God Comes Down to Earth 10
Chen Yu-Lin
陳禹霖
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
inkjet print
Measurements
60 x 72 cm
Notes
Chen Yu-Lin’s family has lived in the same house in Yanshuei, one of Taiwan’s oldest cities, and once an important trading port, for three generations. His father is one of the custodians at the local temple, and preserving this aspect of folk culture and religious practice is immensely important to him. Yanshuei is home to an extraordinary annual event, classified as the third largest folk festival in the world — and the fifth most dangerous. The Beehive Fireworks Festival commemorates the god Guan Di’s success in vanquishing a cholera epidemic in the nineteenth century. According to legend, on the eve of the lantern festival in 1885, and in a state of despair over the plague that had ravished the town for two decades, the people begged Guan Di to deliver them. A local shaman summoned the god, who demanded to be greeted by fireworks. The god and his guide, General Zhou Cang (who together with Guan Di sometimes appears as a door god in Daoist temples), led a procession of the faithful through Yanshuei, letting off firecrackers in every district of the city until daybreak, ridding the town of pestilence. Chen’s dramatic black and white series of photographs, God Comes Down to Earth (2013), reveals the excitement of the Beehive Festival and other Taiwanese religious processions and rituals. Performers with elaborate, fearsome masks and head-dresses are surrounded by billowing smoke and shredded paper fragments from thousands of fireworks. In this photograph we see one of the ‘Guan Jiang Shou’ (Head police officers in the world of Dead), the two guardians of Buddhism’s Ksitigarbha, ‘General Zeng’ (Gain) and ‘General Sun’(Loss). General Zeng extends the lifespan of people who are doing good things; General Sun reduces the lifespan of people who are doing evil things. Because they are Buddhist guardians, with the spirit of Buddhist compassion, while they walk they scatter paper money in the air for lonely homeless ghosts, in order to prevent chaos in the living world.
Accession number
2015.040