物質想像 - 臺北市立美術館

Transcription

物質想像 - 臺北市立美術館

The Imagination of Matter: Childhood and Cosmos Reveries in Jimmy Liao’s Visual Art
物質想像：幾米視覺藝術中的童年與天際幻想曲
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The Imagination of Matter:
Childhood and Cosmos Reveries in Jimmy Liao’s Visual Art1
物質想像：
幾米視覺藝術中的童年與天際幻想曲
Tsai Shu-hui
蔡淑惠
Associate Professer, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chung
Hsing University
國立中興大學外文系副教授
1　This paper is the written report of NSC research project for the 101 academic year. ( NSC 101-2410-H-005-045).
現代美術學報—26
Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
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專題：美術館與當代藝術的新敘事者身分
Abstract
T his shor t paper interprets a series of poetic picture book s by Jimmy Liao, a n
internationally famous Taiwanese artist, from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard’s
theories on the imagination of matter and poetic reverie, as presented in Bachelard’s
Air and Dreams, Water and Dreams, The Poetics of Reverie, The Right to Dream. With
reference to Bachelard’s ideas, I will attempt to penetrate deeper into Jimmy’s Secrets in
the Woods, Thank You, Furry Bunny, for a Wonderful Afternoon, The Blue Stone, Sound
of Colors, The Moon Forgets and A Fish With a Smile. These works present the recurrent
themes of the search for lost innocence and the ecstasy of airy f light, water and the
imagination. Bachelard’s ideas on the imagination of matter find expression in Liao’s
The Blue Stone and The Moon Forgets, where images of air, water, stones, the moon and
stars all appear in a state of cosmic delight. In Liao’s art, this imagination of matter has
its central themes of restoring childhood innocence and striving through poetic reverie
toward the spiritual ecstasy of nature and the cosmic imagination. His stories are indirect
critiques of patriarchy, rigid rationality and rationalist ideology. In the spiritual process of
enjoying poetic reverie, the phenomenon of “becoming animals, becoming fish, becoming
rabbits, and becoming stars or moon,” also corresponds to the Deleuze’s theories, in
which affect, associated with the creative arts expresses inexhaustible creative immanence
as we embrace the Other or the Unknown. This Otherness as childhood innocence is not,
in fact, a psychological regression into the past: it refers to a threshold state that opens up
into a future life.
—
Keywords: affect, Bachelard, Jimmy Liao, poetic reverie, the imagination of matter,
becoming, Deleuze
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摘　要
本篇論文主要從賈東．巴舍拉（Gaston Bachelard）白日夢詩學的物質想像專書，
譬如：《氣態與夢》、《水與夢》、《白日夢詩學》、《做夢的權力》，及德勒茲（Gilles
Deleuze）的哲學理論，尤其：《何謂哲學？》討論藝術家內在性具有超越面向是一種
非人情動力流變過程，來探究幾米視覺藝術系列作品屬於童年想像與天際幻想曲，特
別是《森林的秘密》、《謝謝你毛毛兔，這個下午真好玩》、《藍石頭》、《微笑的魚》、
《地下鐵》、《月亮不見了》，這些是屬於視覺藝術的詩劇，不應純粹被歸類是兒童文
學。幾米是台灣當代一位傑出的藝術家，作品主要以「童真意識」為創作的慾望邏輯，
而在這些系列的視覺詩劇作品中展演出童真情懷，這是在成長過程中逐漸消失的純
真意識。巴舍拉詩學中的物質想像在幾米視覺藝術呈現出液態、氣態、高空、礦物體
的幻想愉悅，畢竟在幾米的作品中，物質想像事實上是扮演著尋找失落的童真情懷，
透過白日夢的高空幻想曲，在幻想中築現對天際與大自然的熱愛，展現一種「童真意
識」，這是一種精神晉升的高亢愉悅感。在這些系列作品，故事皆間接地批判僵硬的
父權理性社會與意識形態。在這種白日夢童真意識的幻想中，進行各種流變過程的享
樂，譬如：流變成魚、兔子、星球體，這概念與德勒茲思想中的情動力，一種內在性藝
術動能創造力有關，這種內在性一個無名他者的藝術動能是藝術創作起始力量。童
真意識是這股內在性的情動創造力量，這不是一種心理退行，而是朝向未來的啟蒙意
識，也因此喚醒內在性的童真情懷不是一種幼稚思維，卻是開啟未來願景的力量。
—
關鍵字：情動力、巴舍拉、幾米、白日夢幻想曲、物質想像、流變過程、德勒茲
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In its own way, art says what children say. It is made up of trajectories and
becomings, and it too makes maps, both extensive and intensive…Art is defined,
then, as an impersonal process in which the work is composed somewhat like a cairn,
with stones carried in by different voyagers and beings in becoming that may or may
not depend on a single author. (Gilles Deleuze, 1998: 65-66)
Anyone browsing through Jimmy Liao’s picture books will find it hard to resist
the strikingly shiny colors and innocent faces of lovely children in the throes of poetic
reveries— mesmerized by aquatic, aerial, and cosmic imagination. In fact, imagination is
often a very complex idea, sometimes confused, from the psychoanalytic perspective, with
the notion of fantasy in a more pathological state. This confusion is especially apparent
when it comes to discussions of childhood poetic reveries, which can be interpreted as
psychic regressions into the past. But if we start with Gaston Bachelard’s notions of poetic
reveries and the imagination of matter—and also consider Gilles Deleuze’s notion of
becoming— we arrive at a different perspective that can shed light on Jimmy Liao’s visual
art. In fact, as a reader, I have discovered some of his picture books belong to the mere
category of Children’s Literature but some of his works indeed belong to the visual art of
poetic reveries within the consciousness of childhood innocence and the imagination of
matter. Most of the critical analysis of his picture books is devoted to the interpretation
of his picture books from the perspective of either children’s literature or magic realism.
