Wire Tuazon’s new one-man show is simply titled One Million Years, but one is likely to be continuously intrigued by the expanse of meanings throughout such a lengthy span of time, as well as Tuazon’s endless stream of ideas. One Million Years, featuring Tuazon’s latest artistic persuasions, will be on view at the West Gallery in SM Megamall from November 4 to 16.
Tuazon describes his paintings as “results of the varied illusions toward vulnerability and contemplation.” The works tackle control, popular memory, individual violence, loss, and immortality throughout a wide range of experience over time, merging image with text. He recalls, “In some of my previous paintings, the visual focus seems to have a picture of artificial reinforcement on the diverse meaning and aspects of life and death.” Images range from the great Hindenburg’s crash (“The Death of Piet Mondrian: Field over Human Skin,” 1999), the Holy Shroud (Millennium Hoax: Year 2000), and through a work entitled “Going Into the Light of the Day” (a painting with an image of a body-freezing apparatus supposedly to revive the dead).
In One Million Years, he selects an existing picture that “seems to have a definition with an uncertain ending, like it has meant something before in another time.” Meanings do change over time, and Tuazon plays around the richness of such boundless possibility. What were significant 10 or 20 years ago may not hold as much weight today. Tuazon then separates phrases or words, and super-imposes them with the pictorial image on the canvas. He notes, “The unpredictability of the text is one of the uncertainties that I like about the painting. The narratives are less specific.”
Tuazon sees his works as personal interpretations “of the actual graphic than a contained sense of facts with completed statements.” He’d rather let his strokes, or his viewers decide how the images take shape, and how the texts add or modify meaning. Perhaps what they might seem today may be entirely different after several years have passed. They are “an ironic criticism of my generation’s fanaticism on isolated events and discoveries, commenting on commodification and our changing sense of humanity.”
Wire Tuazon, who established his own alternative art space, Surrounded By Water, along with his peers, has long been challenging the interaction between images and texts through numerous paintings and installation works. Among his latest accolades was being named as a CCP Thirteen Artist Awaerdee in 2003.
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