God Comes Down to Earth 12
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. Burning incense to communicate with the god, the old man in this photograph stares at its statue. Chen Yu-Lin says: I know he is not praying for himself but for his children and grandchildren, in the hope that all their problems in life can be solved with the god’s help. In traditional Taiwanese patriarchal society, this is the only time you see men frankly face their fragility and helplessness - in front of God.
Accession number
2015.042