https://files.cargocollective.com/591900/The-Futile-Everyday-for-Joyce-Sep.-17-2.pdf

The word "everyday," and its linguistic structure, rests upon a context of unceasing repetition in our life experience. Such regularity produces a behavioral dynamic that often precedes conscious thought, and our collective exposure to it over long periods of time stealthily produces customs and our cultures. At the same time, conflicts large and small produce the elements that give history its face as we travel along the linear axis of time, evolving into blocks of daily experience that await resolution. This in turn provides, in the pattern of repeated days, the ideal position for observing and collecting those things relating to our scurrying human consciousness and to the physical body as conditioned by received structures. In our daily lives we can easily discover the sense of dependency created by these structured relationships and see their powerful logic in action, the way they conveniently stitch together the fragments of memory and experienced phenomena to create interdependent links between past and future, our basis for imagining what might come next. But the regularity of these structures also works to suppress the possibility of self-transcendence; they are instead designed to allow our continued smooth functioning within the customary, pre-set systems of our lives, and to maintain the order and cultural values of our "daily community." This mode of living to which we are so accustomed, however, frequently masks the absurdity behind these structured mechanisms of our reality. The blocks of everyday experience that build up through the repetition of our days accidentally produce a certain kind of fictitious order that further and further separates our "everyday" experience from actual "reality." And how can art, in this continual, monotonous superficiality, overturn the everyday and make its absurdity understood and felt?

"Whether through the influence of social structures or feedback from life experience, whenever I suddenly become aware of something in my life—an object, an action, or something on the verge of disappearing—and I fix my gaze on it, then I've made an instinctive start on my creative work. As I enter this process, the ambient sounds and the flow of people around me gradually slow down and blur, and I enter a state of intense attention." If, as Ho notes about her work, an artist's creativity involves the initiation and conclusion of such a process of fixed attention, then the "object" of her attention is some block of everyday experience that has attracted her. It can include a person's everyday behavior, or judgments about the consumer value of an object within the system, and its externally visible attributes are the "traces" left behind due to temporal factors: a fleeting, vanishing moment, a moment that reveals the inconsistencies in the system's own operation. Choosing her subjects on this basis, Ho further proceeds to deconstruct the symbolic meaning of her subject within its given system, blending it with her own perceptions and reconstructing its implications in a way that reflects the limitations of the everyday system. Here, what we mean by "system" is the day-by-day repetition of that everyday mode, and against its absurdities Joyce Ho's "futile everyday" focuses attention on the limitations of the system and its gaping flaws in a creative process of inner readjustments and outer connections.

But a problem arises: Is the system limited because it is malfunctioning, or just because it is misaligned with us? We can clearly see that if the system is malfunctioning, then it no longer has any functional meaning within our structures, and the symbols operating within the system are also on the road to extinction. The system will ultimately be eliminated from our structures and become an anomaly. The artist then would have nothing to push against, and her work would be like a remnant left behind; simply issuing a powerful creative manifesto would be more reasonable than expecting an imminent implosion in such a remnant. A misalignment, however, points out to us that some system function has now become anachronistic; the way in which that has caused our structures to become disordered, and the means to restoring their balanced operation, all involve the dynamics of changing concepts, which provides hope for the possibility of liberation.

How do we explain the term "theatricality" most often associated with Ho's creative work, beginning with her Room 206? Does it primarily describe the sense of contextual space in her work? Or the work itself, as a vehicle for theatrical character or elements? Or some kind of participatory mechanism in the viewing of her work? And from what angle does this viewing originate? If we cannot clarify this question, then "theatricality" may be reduced to a descriptive term for medium, form, or pre-existing impression with which we label some poorly understood aspect of her work, reflecting the paucity of our imagination, that makes it nothing more in actuality than a "consumer item." Some clues to our questions can perhaps be found if we focus on understanding the dialogues and conflicts different types of art engender, the strategy adopted for bringing art into life practice, and the process by which static verbally-oriented interpretation turns toward a more dynamic narrative. Room 206 was the first work created by Ho acting as a director. By means of a theater which could only seat one viewer at any one time, she challenged, first, the theatrical space, its mass hypnosis of our bodies and limitations on the viewing experience, even as she restructured the character of the theatrical space. The visual elements of Room 206 do not so much show Ho adopting a narrative arrangement in response to the theatrical environment as they reveal that in considering this theatrical work, she chose to configure the space itself as the totality of the work, such that any objects found within it become simply part of the script. Even if each has a story line and symbolic meaning of its own, none can be torn away from the totality of the space; after fully imagining elements such as the narrative scope of each of these ready-made objects in their own spaces and the audience's viewing angle, she added the final, crucial theatrical creation—the performers—thereby introducing surreal tension and internal implications. But is was not necessarily her contact with the theatre that led to Ho combining and deploying these elements; that can possibly be traced back to her painted works of 2011 and earlier, such as Room 206, We're All in This Together, and Finale, works that directly place the symbolic motifs of her painting within a theatrical form, or perhaps even some of her earlier works, such as Cotton Candy, Passing Through, and In Progress, and the sense of mystery created in their compositions. Each moves step-by-step from the flatness of the painted surface and toward a theatricalized physicality, directly expanding their static expositions into dynamic narratives and emphasize a heightened affective element.

