Consider the Head
Hayden Willens
It is the centre of thought. From the head, the brain marshals the rest of the body: it tells the legs to walk, the arms to lift and the body to dance, the lungs to fill with air, the blood to flow and the smallest molecule of human flesh to do its duty. All the armies of the body report to their general: the head. Across the whole body, there are layers of dead cells creating a barrier between the being and the world, except in the head. The eyes are the only living part of the human body we present to the rest of the world – to see into a soul you must look at the face. And from the mouth there come the words and sounds that can raise other humans to the heights and depths of love and hate.
Across the world, the head is decorated to increase attractiveness. It can be the elaborate masks worn to disguise and sexually entice in the masqued balls of Venice, or the heavy make-up of Noh theatre, which provides a blank canvass upon which the emotions of the piece can be drawn. Or the Western business man who slaps on a brisk palm of after shave to hide his natural odour. The head itself is something to be constantly enhanced. Or perhaps it is something to be hidden. It's recognised as a centre of individual power – be it for good or bad.
No wonder then that throughout history in every corner of the world, separating the head from the body is regarded as the surest way of ensuring death. Be it from hangings that breaks the spine to cut the brain from the nervous pathways to the rest of the body, to the axes, swords and guillotines that cut the head from the rest of the body, the idea is to break the link between the general and its armies of the flesh. And after such beheadings, it is the habit of the executioner to lift the head and let it spend its last seconds gibbering of the pains and secrets of death it has experienced.
Yung-Hsien Chen's work objectifies the head. He presents it literally on a plate for the viewer to consider. On the screen, he takes it away from the rest of its physicality and experiments with the masks and revelations that it alone can provide. The short films can be broadly divided into revealing the head, the head’s revelations, and the head as flesh.
Revealing The Head
In a series of visual puns, Chen examines the pain and discomfort of decorating the organ. At first it is just with hair. Wrapped across the face and held in place with elastic bands, the head is unrecognisable. Slowly the hair is blown away to reveal an uncompromising stare, as the object, which is the source of the viewer’s consideration, turns the viewer him or herself into a subject for contemplation.
This then becomes a head covered in layers of dead flesh. Processed meats take on the role of the skin’s cells. The white and red of flayed skin are peeled off to reveal the yellowing layers of fat before this too is slowly removed to reveal the reality of the face beneath, with its own bands of pain imprinted on the flesh. It’s a reversal of mortality in which the dead must be stripped away to show the living – and all the pain that exists in the condition of life.
Continuing the theme of the real nature of the organ, it is then wrapped in swathes of multicoloured cloth. A shapeless mass at first, each piece of colour is almost the representation of a mood that acts as both decoration to the head as well as a representation of thought given physical form. Again, when the decoration is finally removed, the face that stares back at the viewer is uncompromising – as if to say: “Was this decoration or camouflage of the real thing?”
And in the final film of this sequence, the visual pun looks at how the head protects itself – at first with meshes and metals, until that is peeled away and the head is left only to defend itself with words – the words of a newspaper plastered across the features that must be removed away until the vulnerability of the face is revealed. But once again, the eyes give the lie to weakness – it is the viewer who is under scrutiny, not the head on the plate.
The Head's Revelations
Chen then moves on to create an image of his own head as a thing of decoration and intellect. Calligraphy of his own poetry is painted across his features and against an hypnotic soundtrack of him reciting his words in both Japanese and English, the head first swallows noodles of continuous thought and almonds of individual concepts before spewing out eggs of ideas.
It is a literal representation of the cerebral. The red and white of the calligraphy throws up ideas of both death and good fortune in Oriental life. The white of mourning is juxtaposed with the red of luck to suggest a balance in life. This sense of duality is enhanced by Chen’s reading of his poem about the different experiences in life that have made him the man he is. He speaks of growing up speaking and thinking in both Japanese and Chinese and how he’s been moved by the winds of chance to inner city London where he’s required to learn to think and speak in a new language. It’s a story of isolation, but while the past is mourned, he is still blessed with fortune.
The red and the white of the calligraphy also harks back to the simple physicality of the organ. It represents the red and white of flesh beneath the skin – it is the colour of all humanity irrespective of the surface variations caused by the effect of sunlight on melanin. In using these themes, Chen is stating that thought is common to all humanity and while his theme is personal, it is by no means something that cannot be extended to any other member of the human race.
