Facing the Community of Brainwash: Augustin Tzen's One-Man Battle

by Gu Zhenqing

As globe-trotting artist Augsitin Tzen sees it, under globalization, the ideological machineries of the world’s nations are in overdrive, creating a ubiquitous, pervasive and all-conquering community of brainwash. The twenty-first century is a century of technological progress and human retreat. The various socio-political systems of “modern civilization” seem to possess innate jurisdiction over the world. Under the pretense of creating a better future, they have been taking increasingly spectacular ideologies as precepts and tenets. Mankind is being increasingly domesticated into obedient intelligent beings within various modern systems. In the work of Augustin Tzen, the concepts of these ideologies are reflected and crafted into signs and spiritual indicators of modern human culture. One-sided people, split people, superficial people and splintered people constantly emerge in Augustin Tzen’s artworks. Through constant visual analysis and dissection, Tzen creates the awareness that man’s reason and conscience are truly limited. The degradation of the natural environment and drastic changes in the global cultural environment are creating universal psychological mutations and spiritual crises among individuals. Furthermore, ideology, with its propriety over society, uses the global spectacle of the triumph of consumerism to conceal all manner of crises and mutations taking place. Augustin Tzen’s staunchly independent mindset has led him to a propensity for individual battle. He has set out on a one-man’s visual culture war. In the name of individual awareness, he engages in battle against the hidden empire of the community of brainwash, using the deconstruction and criticism of ideological signs to realize a cultural transcendence of the boundaries of ethnicity, society and nationality.

Augustin Tzen was born in Fujian Province. He studied in Taiwan, Japan and France before settling in the United States. Tzen belongs to the first generation of Taiwanese film artists. While in France, he took part in the creative practices of conceptualism and Fluxus. His films and photographs from the 1960s made skilled use of the multiple techniques, methods and forms that would not be used in Mainland China for another 30 years, and he applied them to cultural criticism of the spectacle society. Tzen has lived in Europe and America for many years, and his works are marked by a powerful concern for life and philosophical reflection on art, fusing the transcendent spiritual qualities of the traditional Chinese literati with the keen logic of the western intellectual. Tzen believes that art can liberate humanity. But the significance and value of art is determined by the social circumstances of its creation, acceptance and use. In the so called civilized world of heavily fortified ideologies, though art is a code for international communication, it lacks universal forms and meanings. Through modern and contemporary artistic self-practice and proactive innovation, Tzen demonstrates that only art with a specific social context can become a relevant and appropriate tool for communication. Only when art is implemented as action in reality can it change and reconstruct the social order and rules and release the potential of society and individuals. Augustin Tzen is an activist artist through and through. The mass of visual texts he has accumulated represent constantly progressing thoughts and actions, and show an artist's transcendence of the limitations of humanity.