Eight Drunken Immortals
Shyu Ruey-Shiann
徐瑞憲
Production date
2012
Object Detail
Media
metal, wheels, wires, ink, motors, transformers, sensors
Measurements
installed 450 x 480 x 240 cm
Notes
Shyu makes his works with his own hands: the director of the Bronx Museum, where One Kind of Behaviour was shown in 2014, describes him as an artist who rescues the tradition of mechanical work in a digital age. His machines convey emotional states and a sense of awe – both the artist’s awe in response to the natural world, and then the awe one experiences at the sheer vitality of his inventions. In their sense of the absurd, these works recall the machines of pioneering Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) whose self-destroying sculpture Homage to New York (1968) was a highlight of kinetic art in the 1960s. Eight Drunken Immortals (2012), for instance, is a wonderfully funny and joyful invention. Eight small, busy robots zoom erratically about the floor on shopping trolley wheels, inspired by the Daoist story of the rambunctious immortals who defeated their enemies in unarmed combat whilst staggering about as if drunk. As they zigzag around, the robots ‘draw’ with ink on sheets of paper in a parody of the refined art of calligraphy. There is, however, also a tradition of drunken calligraphy in China: one of the great calligraphers and poets of the Tang Dynasty, Zhang Xu, was reputed to use his hair as a brush when he was intoxicated, producing calligraphy of a quality he could never replicate when sober. He was known as one of the ‘Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup’ — the name ‘Immortals’ is ironic here — a group of Tang Dynasty scholars notorious for their alcohol consumption. Shyu began this work while still a student in France, collecting assorted wheels and other mechanical detritus and beginning to experiment with ways to create mechanical ‘creatures’; he knew from the very beginning that he ultimately wanted his ‘Immortals’ to spurt ink and ‘draw’, but he had to wait fifteen years for technology to catch up to his ambitious plan.
Accession number
2013.116