A Field of Non-Field
Digital file, color & b/w, sound, 61'07'', single-channel video, continuous loop, 2017
Through their control of the global Internet, multinational financial-capital corporations, military-industrial complexes, and digital and biotech giants—also known as the corporatocracy—manipulates the vast majority of the world’s perceptions, and with these pervasive control technologies, has drawn people into various illusions where their senses, desires, and thoughts are no longer their own. This leads us to wonder: Is there any way for us to get out from under this situation?
Chen Chieh-jen believes a solution to this seemingly unsolvable problem is to deconstruct the way the corporatocracy controls and deploys technology to implant certain illusions in society and the individual. To achieve this, Chen has returned to The Middle Way associated with the Mādhyamaka School of Buddhism, which was founded by the Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva. Nāgārjuna invested The Middle Way with the precepts pratītya-samutpāda, svabhāva, and śūnyatā, and also practiced the multiple dialectical spirit of the Eight Negations, which are neither arising nor ceasing, neither permanence nor nullification, neither identity nor difference, neither coming nor going. Using these principles, Chen hopes to establish a new worldview and value system, and experiments with ways to expand both perception-desire constructs and modes of thinking in our world now permeated by control technologies.
A Field of Non-Field(1) is the first chapter of Chen Chieh-jen's long-term project Her and Her Children,(2) and a preliminary perceptual statement after deep reflection on Madhyamaka philosophy. Chen's original inspiration for creating this video work comes from his eldest brother’s experiences of being unemployed (see Chen's artist statement for Star Chart).
Soon after A Field of Non-Field starts, a woman who never appears in the film says in a voice-over that her brother disappeared without a trace after escaping from a hospital where he had been confined several days before because of a suicide attempt. She says, according to what her mother keeps telling her, “my brother just went somewhere far away, beyond the West.” In a later part of the film, she says that her mother changes her response to “your brother is just on his way back” whenever she mentions that she hasn't heard any news from her brother. In sequences from the film that appear later or between these two voice-overs, a group of actors is seen in an empty field performing the role of her brother and other people who are “traveling away” and then “coming back.”
As these different actors perform the journey to some undetermined place, they seem to be holding a funeral for the brother in the darkness of night, even though he is still alive.(3) Also, in the limitless darkness of this night, unending construction sounds can be heard in the distance. Together, the darkness and sound create a jail without walls, from which no one can ever escape. The barren land used as the setting for the film is bathed in artificial light and forms the theatrical space for this prison without walls. The group performing the funeral is composed of people with different identities and put together with objects, and the significance of these people juxtaposed with objects keeps changing in this fluid group.
A funeral banner made of old discarded worker's clothing is leading the group of actors taking part in what seems like a traditional funeral, and objects that are traditionally interred with the body are replaced with old computers, radios, and plastic models of human organs.(4) The brother is seen lying in a coffin that looks like a modern apartment building and staring into the endless void. As the brother is moving along with the procession of actors, a voice-over narration identifies the man as the woman's brother and also makes reference to dispatch workers in contemporary society, the consumption of the corporeal body under capitalism, and discarded people who question the meaning of life. Continually moving forward, the silent laborers carry the brother in the apartment-building casket on a stretcher. This becomes the place for this discarded person to lie down and then tell his story, thus subtly turning the actors performing the traditional funeral rites into a fluid group that confronts pervasive control technology.
Following the group carrying the brother is another group of silent laborers carrying an insane woman holding a mirror on a high framework platform. She is facing the blurry mirror that never reflects her image and a voice-over is heard muttering a string of self interrogatory statements, “When did we accept being sentenced to at-home exile? Was it when we could no longer flee assigned numbers? Or was it after we were used to forcing the entire future into a form?” The group performing the funeral procession starts to take on two, or even multiple, meanings. With the laborers’ support, the woman in which self examination and insanity simultaneously exists, transforms from a discarded person into a narrator. Her whispering becomes a voice of dissent against that infinite dark night and the sound of non-stop construction.
The group continues to move forward to a mysterious solar eclipse that impossibly occurs in the dark night, and this makes the immense construction site grind to a halt,(5) and the world fall into complete silence. At this point, a different group of silent laborers carrying a huge model combining an apartment building and jail appear out of the dark. As they seem to be both moving forward and marching in place, a flame mysteriously comes out of the architectural model and then continues to intensify. Just as it seems the fire will swallow the entire model, its light shines on the gray, exhausted and expressionless faces of the silent laborers. The only sounds in this world are from the growing flame and friction of the moving air. These material sounds that surround the laborers are ever-changing and the only ones that exist in this otherwise silent world.
