Taipei - Urban Landscapes
2014
Taipei runs on electricity and the electricity runs through boxes, grey-green metal cabinets, bolted to walls and pavements throughout the city, standardised and functional and entirely without visual interest. They are the kind of urban object the eye learns to route around: too permanent to ignore, too mundane to see.
Someone decided to paint them.
Walking through Taipei's streets I kept encountering these painted boxes, each one different, each one depicting the same subject. Mountains. Forests. Rivers. Meadows. The standard elements of idealised natural landscape, rendered in a naive style that makes no claim to technical sophistication and therefore makes a different kind of claim entirely: not accuracy but feeling, not representation but longing. Each painting is a small assertion that the world contains, somewhere, a version of itself that looks like this, green and unhurried, unelectrified, unindustrialised, serene.
The boxes they cover make that world impossible.
There is something worth pausing over in this particular choice of subject matter. Whoever commissioned or permitted or encouraged these paintings could have chosen anything, abstract colour, geometric pattern, civic imagery, portraits of local figures. They chose landscape. Specifically they chose the landscape that urban and industrial development replaces: the mountain that becomes a quarry, the river that becomes a drainage canal, the forest that becomes a district. The infrastructure of the modern city is painted over with images of what the modern city has displaced. The electrical box powers the erasure and wears the evidence of what was erased as decoration.
This is not cynicism. It is something more interesting, a collective acknowledgement, expressed in the naive visual language of wish and memory, that the city knows what it has replaced and has not stopped wanting it. The paintings are not ironic. They are sincere. A quickly executed mountain range on a metal cabinet is not a critique of urbanisation. It is an attempt to live with it, to make the necessary infrastructure of modern life bearable by covering it with the image of its opposite.
Naive painting has always done this kind of work. It depicts not the world as it is but the world as it persists in the imagination of people who know it is gone. These are not portraits of specific mountains or particular rivers anywhere in Taiwan. They are paintings of the idea of nature, the generalised, idealised landscape that every sufficiently urbanised culture carries as a counterweight to the city it actually inhabits. Encountered one at a time they are charming. Encountered throughout an entire city they become something else: evidence of a systematic, distributed, entirely unofficial form of collective mourning for a landscape that electricity made possible to leave behind and impossible to return to.
The juxtaposition is not subtle. It was never meant to be. The point of painting a mountain on an electrical box is precisely that everyone can see what is underneath.
