Written by Yi-Cheng Sun; translated by Yi-Yu Lai.
Image credit: The installation photo of artwork, Art-Class-Memory-Manual for Adults: for Language Settled ,in 2019. One of the interviewee’s memories of art class, I used to love drawing., was written on the wall by Tze-Ning Hong.
“…Try relocating the period in the sentence of adults humorously referring to themselves as ‘art idiots’ to a place with some distance: let us engage in analysis, an external gaze, and explanations after what occurred. In this compassionate world, let’s prepare escape routes for one another, and then the roads of escape may seem lengthier.”
——Excerpt from Tze-Ning Hong’s “Handbook of Adult’s Memories of Art Classes: Placement Instructions” (2016-present)
Tze-Ning Hong, an independent researcher, designer, and artist, has been immersed in an artistic environment since childhood and graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University. Her father, a calligraphy teacher in elementary school, provided her with a unique perspective as she navigated between her family and school life during her childhood. From this vantage point, Tze-Ning constantly observed the subtle transformations between “her father as a teacher” and “her father as a dad.” This experience gave her a more nuanced understanding of the teacher’s role than the average person. She has captured and preserved unnoticed and delicate memories regarding art education due to her special position.
Adult’s Memories of Art Classes
On the first day of 2016, Tze-Ning had a bold idea. She wanted to initiate a new project at the beginning of the year. Reflecting on her educational experiences over the past decade, she realised that despite being regarded as a “good student,” she had numerous moments of disagreement throughout her development. These moments, whether profound or superficial, remained in her memory. Consequently, she began to recall her professional development experiences, including all the countless “art classes” she had taken since childhood.
Simultaneously, she conducted interviews with her friends, concentrating on those seemingly insignificant and forgotten details that were of the utmost importance to her. She treasured these other people’s experiences as much as her own childhood moments of silent disagreement. Back then, she disagreed with the idea of remaining quiet in class, with her teachers’ superficial responses to her genuine inquiries, and most importantly, with the notion that could only be one form of beauty in sketching. These unspoken disagreements laid the groundwork for her empathy and her capacity to connect with others through appreciating their life experiences.
Following interviews with over twenty friends, Tze-Ning presented her artwork “Six-Person Joint Exhibition” at the “A Conditioned Game” exhibition in 2017. She subsequently exhibited “Handbook of Adult’s Memories of Art Classes: Placement Instructions” at “The Processes of Knowledge” exhibition 2019. This creative project has been ongoing until 2023 when this interview took place. It is a fieldwork study of adults’ (18 years and older) memories of art classes. Through Tze-Ning’s rearranging and editing, this “handbook” provides four sets of “toolkits” for engaging in seamless and pleasurable conversations about adults’ prior art class experiences.
In the first chapter of the handbook, “Unspoken Rules,” it points out that there are series or structural characteristics of “unspoken rules” in art class that are not documented, making it difficult for students to recognise the “commonality” of encountering these concealed rules. Understanding the underlying reasons behind these rules can be challenging, as there might be a belief that “these rules have always naturally existed.” The chapter suggests that readers use “identification” to cope with these rules and “avoid clichéd expressions, especially those that focus solely on individual artistic techniques or success/failure narratives.” The second chapter, “Talents (But Not Enough),” explores “talent” as a temporary description and the critical impact of the “moment when talent disappears” on childhood art experiences. In the first half of the handbook, Tze-Ning seeks multiple retrospective perspectives for those baffling frustrations or intentionally overlooked memories from the past.
Moving on to the third chapter, she begins with the common expression “I used to love it” and reexamines and intertwines the fond memories of several interviewed friends about art class, such as “There was a teacher who would say, ‘It’s okay if you don’t finish the drawing; you can continue next time.’ It’s true that one classmate spent an entire semester working on the same drawing.” “Next Door to the Classroom,” the fourth and concluding chapter of the handbook, opens up a space that accommodates all memories, with or without them, within the traces of recollection. Perhaps it is directly adjacent to “that classroom.”
“We must follow their dynamics and describe them as they are. To put it more precisely, even if we do not remember ‘any’ ‘art class,’ the process of retracing is still significant. After all, memories of art classes are incorporated in a continuous, ongoing temporal and spatial flux.”