Yet, none of these critical essays has mentioned about the difference between childhood
memory and childhood imagination or the consciousness of childhood innocence. Thus,
I think in this short paper this new perspective on Liao’s art works suggests that his
works should not be totally relegated to the category of mere Children’s Literature and
dismissed as a series of picture books. If we study his picture books more carefully, we
could discover that some of his art works prove that Jimmy Liao is a visual artist with
poetic reveries though I do not deny some of the works are truly the picture books for
children. On the other hand, often “children” in some of his visual art works function as
a metaphor for the concept of “childhood innocence,” which becomes lost or hidden as
we are raised within a patriarchal civilization. As I will show here, in some of Liao’s art
works, he imagines for us this loss of innocence and the feeling of nostalgia that pervades
his works is an artistic sublimation of the desire to restore, revitalize and reawaken
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childhood affect and innocence within our immanent state of being.
Deleuze argues that when artists create, they actually use “the consciousness of
childhood innocence” rather than childhood memory per se. In the artistic process,
the artist is driven by inner forces toward the inter-zone between affects and affection,
and it is an impersona l or nonhuman process of becoming that gives rise to the
creative inspiration. Although Deleuze’s philosophy is somewhat different from Gaston
Bachelard’s notions of childhood and cosmic imagination in poetic reveries, both theorists
agree that childhood reveries are sources of spiritual repose and creative potentiality—
not manifestations of psychological regression. Deleuze even goes deeper and further than
Bachelard’s ideas, arguing that the concept of affect is positive and affirmative in the
artists’ creative immanence. Moreover, both theorists also fight against the psychoanalytic
interpretation that mistakenly understands imagination and fantasy in a rather negative
sense. Thus, in this short paper, I attempt to elaborate upon Bachelard’s concept of
the imagination of matter and Deleuze’s notion of affect as “the nonhuman process
of becoming” and use them in an analysis of Jimmy Liao’s picture books. Deleuzian
theories on art and creative immanence, with particular reference to his concept of
the “consciousness of childhood innocence,” which of course would resonate with the
fundamental concept of Bachelard’s poetic reveries in the imagination of matter, will offer
an entry into Liao’s remarkable artistic world in some of his art works.
I. Jimmy Liao and Childhood Innocence in His Picture Books
Jimmy Liao is an internationally well-known Taiwanese picture book artist with
more than twenty art works published since 1998. Almost all of his picture books have
been translated into more than eight foreign languages, including English, French,
German, Spanish, Greek, Korean, Japanese, and Tai. In 2003, he was selected by Studio
Voice magazine as one of the top fifty-five creative artists in Asia. In 2007, he was
recognized by Discovery as one of the six outstanding and highest-achieving men in
Taiwan, and now he has earned a reputation as the most popular Taiwanese artist and the
one who owns the most overseas copyrights. Some of his picture books (A Fish with A Smile,
Sound of Colors, The Starry Starry Night, Turn Left and Turn Right, Paradise Lost) have
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also been adapted for movies, the theater, television, and animation. In the past few years,
the creative sensation known as “Jimmy Liao’s phenomenon” has hit the international
book markets and delighted adults and children alike. Jimmy Liao’s idealized images of
children daydreaming about a world of poetic enchantment are ubiquitous. They can
be found printed on tote bags, quilts, purses, cups, mirrors, clothes and other consumer
items. In Taiwan, huge crowds f lock to his exhibits, as if answering an invitation to a
world of fantasy, ecstasy and childhood imagination.
Most of the critical essays on his art works fail to see the truth that in fact, poetic
daydreams derived from the feeling of childhood innocence are a recurrent theme in all of
Jimmy Liao’s major art works. Yet, ironically, these dream images are not so much visions
from an enchanted childhood as they are depictions of an escape from an oppressive
civilized world. Only through daydreams encounters with nature itself can Liao’s children
dissipate the clouds in their minds and heal their inner wounds. Liao’s images of poetic
childhood reveries convey a hidden message of condemnation aimed at the rigidity
of children’s lives in a patriarchal society based on rationality and rigid discipline. In
Taiwanese society, parents and teachers impose high expectations and ideals of perfection
upon children from an early age. The reality of childhood can be one of endless torments,
in which children are deprived sometimes of the joy of games and poetic reveries. The
realm of daydreams offers children an escape from the unhappiness of a world in which
they must compromise, conform, and accept discipline; the stronger the pressure on them,
the more powerful their desire to seek refuge in poetic fantasy. Sigmund Freud provided
a theoretical basis for connecting art and creativity to the sublimation of suffering and
anxiety. In an essay “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Freud states that “a happy
person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one” (Vol.9, 1908: 146). In Freud’s scheme,
poetic reverie or fantasy functions as a form of psychic liberation for those who need to
escape temporarily from the rational rigidity of their everyday lives. Generally speaking,
daydreams serve as a vehicle for imagination to elevate the soul or to plunge into the inner
truth of pure childhood innocence, which has always already remained hidden deep in the
heart. The process of sublimation through art allows the pure, hidden joy of innocence to
find expression and therefore re-elevation.
