at all—instead made real in Pien’s methodical and engaged explorations. And so while beauty can frighten, the beastly can seduce. And according to this flipped perception, beauty is rejuvenated through a ghostly performativity, transformed by our participation in Pien’s expansive curiosity. She is a wild thing: raw, tolerant, tenacious, enduring—belonging here, no longer a foreign guest but a cosmopolitan world traveller. She is of the land for she understands this ground of ancestors; she is home. We peer at beastly beauty through Pien’s kaleidoscopic, labyrinthine portals. He gives shelter to these demons with the attention that a gardener extends to his flowers or a honey farmer to his bees. Each demon appears content, heard, visible. The characters never repeat; each is drawn with succinct precision, a flick of the wrist, a calligraphic elegance and grace bestowed by a dedicated artist who loses himself in the process, in the discipline and the sheer love of the act.
There are many things happening in Pien’s pieces: the expression of the grotesque, stage fright for both the viewed and the viewer, tender seductions and sophisticated foreplay involving vulnerability, delicacy, fragility, strength. How to adequately describe the source of this life? It is not supposed to be alive. These are only spirits, ghosts, demons here for a ride, carousing in a kaleidoscope of pandemonium, pan-cultural collaborations and collisions—a pan-pacifist chaos of orientations and generations, pansexual, panoramic voyeurisms morphing metamorphologically from fluid flowing bodily oozing playful delight.
The legend of the mythological figure of Pan tells that those present at his birth saw an ugly child and ran in fear. Pan, a musician, could arouse inspiration, sexuality or panic, depending on his intentions. With his understanding of the beautiful nature of beastliness, of the unfamiliar family, of the livelihood of indigenous ancestors and spirits, tricksters who cause pandemonious panic so as to find some peace and quiet after encountering us, the real foreign guests, Pien proves himself a brilliant Dionysian Pan.
Laiwan is an artist, curator and writer recognized for her practice based in poetics and philosophy. Of Chinese origin, she was born in Zimbabwe, emigrated to leave the war in Rhodesia in 1977 and now lives in Vancouver.
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