In the sound of the flame's constant variation, the many voices from far and near are heard chanting, “What can we do? Nameless. Nameless, what can we do?”(6) Next we see a group of middle-aged woman-workers holding protest banners with traces of writing that can no longer be read and continually chanting the sentences above. The camera slowly moves from the group to close-ups of the women's faces. In the dark and invisible surroundings, their expressions seem to suggest the past, but their voices seem to suggest the present, and the two continually mix together. Following the incessant chanting, it starts to rain, and the women's voices gradually become more urgent as the rain becomes stronger. The camera then turns to an area behind the women where their backlit silhouettes seem to become a group of many Guanyins who are listening to each other.(7) They do not expect mercy from others but rely on each other for support. The Chinese name “Guanyin” (觀音) means “sound perceiver,” literally “the one who listens to the cries of those who are in need,” in this sense, these women workers serve as Guanyin for one another.
The rain falling on these women is also falling on the brother who is still lying in his coffin that looks like a modern apartment building on a stretcher. He continues to stare blankly, and his eyes have become vessels for the falling rain. The falling rain and the chanting seem to cleanse the brother's empty expression.
For twelve minutes, the woman workers repeatedly chant two sentences in the Hakka language. In the course of this long, monotonous, and repetitious chanting, which viewers have no choice but to experience with all of their bodily senses, the women gradually change the emotion in their voices, and expressions appear on their faces that reflect their difficult to accurately recount life stories.
In the next part of the film, after the rain has cleaned everything, a group of silent laborers carry on a tall chair a disabled person who chants a list of seemingly irrelevant words such as “illusion, nothing, nonsense, mania.”(8) Completely removed from any grammatical context, these words are randomly strung together and spoken endlessly, thus setting their meanings aloft into the indefinite darkness. And this, just like the constellation of images on the star chart behind the disabled person, becomes a constellation of spoken words. The dust that rises up as the group marches forward forms a floating dust constellation in the dark space. All three constellations exist together in this space lacking starlight, and due to its constant movement, the funeral procession becomes a fluid group generating multiple images and meanings.
The funeral procession actors are just like the countless stars, or floating pieces of cosmic dust, as they perform a contemporary version of lo-deh sao.(9) The actors deliver the body and produce continuous change, and this makes people, things, environments, and sounds slowly manifest complexity and multiple meanings that are different from their original classifications and definitions. These multiple meanings continually overlap and reproduce an excess of different forms, and this excess is not only an excess of the perception framework dominated by pervasive control technology, but also the reproduction of alternative perceptions that are difficult to define.
In the return journey part of the film, the group has disappeared, and we only see the brother walking in a barren land. Footprints from the previous traveling away part of the film are almost visible on the ground. The endless darkness continues as before, and the distant sound of a construction site still envelops this nameless place. The artificial light looks even more like theatrical lighting as it shines on this real piece of barren land. The lone brother keeps walking until he hears the happy voices of the women workers singing a Hakka song from somewhere behind him, and then he slowly turns around to look.(10) He looks at the silent laborers who are sitting or lying on pebbles on the ground and resting. The women workers casually form an irregular circle and amuse themselves by continuing to sing the same song and dancing. The brother, who is now standing still, listens with rapt attention as the women continue to dance and sign even louder. We can sense that this is a contemporary lo-deh sao performance and they have formed a temporary heterotopia. The song and breeze combine into a complementary rhythm and then together blow over the brother's clothes and gauze bandages wrapping his wrists. As the last line of the song, “The scarf tells of our never ending love,” is heard, the final scene of the return journey fades to black.
It is never explained why the brother attempted suicide, or where the destinations of either the going or returning parts of the journey are. But even vague familiarity with the multiple dialectics in Madhyamaka philosophy, a universal folk knowledge that has been pushed to the margins by so-called modernity in contemporary times, is enough to understand that there are no absolute definitions of “going” or “returning.” Through a narrative of neither going, nor returning, this contemporary lo-deh sao performance renders the gradually naturalized states of local exile visible to us, and calls on the multiple dialectic in Madhyamaka philosophy. This allows us to follow alternative perceptions or other dialectical movements, and to discover a possible crevice within what we originally considered to be a dark night, wasteland, prison without walls, or a pervasive control technology impossible to escape. This crevice can be transformed and re-transformed because no system is absolute or unbreakable.
Like his previous films, A Field of Non-Field does not provide any solution to real difficulties. They instead become suspended in a state awaiting continued confrontation and investigation, such that viewers become aware of related problems beyond the film. In other words, while the film serves as a carrier for the artist's creativity, it is not a crystallization of self-fulfillment. His works are never one thing because they are formed by connecting marginalized individuals and groups who participate in performances,(11) incomplete narratives with heterogeneous fragments, and stimulate problem awareness by making visible difficult situations that demand further discussions. Also, his works are about starting a multiple dialectical movement that reverberates in the same way the women workers sing “never ending love.”(12) Although we cannot predict its effect, as soon as this multiple dialectical movement is started, we know it will certainly never end.(13)