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Perhaps, those who are not familiar with him would never know that Jimmy Liao,
before entering the spotlight of the art market in Taiwan, underwent chemotherapy
for leukemia. Though the doctors in National Taiwan University Hospital at one point
almost gave up on his cancer treatment, he still practiced Chinese Chigong every day he
could in the early morning. He survived the illness with help from his uncompromising
persistence in achieving his own dreams. But readers expecting to find his struggles
ref lected in his works will be surprised: Liao’s dramatic use of remarkably striking
colors calls to mind the joyful spirit of childhood innocence and leaves no trace of the
gloomy colors of despair and depression. The bright, shining colors in Jimmy Liao’s art
transport us to a transcendent realm, where we, in a spiritual higher lift, enter the virtual
ontology of pure sensation with the loss of logical and rational meanings. In his essay “A
Child’s View of Color,” Walter Benjamin writes that “In a child’s life, color is the pure
expression of the child’s pure receptivity.” He also has this to say about color: “As an art,
painting starts from nature and moves cumulatively toward form. The concern of color
with objects is not based on their form; without even touching on them empirically, it
goes right to the spiritual heart of the object by isolating the sense of sight. It cancels
out the intellectual cross-references of the soul and creates a pure mood, without thereby
sacrificing the world” (Benjamin, 1996: 51). Benjamin’s thoughts on art and color go to
the heart of Liao’s use of dramatically striking colors to evoke the childhood innocence
reawakened through poetic visions and reveries of the cosmic imagination.
II. Reveries in Bachelard’s Imagination of Matter
Gaston Bachelard is a French modern philosopher whose great contributions to
poetics and the philosophy of science have won him a prestigious academic status and
also have inf luenced numerous French philosophers, including Michel Foucault, Louis
Althusser, Dominique Lecourt, and Jacques Derrida. Bachelard’s series on the imagination
of matter, (focusing on air, water, fire, and earth), emphasizes on the joy of poetic reveries
and presents his theory of the imagination of matter using the works of several poets.
Imagination for Bachelard finds expression in archetypal imagery that gives rise to a
wide variety of dynamic reveries on matter and substances. Though, in the first place,
Bachelard’s notion of the imagination of matter seems to be a good vehicle to channel
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the dynamic imagination in search of the new image of thought related to the archetypal
transcendence, this does not indicate the obsession with the truth of the origin. The
fact is that the past in the ontological difference conceals the message that refers to the
future. Kaplan explains that “Bachelard studies the creative aspect of imagination not
only phenomenologically, but as constituting an ontology” (Kaplan, 1972: 2). Matter
seems to function as a poetic carrier of the real that allows the dynamic imagination to
elevate itself toward transcendence. This notion in Bachelard’s theories on poetic reveries
in fact corresponds to Deleuzian notion of the creative immanence, which means that
transcendence exists in immanence and it relies on the creative imagination to transport
us into this transcendent state of mind. Imagination is an aspiration toward a new ethical
identity because ordinary imagination as it is everyday given, is not Bachelard’s main
emphasis. Kaplan argues that “Men’s creation of new images, then, is derived from this
psychic power of constant becoming, described, by Bachelard, as imagination” (Kaplan,
1972: 3). Thus, to imagine is to create new images that stand apart from the ordinary and
the mediocre; imagination is the primal force of the creative mind. In Bachelard’s context,
there seems to be no difference between imagination and fantasy.
On the other hand, to Freud, the imagination that gives rise to creativity and art
comes from the sublimation of the desire. But for Freud, fantasy, is partially related
to the sexual pleasure, as we see in the exmaple of Norbert Hanold ’s obsessional,
hallucinatory sexual fantasy, surrounding the marble f igure, Gradiva, in Jensens’s
Gradiva. In a Freudian context, fantasy, is often considered a pathological state in which
the imagination is too “strong.” The idea of a “healthy” state of fantasy, or imagination,
a main concern of Bachelard, Deleuze and Jimmy Liao, is a matter that Freud either
neglects or avoids. As the French philosopher, Rancière puts it, “the invention of
psychoanalysis occurs at the point where philosophy and medicine put each other into
question by making thought a matter of sickness and sickness a matter of thought”
(The Aesthetic Unconscious 23). To Rancière, the existing configuration of unconscious
thought should be called aesthetics; art is a spiritual odyssey that seeks itself and misses
itself in the double sensible exteriority of matter and image. Even to Deleuze, art is the
impersonal process in which the imaginary is the virtual image that constitutes a crystal
of the unconscious (1998: 63). The unconscious is not the repression of the virtual image-
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reservoir but a potentially creative immanence that transforms the images from the stages
of the virtual into the actual.
From this inference, it is reasonable to understand that Bachelard harbors a certain
discontent with psychoanalytic notion of fantasy which might lead the subject into
delirious imagination and he actually tries to make a critical remark on the notion of
fantasy understood in psychoanalysis. To Bachelard, the therapists worry too much about
the poetic fantasy, the so-called daydreams, enjoyed by people, as he argues that:
In short, the psychoanalyst thinks too much. He does not dream enough. In wanting
to explain to us the depth of our being by the residues deposited on the surface by
daytime life, he obliterates the sense of the gulf that is within us. Who will help
us descend into our cavern? Who will help us recover, recognize, know our double
being which, from one night to the next, keeps us in existence. (The Poetics of Reverie
149)
What Bachelard appears to mean here is that poetic reverie can transport us to
descend deeply into the abyss, or toward the limit of our inner being, which tends to be a
nocturnal dream. Oftentimes, this poetic enjoyment could not retain systematically the
social meanings as psychoanalysis would regard it as the danger of fantasy that plunges us
into the world of delirious nothingness. Yet, Bachelard thinks it otherwise that if this joy
of falling into the nocturnal abyss is rejected or prohibited in the first place, the profound
awakening of recognizing the inner truth hidden in the mysterious immanence would be
forever concealed.
