On entering the exhibition space you are immediately confronted with a sweating belly projected wide onto the wall. Droplets of sweat exude from the pores around the navel. You only notice after a while that your own body is getting warm – and that two heating devices are in operation on this side of the space. Sweating is a metabolic occurrence – a circulation of heat, relaxation and fear – that directly corresponds to the video installation Burning Stones (2022) opposite, in which hands massage body tissue.
Esther Yi-Chun Lin’s videos are being juxtaposed for the first time at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Together they form a sweatbox in which the human body becomes the object of a forensic investigation into identity and the history of Taiwan. They delimit a territory that has been deeply imprinted by geography, memory and history – an effect that can be experienced both symbolically and physically through sweating.
How can history be felt? How do landscape, recollection and belonging inscribe themselves into a body? Esther Yi-Chun Lin’s work proceeds from these questions. Body odour as historical analogy: “I think the odour of the body is like a metaphor for history.”
The title Burning Stones refers to the etymology of the old word for sulfur, “brimstone”, which derives from the old English ōbryneö (to burn, fire) and ōstŌnö (stone). In Burning Stones: Hot Archives the bodily equivalent of brimstone is sweat. In heat it is broken down by bacteria and sulphurous compounds are released – body odour. Lin equates the sweating body with a sulphur mine. Evaporating sweat fills the air in the space – like the volcanic sulphur springs in the Taiwanese district of Beitou that fill the surroundings with steam.
From the sweating belly of a woman worried about her BO, fragments of historical scenes emerge. This is colonial archive material tracked down by Esther Yi-Chun Lin on the internet, where it circulates freely. She has excised portrayals of indigenous Taiwanese communities from these images, calling one of these interventions a “biopsy”. In between there are pictures of the Tatun Volcano Group and measurement data on the sulphur concentration in the air during the pandemic, in which higher numbers mean that organic material is being burnt – including human material. It all gives rise to what, for Esther Yi-Chun Lin, are no longer images but crystals that have gone through a body; exhaled, deformed, with surface deposits. The artistically processed visual material becomes a counter-archive – a recurring practice that the artist continues in this exhibition.
On the opposite screen, in Burning Stones (2022), the historical paths of Beitou are transferred to skin by the touch of hands. Esther Yi-Chun Lin invited the performer Ho Zhong-Jun to explore a path through the sulphur mines with her; the result was a performance in the form of a massage. There is no landscape or forest in the video, only massaging hands. But there is a narrative nonetheless: from the body to landscape, map and colony to the transformation of sulphur. The paths to the rivers and mountains where the sulphur mines lie and indigenous laborers earn their wages can be felt in the pressure points of the massage.
The colonial map dissolves, to be replaced by a tree, a large stone, the sound of flowing water – and the skin itself. It is the landscape overlayed by the clutches of Spain, the Netherlands and the Qing, a space in which the traces of indigenous communities and local earth deities are gradually disappearing. The work accomplishes a reversal of perspective: “How can you see a mountain from the mountain’s point of view? A hand from the hand’s?” Orientation isn’t given by measurement but by somatic memory: “The mild odour of rotten eggs, the remembered part of the body, and a touch of happiness.”
The massage is over: “Please remember to take your personal belongings with you. Thank you for participating.” A reset, like after a treatment – and the start of a renewed search for identity at the same time. Everyone takes what belongs to them with them; everything else remains behind. The odour stays where it was – with the spirits, the deities, the bodies inscribed into the landscape. For Esther Yi-Chun Lin this odour is a way to tell stories. It is inhaled, felt and experienced in one’s own body – like the circulation of a story rediscovered across generations.
Text: Keumhwa Kim