Written by Yi-Cheng Sun; translated by Yi-Yu Lai.
Image credit: In the workshop “Cooking with viruses?” participants ate a dish of raw eggs mixed with rice while listening to the artist describe a scenario in which they were consuming a vaccine product. Photo credit: Waag Society.
This interview attempts to explore the metaphors of “workshops as classrooms” and “art creation as a learning process” in response to my curiosity about the phenomenon of “workshops, each with its own expression,” especially because artist Pei-Ying Lin frequently employs workshops in her art creation.
The term “workshop” refers to an activity incorporating instruction and participation. In scientific conferences, it is often used as a small event for exchange and discussion between presentations or academic sessions. In corporate training programmes, workshops are viewed as an effective means of fostering team cohesion and sometimes as a way of collectively resolving major issues. In art and design colleges, workshops have replaced the traditional one-way transmission of knowledge. In contemporary art, participatory art projects frequently include workshops encouraging audience participation. With the guidance of artists, audiences that were once passive observers can now express themselves and even contribute to the final presentation of the artwork. Through my long-term observation and this interview, this article seeks to discover how Pei-Ying’s concept of art creation can provide art education and critical pedagogy with inspiration and insight.
Creating a Supportive Network from the Workshops
Frequently, Pei-Ying’s planned and facilitated workshops fell between the previously defined categories. They serve both the educational purpose of transmitting knowledge and the productive purpose of reshaping knowledge. Sometimes, the workshops resemble (improvised) performances, making them difficult to classify. However, participants were consistently inspired or prompted to think outside the box.
In 2018, during the workshop “Cooking with viruses?” hosted by the Waag Society in the Netherlands, Pei-Ying devised a futuristic scenario where individuals could receive vaccinations through food. Participants ate a dish of raw eggs mixed with rice while listening to the artist describe a scenario in which they consumed a vaccine product. Through the embodied experience of dining, the taste triggered by food-induced empathy in the participants for the fictional narratives. For instance, the sensation of heat caused by spices in the throat was compared to the virus entering the body. The artist then provided participants with a “toolkit” containing information on various virus characteristics and invited them to design a future virus dish. This allowed them to position themselves in a more tangible experiential context and express their views on the future and viruses.
While creating her artwork “Trance 1:1,” Pei-Ying invited participants to join online workshops, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were guided to weave the “spike (S) glycoprotein” structure of the virus’s surface, stitch by stitch, in their own hands. Even though the workshop took place online and participants could not physically meet, they engaged in multiple and continuous discussions and learning and shared their feelings and struggles in response to the global pandemic. The result was not only a collection of metaphorical “viral surfaces” represented by the woven spike (S) glycoprotein structures but also the gradual formation of a micro-community based on weaving the virus. This community provided support and connection to individuals isolated and cut off from social interactions during the pandemic.
In such organic and improvisational workshops, I sometimes mistakenly perceive Pei-Ying’s workshops as one of her artistic expressions, based on years of observation. However, this idea remains unclear and unconfirmed, leading to further questions regarding the coherence of her creative perspective and artistic practice, as well as how to connect these with art education and knowledge production to form an interconnected and supportive network.
“I” Don’t Have Such a Grand Creative Perspective
“I have always been curious, what is the reason or creative perspective behind your continuous organisation of workshops in your artistic projects?”
Typically, such a question posed as the opening prompt in an interview can be quite daunting for the interviewee. Still, Pei-Ying’s response appeared to be straightforward, and the result was not due to serious causes. Her background in the biological sciences includes an ecological perspective, where “observation” is a fundamental method for comprehending and interpreting the world around us.
Pei-Ying has a strong interest in observation, and she is fascinated by merely observing how people with different viewpoints interact, express themselves, or take action in the workshops. In addition, the unpredictability of events encourages her to continue experimenting with workshops. She recognises, from a biological standpoint, the significance of allowing a new organism sufficient space to express itself and disclose its true nature. This understanding translates into her workshops, where collective brainstorming and unanticipated “expansions” often occur, allowing everyone’s imagination to run rampant.
For Pei-Ying, almost everything in life is imbued with a sense of creativity, with “the obvious exceptions of accountancy and utility repairs,” as she sheepishly mentioned. Consequently, the issue of whether workshops were the forms of her creation or not was largely irrelevant to her. What matters to her is whether something is “fun” or “not enjoyable.” On this basis, perhaps, the blurred line between art and life extends into her daily life and artistic practice. In addition to the aspect of “fun,” Pei-Ying provided a clear explanation for why she frequently incorporates workshops into her artistic practises. While she realised that her creative perspective does not entail a strong desire to express herself aloud, she concentrates on “knowing other people’s opinions” and expressing her own views in a more gentle manner. The workshops, therefore, serve as a “trigger” to spark conversations among participants and create enjoyable situations.