Indeed, for Bachela rd, entering the fa nta sy rea lm of poetic reverie is not a
manifestation of psychic malady. It is a means of attaining a spiritual state of tranquility
and a pellucid awareness of the carefree, healthy state of solitude. Besides, Bachelard
emphasizes on the feminine force or attitude towards the things in Nature, as he states
that “to love things for their use is a function of the masculine. They are components
of our actions, of our live actions. But to love them intimately, for themselves, with the
slowness of the feminine, that is what leads us into the labyrinth of the intimate Nature
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of things” (The Poetics of Reverie 31-32). This solitude allows us to “listen to our reveries”
and penetrate the depths of our unknown psychic lives (58). Following Carl Jung,
Bachelard considers that the unconscious or the subconscious mind as the repository
of humankind’s primary nature and forgotten memeories, not just merely the realm of
repressed consciousness. From the viewpoint, if we read those picture books created by
Jimmy Liao, we couldn’t agree more with this interpretation based on his sharp insight.
In Sound of Colors（《地下鐵》）, we are invited into a world of wonder and fantasy
in the poetic visual images. A fifteen-year-old girl who is blind and lonely walks with her
cane into the Mass Rapid Transit Station to initiate a spiritual journey of adventure and
liberation because she refuses to remain locked away in her own room, suffering from
depression and spiritual pain. From her fantasy perspective, the MRT is transformed into
a divine underworld composed of magical and surreal images. The station becomes a
virtual transformation into a surreal and enchanting world of poetic reveries, in which a
sense of drama is captured by the striking colors of the background. The first image the
readers encounter in the book is that of the blind girl with an umbrella and a cane getting
lost in the throng as it enters a train. Next, the crowd is transformed into a sea of animallike figures. More mesmerizing images of poetic fantasy follow as the girl approaches the
various dreams-saturated station exits.
The first exit she reaches leads to a yellow forest with fallen leaves on the ground and
some cute pigs awaiting her near the swinging seesaw. The second exit leads to an ocean
where dolphins frolic ecstatically. At the third exit the girl is lofted into the sky, where
the clouds receive her into the poetic daydreams. Her flight is awkward at first, but soon
she begins f lying like a bird through the clouds and around tall buildings. Afterwards,
she is invited by her own poetic reverie into a giant maze made of trees shaped like a
meditating bird and this image shows how she enjoys the sense of loss in her poetic
dreamland. Or rather if we put it into a more positive sense, the sense of loss simply
provides her a good way for more adventurous poetic daydreams. Next, the MRT station
becomes a purple image of magic realism where all stairs are f loating in the air, as if
dreams were descending from a realm of heavenly delight or ascending into hilarity higher
than heaven. With the magic transformation of the MRT station, into a dark ancient
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cave, a rice field where the gamboling rabbits call to mind the white angels, or even the
illuminated perfume bottles f lying through the air, poetic reveries appears to release a
collective repressed desire for the fulfillment of childhood fantasies.
In most children’s picture books, the visual images fulfill the secondary function
of helping the reader to understand the narrative, but in Jimmy Liao’s visual art, the
narratives are like short poems; the images present the thinking in action. This effect is
what I would term a “poetic theater” in which not only children but also adults encounter
their hidden dreams and childhood reveries. For both children and adults, Jimmy Liao
creates an artistic world that embodies “the consciousness of childhood innocence.” It
would reawaken in us the hidden dreams of childhood imagination or innocence and thus
reading Liao’s picture books indeed would transport or elevate us into the transcendent
poetic realm searching for the feeling of childhood innocence that we have lost for so
long. It proves that the poetic imagination or fantasy should not be understood as the
“unhealthy” state of mind which is simply full of illusion or delusion, moving away from
the sense of reality.
In fact, to Bachelard, following Jung’s notion of alchemy, “the poetics of reverie
is a poetics of the anima” (62), or the feminine creative force that allows the mind to
transcend beyond the mundane world. Being associated with the idea of the great cosmic
reveries of alchemy, Bachelard would think that the poetic reveries would suddenly
transport us to “the summit of differentiated animism” (71), and it is the power of the
language of alchemy that generates the mother tongue of cosmic reverie, which is also
better depicted in Air and Dreams too. Cosmic reverie is a central theme in Jimmy Liao’s
work as a whole. Starting with his first black and white picture, Secrets in the Woods（《森
林裡的秘密》）, along with its later sister-work, Furry Bunny, for a Wonderful Afternoon
（《謝謝你毛毛兔，這個下午真好玩》）, his readers have been able to experience a
joy of imagined dynamic f light. The aerial joy of dynamized movement is “a psychic
amplifier” that allows his readers to contact “a non-dimensional matter” that gives us
the impression of an absolute inner sublimation (Air and Dreams 12, 9). In Secrets in the
Woods, a rabbit uses mysterious magic to inspire a little girl to escape from the boredom
of an afternoon. Together the girl and the rabbit fly into a virtual space where only exists
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inflection of dynamic fantasy; a staircase f loating through the air leads them to a door,
and this threshold welcomes the girl to a meadow where she encounters her lost dreams.
She becomes a rabbit, hopping around with the other bunnies through the magic meadow.
Soon afterwards she jumps to the head of the big rabbit and incredibly, they fly upward
into the sky. This perception of the visual image in f light indeed creates a precious
moment for the readers to enjoy a sudden amplification of the mind. Flying in the sky
with the freedom of imagination is the recurrent images that we could find it ubiquitous
in Liao’s visual art for the poetic reveries for the transcendence of the mind. Jimmy Liao
creates a similar poetic reverie of f light in Furry Bunny, for a Wonderful Afternoon as
well. The main difference from the earlier text is that time has elapsed, the little girl has
become an old woman and the rabbit is now an old rabbit living in the zoo. The encounter
between the two takes place on the day when all of the animals in the zoo are to be
moved into the other place. This unexpected reunion gives them such a great joy that the
old woman has the idea of trying to fly into the sky together, as they did a long time ago.
