The Los Angeles metropolitan, where I was an artist-in-residence for three months, challenged my idea of a city. It also made me rethink the meaning of arts in public spaces and redefine the relationships between me and the city and its residence.

During the residency, I reflected on being an artist-in-residence through my works. I wore a T-Shirt that says “funded by the Ministry of Culture” during the residency to explore my identity as an artist funded by public money. My studio was a renovated garage, so I opened the garage door every day. Doing so, I attempted to turn my studio into a theater to stage my everyday life made possible because of public money.

Attempting to describe the relationship between me and the city, I took videos of the window reflections every time I travel with the metro through Los Angeles. Later, I show the videos in L.A.’s two busiest metro stations and 18th Street Arts Center by projecting them on my palm.
To reflect and capture my relationships with people I met during the 90-day-residency, I recorded every personal interaction and published it on social media every day. The people I encountered every day during the residency are also represented as strings which I stitched onto the coat “The folds of memory” made by designer He Shih Yun. In the end, the coat is transformed into a house of Ersilia -- a city described in Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities,” the accumulated strings also formed a surface allowing projections. The video “circle of relationships,” a work I made together with L.A. artist Sean Berrie, is our attempt to describe the relationships and conditions of a nomadic artist. Combining the works mentioned above: the social media entries, the coat full of strings, and the video, they become an installation capable of traveling and adopting into different spaces, just like the nomadic artists-in-residency.

L.A. has forced me to reflect on my limited imagination of how a city looks like. Through the conversation with other artists, I also learned the meaning of cultural exchange and the positive aspect of the multicultural environment.

Further reading：The Blurry Line of Public and Private in the Life of I-Chen Lai
https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/the-blurry-line-of-public-and-private-in-the-life-of-i-chen-lai