Find yourself face to face with some of the world’s greatest composers at the Kimmel Center’s most recent art installation. Internationally acclaimed Taiwanese artist Long-Bin Chen’s unusually realistic sculptures, aptly named “The Composers,” is the second of public art installation in the Kimmel Center Plaza. The sculptures are on loan until June from the West Collection through a partnership with SEI.  The first exciting installation, Jonathan Schipper’s “The Slow and Inevitable Death of American Muscle,” simulated a head-on collision of two-muscle cars and was on display for 90 days.

The late Susan Sontag had it right: “A good book is an education of the heart.” Not only do books enlarge one’s “sense of human possibility,” she wrote, they also expand the individual’s “experience of the world.” Conversely—the great American cultural critic declared—books are “creators of inwardness.” It doesn’t take a huge imaginative leap to believe that, had she been asked, Sontag would have easily extended her observations to choice bits of music or objects d’art. That goes double had she ever been confronted with Long-bin Chen’s bookish busts of classical composers.

An artist who has taken to carving bizarrely realistic sculpture from the detritus of our machine-age civilization, Long-bin Chen has for more than two decades turned the old modernist idea of truth to materials into a capacious digital-era sculptural metaphor. As the artist put in an interview, it was sometime in 1992 that he realized that the personal computer had begun making the world of books effectively obsolete. Not long after, he began cutting up hard and paperback volumes, newsprint, and recycled paper. The results are trick-the-eye sculptures that represent modernity’s most fundamental changes. Memorials to the written and printed word, Chen’s strangely readable forms point up how we understand, package, and consume information in our technologically driven, data-obsessed, post-literate new millennium.

Chen’s most recent suite of sculptures features the heads of some of the world’s greatest classical composers. Knifed, machine sawed, and carefully sanded from books gathered from his own and other “found” libraries, Chen dutifully crafts each of his busts to resemble likenesses straight out of history books. The fact that he has learned to brilliantly transform his chosen material adds greatly to their uncanny effect. Rather than betraying their origins as mostly discarded paper products (the artist often salvages tomes from bookstores, publishing companies, and university libraries), his carved heads—with their noticeable grooves and striations—appear as if they’ve been chiseled from noble materials like hardwood, marble, or stone.

Chen’s sculptures activate an age-old audience reaction that can prosaically be termed “the whipsaw effect.” An artist who has become expert at making everyday stuff look new again, his representations of the familiar look conventional, but only at first glance. Take, for instance, Chen’s latest choice of subject matter. Titled simply after the names of giants of the Western musical canon, sculptures like “Bach,” “Beethoven,” “Brahms,” “Chopin,” and “Verdi” present their subjects in the form of classical statuary, but with an additional visual-rhetorical twist. Instead of being merely constructed from traditional materials or even their paper facsimiles, Chen’s busts are ultimately made up—to borrow a line from the equally canonical Hamlet—of “words, words, words.”

And therein lies the lasting strength of Long-bin Chen’s art—namely, that the Taiwanese artist doesn’t just make certain time-tested traditions look new again, he refurbishes their cultural currency. Riffing on academic sculpture, his classical-looking busts update past and present artistic traditions, while making the case for a renewed kind of cultural literacy: one capable of carrying the values of visual art—and books and music—far into the future. — Christian Viveros-Fauné.

臺灣旅美藝術家陳龍斌受費城地區知名SEI集團旗下West Collection邀請，創作「作曲家系列」雕塑一組12件，以其獨特「書雕」創作方式雕塑包括巴哈、貝多芬、蕭邦、布拉姆斯、海頓、韋瓦第…等12位世界音樂巨擘之頭像。West Collection策展部門為強化視覺藝術與音樂教育之相輔相成與靈活運用，特別打造內建各作曲家代表樂曲撥放器的雕像檯座，並與費城地區最具代表性的 Kimmel表演藝術中心合作，在喜愛表演藝術節目的觀眾人潮川流不息之劇院大廳展示「作曲家系列」，藉由長期展示計畫，開啟不同社群觀眾對現代雕塑形式及古典音樂欣賞的討論與興趣。本展自2月開展至今，已吸引至少上萬人次觀眾駐足欣賞，廣受好評，展覽將持續開放參觀至5月25日，歡迎有興趣的民眾前往欣賞。