Of course, afterwards, the dream is fulfilled; in the book’s final images, they enjoy this
transcendent flight in the sky, transported by a fantasy of rejuvenated innocence and pure
pleasure of friendship. Though both of the books—Secrets in the Woods Furry and Bunny,
for a Wonderful Afternoon— are just the black and white art works, they have impressed
me the most because of the true and pure friendship the woman has shared with the
rabbits. It seems that the best image of a good friend in Liao’s art works in fact is not
always humans, but animals or celestial objects, like the moon or the stars.
The air imagination actually amplifies the mind because “with air, movement takes
precedence over matter…[and] the aerial psyche will allow us to develop the stages of
sublimation” (Air and Dreams 8). Imagination is the mental faculty that forms images,
and to Bachelard, the imaginative act continually fuses and changes mental images. He
thinks that “if an image does not determine an abundance—an explosion—of unusual
images, then there is no imagination” (Air and Dreams 1). In Jimmy Liao’s art works,
through our perception of viewing the visual images, the imagination undergoes from the
virtual sublimation to the discursive transcendence. Our daily tension or discontent is
greatly released since aerial dynamism is to open up the deeper consciousness of freedom.
Liao’s “vertical differential” seems to elevate his readers their consciousness of freedom
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and release their burden. Bachelard describes such uplifting moments in this way: “it is
in its traveling upward that the élan vital, the impulse of life, is the humanizing impulse”
(10, 11). Liao’s graceful and innocent images of flight have the power to make his viewers
“become conscious of being a reservoir of grace, of being a potential for breaking into
f light” (20). We understand this graceful f light in dreams would awaken in us the
consciousness of childhood innocence that positively would develop our inner strength
for self-liberation and for the better sense of self-esteem. Of course, it is not that Jimmy
Liao has given us a world of fantasy that helps escape from the social reality, but that he
has provided good images for the dreams in flight that provide a good carrier of the real
to transcend us into the beyond and launch a new awareness of the self toward a new life.
Oneiric f light is the synthesis of falling and rising and what is primordially beautiful
about our dreams of being the birds is their ability of flight. This is the simple reason that
I think Jimmy Liao’s visual art has its unique form as “the visual poetic theater,” a new
term coined by myself.
A true poet is not satisfied with this escapist imagination. He wants the imagination
to be a journey. Every poet must give us his invitation to journey. Through this
invitation, our inner being gets a gentle push which throws us off balance and sets
in motion a healthy, really dynamic reverie. If the initial image is well chosen, it
stimulates a well-defined poetic dream, an imaginary life that will have real laws
governing successive images, a truly vital telos. (Air and Dreams 3)
In Secrets in the Woods and Furry Bunny, for a Wonderful Afternoon, Jimmy Liao has
sent us into a great f light of daydreams, which is a primordial beauty for the dynamic
imagination. The fantasy in the dynamic imagination creates a great health for us to
elevate the mind into the transcendent state.
In fact, the ascensional movement in its vertical dreams is the virtual activity of the
soul and Aristotle has explained well that “soul is substance as the form of a natural body
which potentially has life, and since this substance is actuality, soul will be the actuality
of such a body” (De Anima 157). The soul has its own rising and falling movement (that
is, its growth and decay), which corresponds to the movement of the imagination. Yet,
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all things are affected and moved by that which is productive and in activity; in the
activity of imagination, Aristotle thinks that it goes with the sense-perception, because
imagination could not exist without perception.
But it is possible that whenever anything has been set in motion there is something
else that is moved by that thing. And imagination is held to be a kind of movement
and not to occur without perception but in things that perceive and in connection
with objects of which there is perception. (De Anima 200)
From this inference, we could understand that imagination working with the senseperception is the natural activity that has a close connection with the virtual inf lection
of the soul. On the other hand, Jung divides imagination into two forms: creative
imagination and active imagination. The former refers to all cultural forms— such as art,
religion, philosophy or society—whereas the latter refers to the creation of the personality
as the true way to “know thyself ” ( Jung on Active Imagination 17). I think, in fact, active
imagination is “the way to self-knowledge” and “the essential, inner-directed symbolic
attitude” that is at the core of our psychic development (17), though there lies a certain
danger that we might be overwhelmed by the strong forces derived from affects, impulses
and images of the unconscious. Undoubtedly, too excessive or obsessive attachment to the
powerful forces of active imagination would sometimes drag us down toward the abyssal
darkness that engulfs us into delirium if self-discipline is not well-done. Yet the modest
way of the poetic reverie as daydreams has provided us a good way to enjoy the spiritualelevating imagination where dwells our inner truth. This journey to the far-away worlds
of the imaginary really channels a dynamic psyche that goes into the land of the infinite.
Indeed, transcendent imagination of going beyond thought is the very law of poetic
expression, which also explains the truth of our creative immanence.
Jimmy Liao’s cosmic reveries and childhood fantasies provide examples of not only
what Bachelard called air dreams, but also of Bachelard’s ideas of water and earth. In A
Fish with a Smile（《微笑的魚》）, Liao invents a touching friendship between a solitary
middle-aged man and a fish. One day, the solitary man passes an aquarium; curiously
one fish falls in love with him at the first sight. Afterwards, the man decides to take this
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loving fish back home with him and keep it as a pet. His pet fish becomes his best friend
in the world. One night, while the whole world is sleeping, the smiling fish suddenly
becomes a green lantern in f light and awakens the man. They rush out of the house
and run toward the open space in the city. This journey is another of Liao’s flights into
the dreamland of childhood memory. Afterwards, in his imagination he becomes an
infant and swims like a fish in the ocean. Accidentally, he has a sudden awareness that
the ocean in which he frolics with many other different kinds of fish is in fact a tiny
fish bowl. This sudden awareness indeed awakens in him a deep sense of empathy that
further compels him to make the right decision to release his pet fish back into the ocean,
where it can enjoy its fundamental right to freedom. This lovely story has had such an
appeal to both adults and children that it was made into an animated short film, which
has won several international awards, such as the best short film in the 29th Hong Kong
International Film Festival, the best animation in the 51st Asia Pacific Film Festival, and
the best award of the panel of judges for the best children’s film at the 56 th Berlin Film
Festival. Bachelard once wrote that “we suffer through dreams and are cured by dreams”
(Water and Dreams 4); apparently in A Fish with a Smile, the solitary man’s inner wound
is healed by becoming the smiling fish through dreams that elevate him to the childhood
reverie where he could truly express his emotion with freedom. It is the precious moment
of rebirth with a new sense of identity, an indelible mark, to the solitary man. It is the
sensation created by the nonhuman or pre-individual affects in the becoming process that
allows us to experience the inner destiny and give us the sense of youth.
