Artists
Photo Credit: NIU Chun-Chiang
CHEN, Wan-Jen
CHEN, Wan-Jen
| Location | USA / New York, NY |
|---|---|
| Residency | International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) |
| Year of the Grant | 2012 |
| Work | I Have Come to a Place Where Depression Caught Me out of the Blue |
| Personal Website | CHEN, Wan-Jen's Personal Website |
Artist Statement:
Our bodies are often symbolized, flattened, and de-contextualized in the digital space. This artificial quality is recognized and emphasized in my work. I often think about how to utilize this recurrence and adaptation of images to ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ into reality. My work illustrates the unlimited extension as well as circulation of time and space, and furthermore aims to reconstruct and stitch together the mundane moments in our daily lives. It borrows other people’s bodies and spatial experiences and re-contextualizes them into the cold, repetitive, and machine-like moving objects. Day-to-day attention and critiques are applied into my pieces, allowing the shown images to slip in-and-out between reality and imagination. In my work, the closed circuits of spatial movements are metaphors for social mechanisms, allowing each action to transform into pure ritual. It hangs and exists in captivity, in the collective senses of nothingness and emptiness.
New York City is a place that carries the people’s dreams and passions. It is always so lively and filled with vigor. ISCP gathers together people in the arts field all over the world – people of various experiences and cultural backgrounds. What I gained the most from being a resident artist in NYC, was meeting all these different artists. We shared not only music, but also talked about cultures in our home countries and got to know each other’s works.
At the same time, the limited resources challenged everyone’s ability in being mobile and adaptive in a foreign culture. Foreign encounters and cultural shocks in an unfamiliar place affected my normal daily functions and working train-of-thought. I found new clues in making arts and attempted to think outside the limitation that I set for myself. For instance, when processing images, I began to think past the conditions of the existing spaces and created a ground in which images/videos and space could converse. This new development naturally set out a new stage in my art career, a starting point for experimentation in video installation.