with evocations of Bruno Schulz’s writing by Po-Chih HUANG and Witkacy’s oeuvre by curator Corinne Diserens
November 6, 2016 15:00 at TFAM

Po-Chih Huang’s diverse artistic practice revolves around the circumstances and history of his family, which enable him to engage in issues like agriculture, manufacturing, production, consumption, etc. Since 2013, exhibitions of his continuous art project Five Hundred Lemon Trees have been transformed into a crowdfunding platform allowing the appropriation of artistic resources for developing an agricultural brand, activating fallow farmland, and growing lemon trees for lemon liqueur. The project has connected his family members, local farmers, and consumers to make a new social relationship possible. The practice ultimately leads to the artist’s investigations with regard to personal life, so he starts to write stories about each individual involved in the project. Moreover, by establishing an intertwining, reciprocal, and symbiotic system made up of “planting, researching, writing, brewing, and bartending,” the project has been translated into art, liqueur, and a flexible and adaptable organism.

Along with reciting, reading, oral presentation, and lemon liqueur tasting, Huang will discuss how his writing is inspired and nurtured by the eccentric and poetic works of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz. Drawing inspiration from Schulz’s description of his own father, the artist uses his engagement with writing and the Five Hundred Lemon Trees project to see his father from an alternative perspective, restart the father-son dialogue, and also the conversation with his family history.

Huang’s reading will be followed by an historical evocation by curator Corinne Diserens of the oeuvre of Polish artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), known as Witkacy, and his artistic relationship with Bruno Schulz.

My inventiveness, my form, or my writer’s “grimace” leans, just like yours toward aberration, persiflage, buffoonery, and self-irony. Who, better than you, could understand me!
Letter from B.S. to S.I.W., April 12, 1934

I began to feel—to put it poetically—rising from the depths of my being the satanic fumes coming from the evaporating cinnamon grounds that had accumulated there during the night. Once the pressure of everyday chores had vanished, something uncanny burst forth from my spiritual crevices, poisoned by that monstrous drug: Schulzean cinnamon.
Bruno Schulz’s Literary Work by S. I. W. (1935)