To Bachelard, “water is truly the transitory element. It is the essential, ontological
metamorphosis between fire and earth” (Water and Dreams 6). Water imagery presents
the being in the purifying process of the infinite flux in the horizontal dimension, unlike
other images that are involved in the dialectical forces of hierarchal arborescence. For
Liao, a return to childhood in fantasy through poetic reveries is a source of enlightenment
and spiritual transcendence, as we saw in the case of the solitary man in A Fish with A
Smile. The concept of childhood as something pure and unfathomable calls to mind
archetypes, one of the gravest images of the human soul (The Poetics of Reverie 114).
This going back toward the childhood reverie is not a psychic regression, but a spiritual
ascension toward an aspect of the soul that is at once deeply hidden, purifying and
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transcendent.
Childhood is a human water, a water which comes out of the shadows. This
childhood in the mists and glimmers, this life in the slowness of limbo gives us a
certain layer of births…Reverie toward our past then, reverie looking for childhood
seems to bring back to life lives which have never taken place, lives which have never
been imagined. Reverie is a mnemonics of the imagination…A great paradox is
connected with our reveries toward childhood: in us, this dead past has a future, the
future of its living images, the reverie future which opens before any rediscovered
images. (The Poetics of Reverie 112)
For Bachelard, the childhood reverie is a journey of healthy daydreams toward the
archetype, where dwell our primordial affects, the ultimate secrets within our immanence.
This apparent regression of childhood reveries is actually forward-looking. In Bachelard’s
thought the past foreshadows the future through a repetition in difference. Reveries set
in the past are not, in fact, the kinds of pathological regression that traps the subject in
a dark cave. On the contrary, this returning toward the childhood through daydreams
provides the virtual contact with the transcendent immanence that opens up a soft-walled
labyrinth, a spiritual invitation toward self-transmutation. The image-reservoire of the
childhood are kept hidden the treasure of our unknown being in a tranquil repose and
only through this useless memory of childhood could we really unfold our true being
that reveals the secret of the future. Gilles Deleuze in fact has shared some similar views
with this childhood reverie that would awaken the consciousness of childhood innocence
within our creative immanence and this childhood imagination in fact both to Bachelard
and Deleuze bears the secret toward the future. In the following discussion, I will focus
more on the explanation of Deleuzian notion of affect related to the consciousness of
childhood innocence in immanence which is understood in a more positive and creative
sense.
III. Deleuze and Affects in Creative Immanence
Inf luenced by Bergsonian notion of time as duration, Deleuze argues that the
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virtual past coexists with the present; that is, the past and the present coexist rather
than constituting two successive moments. The contemporaneity of the present and the
past means that the past “preserves itself in itself ” and “it is the whole, integral past: it
is all our past, which coexists with each present”(Bergsonism 59). We could realize that
the past in the virtual preserves itself in each present moment and “we must recognize
that the present itself is only the most contracted level of the past”(Bergsonism 74).
In other words, from this view, the affects of childhood coexist with the duration of
life in adults, as Deleuze quotes from Fellini: “We are constructed in memory; we are
simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity” (Cinema 2, 99). Hidden
childhood innocence, which can be reawakened through the perception of the innocence
through images in the creative arts, is not a return to origins, but it can be carried away
by the intensities of creative affects that form a rhizomatic line of f light to break away
from the rigidly-hierarchized structure of the society. This idea is slightly different from
Bachelard’s notion childhood reveries and their association with Jungian archetypes.
The difference is that the Deleuzian notion of the affect does not seek origins, but rather
blocs of sensation that present the singularity of creative forces. Thus, childhood reveries
should not be understood as a psychological regression, but that which bears the secrets
toward the future life, because this spiritual journey coupled with transmutation is the
nonhuman process of becoming.
The notion of Deleuzian affects is quite remarkably discussed in the book What is
Philosophy?
Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who
experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the
strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings
whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived…Affects are precisely
these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts—including the town—are
nonhuman landscapes of nature…We are not in the world, we become with the
world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become
universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. (What is Philosophy?
164, 169)
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106
From a Deleuzia n perspective, a f fects a re considered the pre-individua l (or
impersonal) state of forces of creative potentiality; perhaps, one might consider this limit
consciousness is quite dangerous if it is put into a real practice. And I think this is the
main point of Bachelard’s argument that psychoanalysts place too much emphasis on
disorder and have worried too much. Here I do not tend to romanticize the elevation of
the spiritual lift, a transcendent jump into the poetic reverie of childhood innocence.
Yet, it is the right moment to reconsider our “fantasy structure” we have learned from
the psychoanalytic perspective. There is a certain difference away from the perspective
of psychoanalytic understanding that Deleuze and Bachelard have tried to reconstruct
and open up a new understanding that helps change our stereotyped concept of the limit
experience within the consciousness.
