Chen Chieh-jen
Born in 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, and graduated from a vocational high school for the arts. Currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan.
While Chen’s primary media is video installation, in his production process, he has consistently experimented with community formation, integrating other participants with his film crew. This has added an activist quality directed at re-envisioning society in his creative process.
During Taiwan’s martial law period (1949—1987), a time marked by the Cold War and anti-communist propaganda, Chen employed extra-institutional underground exhibitions and guerrilla-style art actions to challenge dominant political mechanisms. After martial law ended, due to difficulties produced by an inability to understand or recognize history and reality, Chen gradually ceased making art, which lasted for eight years. During this period he re-examined his family history and experiences growing up, and reflected on the trajectory of Taiwan’s modern history. The environment of his youth was filled with places of discipline, governance and illegitimacy, such as military courts, munitions factories, industrial areas, and illegal shanty towns.
This situation stemmed from Taiwan’s long history of subjugation, from Japanese colonization (1895—1945) to the Cold War/anti-communist/martial law mechanisms jointly created by the Kuomintang and United States in the post-World War II period. It was during this time that Taiwan joined the system of capitalist and international division of labor, becoming an export-oriented, lower-end economy reliant on labor intensive, high polluting industries. After martial law ended in 1987, Taiwan was again remade, this time as a neoliberalist society.
Returning to art in 1996, Chen started collaborating with local residents, unemployed laborers, day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth and social activists. He formed a temporary community and a filmmaking team with those marginalized by society, especially social activists and movie industry workers. They learned from each other, occupied factories owned by capitalists, slipped into areas cordoned off by the law, and utilized discarded materials to build sets for his video productions. In order to visualize contemporary reality and a people’s history that has been obscured by neoliberalism, Chen embarked on a number of video projects in which he used strategies he calls “re-imagining, re-narrating, re-writing and re-connecting,” to further his goal of generating dissent, starting a second wave movement and producing contemporary lo-deh sao.
Starting in 2010, Chen began actively focusing on the fact that many people around the world have been reduced to working temporary jobs and lost sense of existence due to and lost sense of existence due to the corporatocracy’s pervasive control technology. Chen calls this universal situation “global imprisonment” or “at-home exile.” Based on these ruminations, Chen has considered how pervasive control technology can be qualitatively changed by transforming desire with alternative forms of desire and detoxifying illusion with māyā.
Although Chen addresses political and economic issues in his work, he believes that art should not only criticize and reveal political, economic, and perceptual manipulation, but also promote the creation of experimental communities and mutual learning, and so he incorporates these pursuits into the process of producing his videos. Using poetic, dialectical imagery, Chen generates a different perceptual and political space from difficult to articulate bodily experiences and memories, individuals in nebulous states of spiritual disintegration, and various indistinct or marginalized areas within society. He furthermore invites viewers from different historical, cultural, and social contexts and with different life experiences to deploy their imaginations within the narrative gap that he creates by linking disparate events and historical horizons, or with concise dialogs or completely silent, slow-motion video. As the audience watches Chen’s videos, imaginings evoked by these gaps help establish a forum for multiple dialogs and multiple dialectics.
He has held solo exhibitions at the Vienna Secession, the Art Sonje Center in Seoul; the Mudam Luxembourg; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; REDCAT art center in Los Angeles; the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Asia Society in New York; and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Group exhibitions include: the Venice Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, Lyon Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Gothenburg Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Moscow Biennial, New Orleans Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Guangzhou Triennial, Fukuoka Triennial, and the Asia Pacific Triennial. Chen has also participated in photography festivals in Arles, Spain and Lisbon; film programs of various international art institutes include: Tate Modern, Mori Art Museum, Centre Pompidou and dOCUMENTA 13.
