Text/Photos by Chen Chi-Hsiang. Venue: Taipei Jinglv Gallery. Dates: 2016.11.12-12.4. Guillaume Hebert graduated from the Caen School of Fine Arts in Normandy, France, and is a French young photographic artist who has lived in Taiwan for many years. Through a unique French or Western perspective and distance, he expresses the atmosphere of his foreign land, scanning what he sees, knows, feels, and observes in daily Taiwanese life. He intends to capture signs of Taiwanese social life situations and natural landscapes (seascapes and scenery) with his lens, using photography as a cultural catalyst to explore and articulate his cultural and visual viewpoints. His works possess a strong sense of strangeness and captivating imagery. Whether in form, color, or composition, his images exhibit a unique Western painterly beauty, along with a postmodern retro-photography quality resulting from post-production filter-like color processing. This method unifies his forms and hues, creating a poetic photographic painting style.

The Coffee Nap series reflects what Hebert saw and felt while living in Taipei’s urban coffee shops. The artist explains: “These sleeping portraits, starting in June 2015 in Taipei, are all ordinary city dwellers. They chat, wait, read, or kill time playing handheld games in cafes...” He continues, “Exhausted bodies cannot resist the hypnotic music in the cafes; finally, heads drop one by one onto tables, as relaxed and inert bodies no longer care about their surroundings” (Note). These portraits without visible faces resemble everyday theatrical performances of Taipei people’s lives and the artist’s strange urban scenery.

For a Frenchman, napping on a table is almost unimaginable; sleeping in public spaces is considered indecent, even uncivilized. However, this is not an issue for Taiwanese people. Under subtropical climates, people have a habit of resting after lunch, a custom cultivated since childhood. Remembering primary and secondary school, students were punished if they did not nap on their desks. Today, especially in cafes where air conditioning is available, it is a good opportunity to relax and take a short nap, so coffee naps are not surprising. Taiwanese seem to have blurred boundaries between public and private living spaces, which is normal for people’s lives but becomes a strange urban spectacle in Western eyes.

The Coffee Nap series seems to feature mostly young groups, representing young Taiwanese students facing academic pressure and rote learning, leading to physical and mental exhaustion and drowsiness. Eating becomes an outlet for the whole society’s physical and mental liberation. These faceless portraits are somewhat surreal. Exhausted bodies lie softly on crossed arms or directly on books on the table, wandering in sweet dreams. Aside from shiny black hair and colorful clothing, still-life items in front include a cup of coffee (identifiable by the cup which cafe), a book, handouts, mobile phones, glasses, and other accessories. Full of modern painting color-plane structures, between realism and abstraction, imagination and metaphor, dreaminess and poetry, they reflect Taipei’s urban social context and reveal the artist’s introspective cultural context.

From Guillaume Hebert’s website