Left: Char-Wei Tsai, Frog Mantra, 2005, black ink on photograph, 30×19cm. Right: Hui-Chan Kuo, Byniki 2002-01, 2002, digital print, 144×182cm.

Humor and Mischief in Art
Jonarthan Goodman

Having fun and being funny are not easily achieved goals in contemporary art, which has not tended to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. But art? capacity for the absurd, no matter what culture it is coming from, remains a part of its attractiveness in modern life, which is often as ridiculous as it is sublime. Satire often comes into play, being part of an artist? political attack; it is a way of paying disrespect to the powers that be. But even with the prevalence of humor in contemporary art, it is hard to be funny each person? version of the humorous differs from the next, so that being consistently comic requires considerable powers of the imagination.
In the show at hand, "Frolic: Humor and Mischief in New Taiwanese Art" New York-based curator Thalia Vracho-poulos and her counterpart in Taiwan Jane Ingram Allen look at the absurd as it occurs in Taiwanese culture; some of the joking seems specific to the culture of Taiwan, but much of it is universal. Poking fun can be a game, either gentle or abusive, that links the audience to the artist, who shares his oblique vision with viewers who hopefully get the joke (there is nothing more disheartening than a failed joke). Yet both the artist and his admirers must be careful to read the humor as it was intended; the interpretation of the absurd brings with it certain responsibilities, which place the mischief into a context where its bite occurs with full force.

Enigmatic and Mysterious Humor

Sometimes the joking is exquisitely subtle. Tsai-rung He's digital photo series looks at interiors that don't match our expectations of them in one image, an interior done up in yellow, the artist has a woman attending to the top of a window, one of two that just out at an impossibly sharp angle, meeting each other at a point some distance from the wall. The absurdity of this meaningless architectural element is emphasized by the bright lights on either side of the triangle made by the meeting of the two windows. To the picture? right is a couch encased in a wrinkled sheet; none of the environment makes any sense, so that the humor is enigmatic and mysterious. Meng-chuan Ho? C-print photograph, entitled Perfect Marriage, spoofs the Chinese marriage industry, which makes use of sentimentality in large amounts. In this complex image, the groom is dressed in a tuxedo; his wife-to-be wears a yellow gown and white veil. Given their happy expressions, one would assume that all is well if it were not for the beautiful woman reclining in the man? lap. Four other figures in the photograph, all of them women, seem to make it clear that the groom has a roving eye; their presence undercuts the solemnity of the ritual tie.

Akibo Lee's animation print, She Is My Lulubo, offers a strange robotic figure, almost entirely legs, with a cone-shaped metal head on top. In the background are reddish bulbous shapes, formed into groups with smaller spheres extending on stick-shaped supports. One has the general sense that this is a painting suggestive of a love relationship; but the ridiculousness of the image subverts any real tenderness. The surreal character is very active in this painting, whose strangely shaped figure occupies the central part of the composition. The work? background is completely given over to the gourd-like shapes described above.

Wan-ting Su's digital prints make use of dark color patterns and strikingly skewed expressive shapes suggestive of plants in a garden he titles his works Fairy Garden and Exotic Garden, both names giving a good sense of his overall compositions. In one of the pieces, we see his images crowd into the picture plane; there are faces and hands done in white and black, as well as patches of red, green, and blue he busy scene is comically composed, with cartoon characters grimacing and generally being difficult. A sense of fun with nature is also to be found in the work of Ai-hua Hsia, whose Japanese lacquer ware sculpture Hsia is based in Japan consists of a forest sprite and six plant forms towering over the tree spirit. The artist's installation looks very much like a set for a dance company; its shapes resemble the organic forms of Noguchi. The feeling is that of organic unity, while the work's simplicity emphasizes the light-hearted pleasure the art brings to its audience.

Ching-Yao-Chen, Blossoming in The Black Yard, 2007, digital photo print, 130×130cm.

The Notion of Satire to the Artist

Finally, the digital prints of Agi Chen, who is in a doctoral program in Taiwan, takes the color schemes of the comic book figures' costumes in Chen's case Spiderman and Batman and reduces them to flat circles surrounded by skyscrapers. The eccentricity of Heroic Color Spiderman, with its concentric, circular stripes of red, black, and blue in a forest of tall buildings in daylight, is matched by Heroic Color Batman, which offers a darker sky presumably more auspicious for the nighttime exploits of Batman and a color circle based on the hero's attire, black and gray predominating.

Unfortunately, not all the artists can be mentioned in the limited space of this text, which focuses only partially on the show's fine overview of comic work made by Taiwanese artists. As we have recognized, humor is a very independent variable in art: one person's joke may well be offensive to someone else of a different mind. In fact, the comic is a quality that is extremely hard to measure; the viewer intuits the humorous presentation and does or does not respond to the humor involved. Frolic shows that it is possible not to take things too seriously, even in these distinctly troubled times; indeed, it might be argued that a sense of humor is exactly what we have lost in our mad dash for material goods, among other things. Seen objectively, most of our goals and desires, when achieved and expressed, feel ever so slightly silly, the only cure for which is the special appreciation of laughter. It should also be said that the notion of satire is very important to these artists, who play with popular culture's global reach and absurdity. One senses that the irreverent spirit of much of the art in Frolic has to do with the colossal silliness and stupidity of pop culture, which entertains us with kitsch, whose emptiness the intellectual inevitably makes fun of. Curators Vrachopoulos and Ingram Allen have put together an energetic, fun, and entertaining show; like the artists they exhibit, they know quite well that laughter is contagious and entirely subversive.

Tsui-rung He, Still Room Series 1: Sofa 2, 2006, digital photograph, 45×171cm.