This progression from the flat surface toward installations and theatre design was Joyce Ho's practice in experimental cross-media dialogue, but at the same time, was latent within the sense of time in her creative work. How shall we describe this sense, as in the clock which has stopped at 8:20 in her Room 206? Perhaps we can say that this temporal aspect begins by being based in the visual restrictions deriving from the 'white cube' type of experience, while further blurring the symbolic meaning of works in their crossing of the spatial venue—a maze created to link art (its creator) with life (its viewers). Some of its chief features derive from: the peremptory nature of the work's encounters, the linear narrative between scene and viewer, the suggestive lighting; its temporal quality is a perceptive state of the viewers initiated as their bodies linger in the undertow of these external conditions. Participation by the viewers should be seen as Ho's reaction to the pre-set mechanisms of this creative venue; the internal sense of time in her work, with the participation of the viewer, stealthily seeps outside the work and gradually forms a new mechanism for viewing, a mechanism which, within the everyday context of the white cube space, is always vague and is weakly referred to as "theatrical." Ho's work One Day, shown in 2015 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, presented in full this sequence of artistic development, endowing us with seven days, through a series of rooms behind six doors and one non-door that embraced the sense of repetitive day-to-day aspects of life. In the cyclical repetition of these doors, regularly opening and shutting on one day, there was inlayed behind each action and each door a possibility to be unexpectedly met with, yet that was completely predictable. Isn't this bizarre repetitiveness Ho's reaction to, and rearrangement, when facing the restrictions of the everyday (mechanisms)? This appropriation of these mechanisms with their temporal character is the distinguishing mark of this sequence of creative works. When "the everyday" is removed from its pre-set perceptions, and at the same time, comes back to impact one's own self, then "the everyday" has achieved its dual meanings within the works of Joyce Ho.

Cracks in "the Everyday Hypothesis"

