Yang Mao-lin once said, “I have always been fond of comics, cartoons and heroes in movies. They are all about saving the Earth and keeping the peace of the universe and the world. In a certain way, they are like devas and buddhas to children, selflessly sacrificing themselves and protecting humanity.” At the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, this renowned Taiwanese artist’s latest show begins with a sudden divergence from this orientation, focusing instead on grotesquely comic deep-sea predators as well as indigenous Taiwanese flora and fauna. The show ultimately returns, however, to the further examination of the heroic and redemptive in the hybrid classical/pop form for which the artist has become quite well-known.

In the exhibition booklet for the show, the curator of Rescues in Time, Gong Jow-jiun (a professor at the Tainan National University of the Arts), points out that although Yang established himself by exploring themes of benevolent immortals and heroes, for the past several years he has taken a detour from political, historical and social art to focus a bit more on himself, his own life and his own motives. The metaphor he initially preferred for this new avenue was deep sea predators. The first series under his theme of The Quest for Mandala is called Wanderers of the Abyssal Darkness.

It is suggested by Gong that the deep-sea fish represent the reclusiveness of the artist. OK, but there is definitely more that can be gleaned from these fish as metaphors. Super-cold temperatures, extreme pressure and near-total darkness provided the environment for the evolution of truly horrific but also goofy looking creatures with glowing bioluminescent lures protruding from their skulls, transparent domed head coverings protecting soft and sensitive eyes and huge mouths with razor sharp inward pointing teeth – the mouths of some deep-sea Anglerfish are often larger than the rest of their body mass.

The sculptured fish, as well as the painted ones, can become caricatures of human life at its most basic or crude: human life stripped of art, higher purpose and/or ideology. These fish are Schopenhauer’s pessimism writ large, implying, perhaps, that underlying ideology, art and purpose, and other things one might claim to live for, everything serves the need for survival. The fish can become idols of biological existence to challenge the optimism of buddhas and devas.

Yang does not abandon his heroes completely in this stage of his Mandala series. It is not surprising that Yang would also like The Wizard of Oz so much. Dorothy is, after all, a type of deva or hero, chosen by the gods for a higher purpose. She inadvertently kills the Wicked Witch of the East and is heralded for freeing the Munchkins from the witch’s bondage. Although she claims non-involvement in the assassination of the evil witch, the author of the tale (L. Frank Baum) mentions in the text that Dorothy was “the means” of the witch’s destruction, implying that Dorothy was an agent of moral activism who obediently followed the Hand of Providence. L. Frank Baum was, by the way, influenced by theories of spiritual development propounded by Madame Blavatsky and this is reflected in the plot of his story.

These fish have huge, bulbous eyes to capture what light might be available at extreme depths, and some have a type of transparent dome on their heads, so some of these fish become perfect absurdist vehicles for Dorothy and her chums to use as vessels. We can sometimes see them through the eyes or domes. To be riding these fish in this manner implies, of course, that Dorothy and her crew have endowed these creatures with a higher purpose. Dorothy wants to go home. Her companions are certain they are deficient in human qualities that help us rise to a higher level of humanity. They are all searching for something they believe they are missing and ought to have. They have hijacked these fish, the way our higher cognitive functions hijacked our bodies and gave them additional purposes sometimes at war with the body.

Are these just fish guided by empty dreams or are they really on their way to an enriched and spiritual new type of life through Dorothy’s captainship? How much can a hungry Anglerfish aspire to, guided by heroes? Maybe Dorothy and her friends are on a clandestine mission which will help lift the entire world. Their journey may prove there really is meaningful stuff to do after you fill your belly and one really should try to live ethically in the world. Working toward the end of suffering and toward the survival of the planet seems to be a good start implied by the next part of the exhibit.

After the Abyssal Depths we progress into The Lasting Spring. Here Yang explores wood sculpture and painting on wood slabs and round table-tops so that the painting process has to follow the texture and quality of the wood, working around natural flaws or marks. I am almost tempted to say that Yang emerges from the abyssal depths and its concept of nature as a survival of the most aggressive to a state of tranquility in nature using animals indigenous to Taiwan such as the crow, clouded leopard, Asian black bear, Eastern grass owl and pheasant, along with various types of lilies from the island. In the backgrounds one often sees ships or other vehicles of war from nations that invaded Taiwan during its long colonial history.

In the final gallery of the exhibit there is a collaboration between the WhiteDeer Animation Studios and sound artist Chen Yu-jung to create an immersive magical forest and deep-sea sanctuary where heroes and antagonists are able to comingle. We see, for instance, a Stormtrooper Deva on a Central Formosan Toad which can be either a statement about technologically advanced foreign entities coming to Formosa/Taiwan in the past for economic domination or someone conquering his lower, animal nature (which we saw in the Abyssal Depths) to rise higher toward spiritual bliss. There is another Stormtrooper who rides a reptilian creature, perhaps indicating the way to true enlightenment is to accept and live with the animal nature while finding ways to rise in one’s humanity from it.

We are kind to offer children, through superheroes, a sense of underlying justice in the world, shielding them from suffering the continuous anxiety of looking at how dire and cruel the current situation of the world really is. As for us adults, the devas and buddhas have become weak and powerless in the world as we watch a steady and prolonged moral decline due to a lack of sincere purpose and humane standards which we should expect each other, and especially our “leaders”, to live for.

The conditions that require our comic book heroes would be ameliorated considerably if houses could drop on all who contribute to evil, but then we might all get crushed. Perhaps Yang realizes we need a radical transformation of our devas and buddhas, we need to see them differently, as he presents them differently.

Instead of praying to them, asking them for what they cannot do, we must look to them as signs of hope for our own heroic development, so that we become the heroes who influence those around us, and we emerge from the abyssal depths into the serenity of a lasting spring individually and as a species. We have gods and devas and buddhas but we do not use them as standards by which to push each other continuously toward goodness and peacefulness.