——Excerpt from Tze-Ning Hong’s “Handbook of Adult’s Memories of Art Classes: Placement Instructions,” Page 20. (2016-present)
Art Experiences of the “Faceless”
After revisiting childhood art class experiences with so many adults, it is undeniable that the interviewees’ memories are rich and diverse, but also filled with thought-provoking and occasionally sombre moments of frustration. Perhaps the most significant experiences are the “memories of those art idiots,” which seem unworthy of being mentioned, written about, or carefully examined and are almost doomed to be forgotten. This perplexes Tze-Ning, who asks, “Isn’t it odd? In a class of thirty students, maybe three or four can be happy, while the rest are labelled as art idiots just to draw attention to those few. It’s really strange, isn’t it?”
In Tze-Ning’s interviews, she unexpectedly discovered that only the art creators who ended up staying in the art field have their art education experiences remembered, while the experiences of others are disregarded in art history. However, she believes that all experiences deserve equal consideration. They all deserve to be attended to, written about, and comprehended, whether the experience is skilful and well-crafted or an art class experience in which the drawings are abstract and asymmetrical. In light of this, Tze-Ning is adamant that “We should talk about trauma experiences, because most of it is about success stories…” even though she knows there must also be many happy experiences among the various art class experiences. Her attention to “faceless” art audiences and their experiences reflects this firm belief and caring attitude.
In fact, at the moment of this interview, Tze-Ning was busily preparing for her doctoral research in the Netherlands. Currently, what concerns her are the experiences and recollections that have lost their identities within numerous educational, participatory art projects. As a growing number of artworks are “completed because of the audience,” but only the voices of artists, art institutions, curators, or art critics are heard, this absence became particularly intriguing to her. As the role of the audience in the art world becomes more complex, the portrayal of their faces appears to lack details, similar to an image that has been overexposed. What will we remember about the audience? Is it merely a list of visitor numbers in galleries or the “special thanks” list in participatory projects?
Through Tze-Ning’s thoughts and inquiries, one cannot help but be reminded of Claire Bishop‘s discussion of the artist Thomas Hirschhorn in her essay “Pedagogic Projects: ‘How Do You Bring a Classroom to Life As If It Were a Work of Art?‘” According to her citation, Hirschhorn uses “presence and production” instead of “participation,” “community art,” and “relational aesthetics” to describe his works:
“I want to work out an alternative to this lazy, lousy ‘democratic’ and demagogic term ‘Participation.’ I am not for ‘Participative-art,’ it’s so stupid because every old painting makes you more ‘participating’ than today’s ‘Participative-art,’ because first of all real participation is the participation of thinking! Participation is only another word for ‘Consumption’!”
——Excerpt from Claire Bishop’s “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship,” Page 434. (2012)
In fact, Thomas Hirschhorn’s critique of “participation as consumption” responds to an essential issue of participatory art: its reflection on interpersonal relationships, consumer society, division of labour, and spectacle society in a modernised society. Through participatory projects, artists attempt to reclaim human agency and explore potential pathways within social relationships. Ideally, the roles of the artist and participants should be blurred, and all participants should have the power to act and speak. No one should be merely a means to complete the artwork because everyone becomes an integral part and purpose for the art itself.
From the Memories of Art Classes to Participatory Art
Upon tracing Tze-Ning’s artistic and research path, one can discover a common thread underlying seemingly unrelated themes: “how to achieve equality in artistic experiences.” Based on this simple yet profound concern, Tze-Ning suggests a reform strategy that places experiential research back into the context of art education through investigations of countless overlooked art experiences. On the one hand, this approach prompts us to contemplate the power relations within educational settings and to give equal importance to every learning subject based on critical pedagogy. On the other hand, it urges us to critically examine the blind spots often present in participatory projects.
Within this context, we can explore a transformative direction for participatory art education that not only responds to the constraints imposed by modern society on life and relationships but also avoids becoming rigid in its form. The goal is to genuinely empower participants, create experiences, and even collectively generate knowledge, leading to artistic outcomes where mutual empowerment coexists within the collective.
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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