In the interview, Pei-Ying shared a perspective different from emphasising individual authorship and talent, presenting an alternative concept of “I don’t have such a grand artistic perspective.” In this notion, artists create not only art to be admired but rather a method for incorporating more voices from others and constructing spaces for sharing experiences. This recalls the late 1990s when French curator and aesthetician Nicolas Bourriaud proposed in Relational Aesthetics (1998) his hope that artists should reconfigure human relationships within the context of neo-capitalist society. Since this book’s publication, numerous practices have integrated relational aesthetics and participatory art. Additionally, scholar Stewart Martin later argued that creating a social space is the key to practising relational aesthetics. Such practices become more meaningful compared to exhibiting specific artworks in art galleries.
Drawing Inspiration from “Learning-Oriented” Art
Like all great artists, pei-Ying has questioned the purpose of art and creation. During her participation in activities hosted by the international organisation Hackteria in Indonesia, she was profoundly influenced by the following statement by the Indian artist Yashas Shetty: “Creation is for learning something.” This viewpoint profoundly affected Pei-Ying’s view of creation, leading her to adopt and embrace this “learning-oriented” approach. Perhaps it is because of this “learning-oriented” artistic view that her works are brimming with knowledge and are frequently accompanied by interdisciplinary workshops. In this process, not only does Pei-Ying achieve her objective of learning through creation, but so do the participants, based on their individual experiences.
I inquired if her choice of medium for artistic practice resulted from the limitations imposed by traditional art mediums, with exhibitions as the primary form of art creation. Pei-Ying explained that the development of scientific art and bio-art can be comprehended in the context of experimental projects primarily funded by the field of science communication. As a result, more emphasis was placed on the number of participants, and workshop formats were flavoured over static exhibitions. Additionally, early presentations of scientific art and bio-art at the ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL in Austria were a combination of party, DIY, exhibition, and performance, which influenced the approaches adopted by artists arising from such an art creation mechanism.
Pei-Ying regarded art not as a restriction on knowledge production but rather as a more affirmative avenue for her scientific art practice, as it offered a more open space for experimental projects and alternative knowledge production. One can create their own theories or structures in the field of art, and no one can say their structure is incorrect, as unique perspectives are valued. Pei-Ying emphasised the significance of establishing spaces for equal and active dialogue in collective art production, where the outcomes often explore topics that may not be discussed in conventional academic and cultural contexts.
From Pei-Ying’s creative perspective, her work not only opens up possibilities for individual artistic agency within the art field but also expands the boundaries of contemporary art in terms of “how to learn and produce knowledge.”
The Complex of Creation and Learning
What learning and knowledge-production experiences does Pei-Ying have in such a creative process? First, she firmly believes that the learning experience is both feasible and unique. Taking her recent project “Trance 1:1” as an example, to weave a coronavirus ball that matches the known real microstructure, multiple disciplines, collaborative experts, and diverse materials are required, such as virology, epidemiology, scientists, knitting programmers, textile designers, and cotton threads. As an artist, Pei-Ying is frequently required to act as a “translator between” various fields and individuals, allowing them to connect and collaborate. Behind this translation work lies her autonomy in learning, unrestricted by professional boundaries. Continuous self-directed learning leads to unpredictable learning experiences and new discoveries during engagement and communication.
In addition to creating new connections between things and during the process of creating the artwork, Pei-Ying specified that she often needs to learn many “repair” techniques. She joked, “I’m really good at mending sweaters now, you know?” In her view, the ongoing labour, translation, communication, trial and error, and reflection are all intertwined with the art creation process but also transcend the art of creation itself. I am inclined to consider them as a complex of art creation and learning in terms of art education.
Pei-Ying’s notion of “repair” in the creative process can be seen as an abstract concept, a series of restoration projects undertaken by intertwining creation and learning. It addresses the dilemma of specialised knowledge systems, which, despite being stable, are often impotent in the face of contemporary challenges. Using the metaphor of a workshop as a classroom and regarding creation as an attempt at learning methods, then the aforementioned process of repair as art practice always permits imbalance, differences, and unpredictable elements to enter the system through experimentation and openness.
Yi-Cheng SUN, born in 1990, lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. She is an independent curator, community contributor and lecturer at NTUH. Her recent interests include cross-disciplinary (Art & Science) collaborative approaches, critical pedagogy and artist-teacher.
This article was published as part of a special issue on The Artist-Teachers in Taiwan.
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