Deleuze argues that “every work of art is a monument, but here the monument is not
something commemorating a past…The monument’s action is not memory but fabulation.
We write not with childhood memories but through blocs of childhood that are the
becoming-child of the present (What is Philosophy? 167-168). To Deleuze, the childhood
reverie does not seek to return to the past, or to be a child again, which amounts to
psychological regression. If we take the example of A Fish with a Smile, we see that the
middle-aged solitary man is not obsessed with a return to an origin (his childhood);
instead he experiences an unexpected spiritual elevation that helps him transcend his
socio-cultural identity to go beyond perceptual states and affective transitions of the lived
to enjoy a temporary moment of childhood innocence, associated with the animal affects.
For this solitary man, becoming a fish and swimming in the ocean with pure pleasure of
consciousness allows him to experience the pure pleasure of being in an in-between state
that is both human and non-human (an animal) within his immanence.
The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but man’s nonhuman
becoming…becoming is neither an imitation nor an experienced sympathy, nor even
an imaginary identification. It is not resemblance, although there is resemblance.
But it is only a produced resemblance. Rather, becoming is an extreme contiguity
within a coupling of two sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the
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distance of a light that captures both of them in a single reflection…it is a zone of
indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts and persons endlessly reach
that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation. This is what is
called an affect. (What is Philosophy? 173)
Within the inter-zone of indiscernibility, the indistinctions between two different
beings are erased: a fish becomes a man and a man becomes a fish. Or to be more
precise, the smiling fish triggers the affect of the non-human creative forces within his
immanence; thus the smiling fish is a means for him to elevate his mind into the poetic
reveries and also enjoy the pure joy of childhood imagination.
Another good example for this nonhuman becoming is The Moon Forgets (《月亮不
見了》), in which the Moon falls into the earth, takes on multiple likeness and forms a
close friendship with a boy. In one of Liao’s cosmic reveries, the Moon, who has suddenly
forgotten where she should be and who she is, decides to replicate herself in the form of
many shining moons whose presence on earth soothes and comforts people’s mind; or
the pet moon stays by the boy’s side in silence as he completes his homework or watches
television. The moons also decorate the dark forest, which becomes a remarkable and
enchanting place. Yet, the beauty of fleeting moment would not stay permanent; one day
the Moon seems to remember her real home and it is the boy’s duty to help her to f ly
back to the sky. Of course, at first, the boy is so reluctant to accept this fate, yet his final
compromise shows his gratitude to the Moon. The readers view both of them, the boy and
the Moon, having a difficult time separating from each other. In the final scene, the boy,
in awkward flight, accompanies the Moon back to the sky in a rainy day.
From The Moon Forgets, through the intermingling of percepts and a f fects,
undeniably the viewers visually engulfs in a great sensation of the cosmos reveries: we
feel through their mutual identification that either the moon becomes the boy or the
boy becomes the moon; in addition, the space between the earth and the sky has almost
become indiscernible. It is a visual sensation based on transformation of our perception
and we only experience of percepts and affects; Jimmy Liao in this visual art work has
created an imaginary space that makes no distinction between the earth and the sky
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since the moon has descended from the sky and has become a pet for the solitary boy. For
each party, the other has become the idealized or imaginary double; that is, the universe
becomes a single unity to the boy and the moon. It is a poetic grandeur and we have also
become the dreamers that inhabit the world through the cosmic reveries. It is true when
Bachelard states that “in a cosmic image as well as in an image of our dwelling, we are
in the well-being of a repose. The cosmic image gives us a concrete, specified repose; this
repose corresponds to a need, to an appetite” (The Poetics of Reverie 178). This cosmic
imagination has channeled us into the virtual world of cosmic percepts. Deleuze writes
that “The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man…Characters can
only exist, and the author can only create them, because they do not perceive but have
passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensation” (What is
Philosophy? 169). The cosmic reveries in The Moon Forgets present the nonexistence of the
actual landscape and it is the virtual percepts actualized in its visual act that enchant the
readers and envelope them in the nondimensional space, as if percepts were nonhuman
landscapes of nature. If we look the same way at the imaginary landscape the blind girl
experiences in Sound of Colors, we realize that the virtual actualized as an imaginary
image is more real to the psyche. To Bachelard, in the cosmic imagination, the universe is
expressed as a beautiful, unifying force.
On the other hand, in Earth and Reveries of Will, Bachelard analyzes the material
objects, such as earth, which unlike other elements—fire, water, air—may indeed be
characterized by their nature as resistance and gentleness, a form of ambivalence (7). The
earth, like the rock, presents an image of uncompromising persistence in its own will.
As to this willful persistence, Jimmy Liao has also created a fantastic picture book, The
Blue Stone (《藍石頭》) which is a touching story about the homecoming journey of a
blue stone. After a disastrous fire in a forest, the blue stone unfortunately splits into two
halves: one half stays in the forest and the other unfortunately is transported away into
the city. This primordial trauma on the contrary functions like a central gravity of the
magnetic field for the split blue stone with its uncompromising persistence to long for the
“homecoming”: the further one half of the blue stone is carried away by the truck from the
forest, the more it strives to return to its home—the forest, to be united with the other
half. So as the story goes, the blue stone is sculpted into various shapes, including those of
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an elephant, a bird, and a fish. The problem is that each time the blue stone is re-shaped
or re-constructed into the different animal figures, there is always a powerful explosion
from within it—an apparent act of self-destruction. The stone’s absolute refusal to be
assimilated to other forms, or integrated into the “civilized” human world, amounts to
its resistance toward accepting new identities. This resistance brings to mind Bachelard’s
description of how earth reveries would be characterized as a will of resistance and
hostility. Gradually, after having exploded several times, this “homesick” or “traumatized”
blue stone has become smaller and smaller than ever. Eventually it has become so small
that it can easily be made into a heart-shaped necklace for a young woman. Yet, after a
heart-breaking event, the young woman who owns the blue-stoned necklace throws it onto
the railway track; as the train goes past, the blue stone has been crushed several times that
it has turned into dusts, as light as the air. Now the blue stone could fly with the wind,
across the city, the ocean, toward the forest where it can be reunited with its other half.