If the "temporal nature" in this entrancing and theatrical sequence of Ho's works manifests as a kind of capability to rearrange these mechanisms, then our analysis of the various connecting relationships in her work should begin from a view of the totality of her exhibitions. A description of totality, with respect to the venues for visual art, is clearest in the aspect of the kind of visual vocabulary that is woven between the works and the surrounding spaces. This has also been called "exhibition language." This is a highly abstract construct, one that internally involves such various subjective concerns of the artist as spatial layouts, adjustments to ambience, rhythm, and light, and externally, restricted deductions with viewers as subject. "Has something been left aside in Joyce Ho's work? It seems that it's not played up in the way that would usually attract people, not to mention being just a little bit obscure"—such are the doubts recently expressed about her work. On this point we can perhaps begin from the Everyday Hypothesis for which this author served as exhibition planner. During the planning, the exhibition was originally considered within realistic conditions and restrictive concepts, which is to say that within the exhibition space there was an exhibition planner and arrangements for two artists, and it could be anticipated as something in which one exhibition would be viewed and interpreted as a harmonious totality. We would then typically, on the basis of this assumption, feel comfortable in presupposing the existence of some art, and based on the existence of this presupposition, would present the exhibition. This all of course looks like a perfectly natural state of affairs, yet to us it seemed utterly absurd. For this cooperative venture we therefore took the exhibition planners "exhibition planning" and the artist's "creativity," put them all on the table, and reshuffled the deck to start the game over again. We didn't know who would win and who would lose in this round, but arguments over gamesmanship are only philosophy. In that exhibition, "control of the overall space" was a turning point for Joyce Ho; for her, in previous exhibitions, even if limitations were imposed in the planner's basic direction for the space, it was nevertheless the cae that there was a block of "empty" space, significant in that neither the exhibition planner nor the other participating artists would intrude into that space. But in this particular instance of cooperation between Joyce Ho, Li Jie, and this author, the exceptionally sensitive nature of works by Lee Kit, as well as the political authority exercised by the exhibition planner in the use of space, Ho's original intention of a highly controlled deployment of space had to be shelved, and the circumstances posed a challenge to the management and maintenance of the sense of time internal to the work when space was to be established to become part of the totality of the work. In the process of readjustment, "establishing the space itself as the total work" formally transitioned into "using the overall space to complete the work itself," which, as far as her work was concerned, was contrary to the desired path. Once the internal temporal character inherent to her work had to be redeployed in a new manner, it was necessary to reduce the control over the actual physical space, but this relinquishment of control in turn eroded the nature of her work; and that is precisely why the temporal sense that was created could exist and continue its forward progression within the work, but was clouded with an extra layer of obscurity. In Everyday Hypothesis, Ho attempted to lightly put aside the previous creative methods familiar to all, putting aside her theatrical garb and adopting a stance for cooperative ventures. While this was somewhat unsettling, her resolve remained strong, a resolve deriving from the Joyce Ho that was illuminated in the exhibition by Lee Kit, and from the inner sense of space obtained when she relinquished control of the physical space of the exhibition. With this inner space as a point of departure, Ho in fact felt even more comfortable in trying to create the kind of overall space to embrace her work while at the same time retaining the temporal sense inherent within the work itself. Just as with the wall and the narrow opening just before entering the exhibition space for Everyday Hypothesis, Ho sets aside the core on which our conditions for comfort rest, the trust arising from the external world and from others, and ultimately, the process on which her creativity fixes its gaze will also return to the subject itself. Isn't this exactly the stance with which Ho is presenting us in this exhibition in works such as Daily Practice, MORE, and Wandering_TKG+?

Semi-transparent Scenery

Following Everyday Hypothesis, Ho mounted a solo show of a site-specific work, Transparent Scenery, at the public area of the museum lobby at the Kirishima Open Air Museum in the city of Kagoshima on Japan's Kyushu Island. Two of her works there, however, her Moist Scenery and Sakurajima's Shadow, continued her experiments in harmonizing with the conditions of this kind of extreme open space, and in their methodology also extended the forms of Wandering_TKG+, Lit, and Abducted. Their subject was Sakurajima, the live volcano visible in the distance from Kyshu Island that impacts the lifestyles and customs of the local people, and her depiction of the scene of its eruption, which in Taiwan could only exist by virtue of the memory of its image. Such imagistic memory is fast, intense, intuitive impression, seeming so real even if not something we actually experienced. After Joyce Ho had personally experienced the sight of a Sakurajima eruption, the romantic sight of volcanic ash gradually settling from the sky seemed in a kind of symbiosis with the local people, and the remembered image was accompanied by the volcano's violence and sense of disaster, while on the island itself there was unusual calm; like the ten different types of face masks offered at the convenience store, it manifested itself as part of the variety of daily life. As the ash drifted downward, the people of Sakurajima simply quietly put on their masks and prepared to fill one trash bag after another with sweepings of the ash. For Joyce Ho, this was the kind of ideal subject on which to focus her attention. Coming from Taiwan, she was just an outsider, and her experience might just be that of a novelty seeker; but approaching from the locality of Kyushu, her work definitely extracts that local sense of the everyday. In Moist Scenery, she employs the image of a boiling kettle of water and a magazine picture of Sakurajima to link to the outlook of everyday calm with which the locals view an eruption of their volcano, or it could be said, to link to a segment of our imagination of a volcanic eruption. In Sakurajima's Shadow Ho takes both of the two ends of a semitransparent curtain points at which it is fixed, as if there had only those beginnings, so that gazing toward the other end of the curtain we find it links to another setting from which it begins. She has eliminated the curtain's function and imbued it with a new meaning, as if it were a segment of drifting volcanic cloud, condensed within the space of the museum.