And finally, the thoughts of the head produce something simple and beautiful. Bereft of any words, a flower represents the beauty of human thought. Emerging from the mouth, it is the perfect image for the glories of mental achievement.
The Head As Flesh
In the final series of films, Chen uses disquieting images of the head as simply a hunk of flesh, with an underlying black humour, to suggest the mortality of the human condition.
At first the face is bombarded with falling pasta. Foodstuffs rain down on the head in a monsoon of plenty. Aimed not just at the mouth – the natural receptacle of such food – it tumbles in all direction, briefly settling on the nose or eyes before skittering off onto the plate. And then the head is revealed as nothing more than the main dish. Surrounded by pasta, it is something to be eaten. All the decoration and protection and intellectual creation of the past films comes down to this – a head is nothing more than a meal. No matter what we make of our own humanity through physical or mental ornamentation, when it comes down to it, it is nothing more than any other object you’d expect to find on a plate.
The viewer is invited to digest all of Chen’s ideas – indeed, to digest Chen himself – in the same way they would digest any other meat. But Chen doesn’t leave it to the viewer alone. Again, he brings in the ideas of fortune and death. The pasta is replaced with worms that try to eat into the head. Chen emphasises his own mortality and the mortality of his ideas. When all is said and done, no matter what we achieve in life, he says, we will all become wormfood.
However, he doesn’t allow the film to end on such a negative, even banal, note. The worms are replaced with maggots. First they exist around the plate, away from the source of their nourishment, before finally joining it. Again a theme of mortality, but leavened with the colours white and red. Once again, the white represents the death and mourning of humanity, but the red represents the good fortune – perhaps of leaving life, but more likely the fortune of having been alive. He plays with both ideas, by alternating the colour of the insects, allowing them to fight to take control over the head as they attempt to burrow into the skin.
And in the final scenes, the maggots prevail. The head has disappeared and all that is left are the maggots. They writhe and squirm on their plate, most likely having consumed the head totally. Nothing is left of its decoration or thought, just the duality of life and death. The head may have disappeared, but it has left a legacy.
As a piece of art, Chen's meditations on the nature of the head reveal a fascination not only with the objectification of a bodily part and its power to disquiet the viewer, but also a sense of suffering and endurance intrinsic to the nature of art itself.
To create his images, the models have had to suffer. From the simple images of hair trapped around the head by elastic bands, to the scenes of worms actually attempting to eat into living flesh, none of the ideas presented here on screen were easy to obtain. There are no sleight-of-hand special effects used to diminish the models’ suffering. What the viewer sees is what the viewer gets. The wincing of the head as elastic bands are cut mirrors the wincing of the viewer as it’s watched. The viewer is brought into the process to make his or her response a part of the art itself.
Reserving the most painful and uncomfortable roles for himself, Chen places himself as the artist at the centre of the work. It is a very personal piece. His own words are written across his own head and the viewer hears Chen recite the poetry of them in both Japanese and English. In his words he expresses his own experience of life, while in the images one sees his philosophy of life physically expressed.
He subjects himself to the distasteful and painful experience of covering his head in clammy dead flesh that is ground into his own skin with tight elastic bands – and when it's removed, the imprint of the bands are clearly visible. When maggots and worms are supposed to burrow into living flesh, he submits his own neck and head to the ordeal.
But throughout it all he remains dispassionate. He does not offer up any pain to the viewer, instead he allows it to be implicit. It can only be imagined by those looking on rather than experienced. Looking on, one can minimise or maximise the sensations that he must be feeling, but not know them in truth unless they are experienced personally. Within the clearly discomfiting images, Chen provides an area of ambiguity for person looking on: perhaps it’s not so bad after all? Or perhaps it is something to which no-one should willingly subject themselves? Either way, he only occasionally looks out of the screen with a mildly baleful glare to suggest that art is not always the easy option in life.
The startling imagery presented in Head On The Plate calls up some cinematic reminiscences of horror movies from both east and West, calling to mind the works of Clive Barker (in Hellraiser) or Greenway's The Pillow Book – but Chen takes those ideas further. With the parade of pain crossing the screen, he points the way towards a reality of cinema that is far more urgent (despite its hypnotic rhythm) than anything dreamt up by special effects and make-up artists in film studios across the world.