The poetic reveries of the blue stone undeniably present a traumatic event that initiates
a journey homeward to the true inner self and toward the truth of childhood experience,
a true feeling for “the warm home” in our mind. I think either childhood innocence or
childhood imagination has been the major recurrent theme in Jimmy Liao’s picture books.
IV. Conclusion
Bachelard’s conception of the imagination of matter finds a good illustration in
Jimmy Liao’s art. Childhood innocence according to the Deleuzian-Bergsonian notion
of time does not actually vanish, which is a powerful feeling of affects in immanence
for creativity. We all understand that the creativity is the mysterious power of the
immanence: affects with the ontological virtuality, going beyond the consciousness of
affection, indicate the status as the unnamable otherness which has the trajectory of
intensities within the subject. In Deleuze’s Foucault, when dealing with the inside of
thought, we come to realize that the creative forces come from the outside within the
inside, that is, this exclusive inclusion functions the major force of creativity within
the subject. This outside, as Deleuze argues, is not a terrifying void (Foucault 95). This
outside as the exclusive inclusion could be understood as the unthought within thought
itself and “the unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very heart,
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as the impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside (Foucault 97).
This “outside”, “unthought within thought” or “exclusive inclusion” within the subject
actually corresponds to what the above-discussed notion of affects that trigger the
nonhuman becoming for creativity. Indeed this “outside” of the consciousness has stored
in it fragments of ontological imagery of our innermost childhood memories; it may be
understood as the “invisible archives” inscribed in the human soul.
Like the Begsonian concept of time, the idea of “archives” in Derrida’s interpretation
is not a question of the past, but of looking toward the future, since the future is rooted
in the past. Derrida thinks that “the archive has always been a pledge, and like every
pledge, a token of the future” and “it is the question of the future itself, the question of a
response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (Archive Fever 18, 36). By the
same token, to both Bachelard and Jimmy Liao, the childhood reveries have nothing to do
with psychological regression to the past; rather, they are penetrating reflection into the
future and a spiritual transmutation of a future life. To Bachelard, the archetypal imagery
derived from feminine forces remains untraceable and cannot be concretely represented.
What Bachelard emphasizes is that the childhood or cosmic reveries are the threshold to
the secret of our inner true being. Thus, the poetic reveries of childhood innocence in
Jimmy Liao’s visual art in fact do present a non-regression toward the past, but a good
hope for the self-transmutation to the future life.
page.
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Works Cited:
Aristotle (1986). De Anima (On the Soul). (Hugh Lawson-Tancred, Trans.). New York: Penguin Books.
Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. (Daniel Russell, Trans.).
Boston: Beacon Press.
—— (1971). The Right to Dream. ( J.A. Underwood, Trans.). Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and
Culture.
—— (1964). The Psychoanalysis of Fire. (Alan C.M. Ross, Trans.). Boston: Beacon P.
—— (1988). Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. (Edith R. Farrell & C. Frederick Farrell,
Trans.). Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
—— (1983). Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. (Edith R. Farrell, Trans.). Dallas: The Dallas
Institute of Humanities and Culture.
—— (2002). Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. (Kenneth Haltman, Trans.). Dallas:
The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
Buchanan, Ian (2000). Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Durham: Duke UP.
Benjamin, Walter (1996). Selected Writings (Vol.1 1913-1926). Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings (Eds.).
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP.
Chodorow, Joan (Ed.) (1997). Jung on Active Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Brian Massumi,
Trans.). Minnespolis: U of Minnesota P.
—— (1994). What Is Philosophy? (Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, Trans.). London: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles (1972). Proust and Signs. (Richard Howard, Trans.). New York: George Braziller.
—— (1988). Bergsonism. New York: Zone Book.
—— (1989). Cinema 2. (Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Trans.). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
—— (1995). Negotiations. (Martin Joughin, Tran.). New York: Columbia UP.
—— (1998). Essays Critical and Clinical. (Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, Trans.) . London: Verso.
—— (2001). Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. (Anne Boyman, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
Kaplan, Edward K (1972). “Gaston Bachelard’s Philosophy of Imagination.” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 33(1), 1-24.
Rancière, Jacques (2009). The Aesthetic Unconscious. (Debra Keates & James Swenson, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Watson, Gerard (1982). “Φαντασα in Aristotle, De Anima 3. 3.” The Classical Quarterly, New Series, 32(1), 100113.
幾米（1998）。《森林裡的秘密》。臺北：大塊文化。
——（1999）。《月亮忘記了》。臺北：格林文化。
——（2001）。《地下鐵》。臺北：大塊文化。
——（2003）。《微笑的魚》。臺北：大塊文化。
——（2004）。《又寂寞又美好》。臺北：大塊文化。
——（2005）。《失樂園》。臺北︰大塊文化。
——（2006）。《藍石頭》。臺北：大塊文化。
——（2007）。《戀之風景》。臺北：大塊文化。
——（2008）。《幾米故事的開始》。臺北大塊文化。
——（2009）。《星空》。臺北：大塊文化。
——（2010）。《我不是完美小孩》。臺北︰大塊文化。
——（2010）。《走向春天的下午》。臺北：大塊文化。
Submission on 2013.9.13, Approval on 2013.11.26.

物質想像 - 臺北市立美術館

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