Happiness Building
2012
multi-channel video．documentary photographs．audio files．discarded objects
Introduction
In 2012, Chen Chieh-jen rented a sheet-metal building located in New Taipei City that once served as a factory. He then organized a temporary community of people with a heterogeneous background to construct a film set in the form of a labyrinthine, three-story apartment building within the sheet-metal building. After shooting his films, Chen repurposed the structure as the projection venue for the same films, an exhibition venue for related installations, a performance space, and a public area for forums to suggest the concept of transformation. This new space presented an exteriority to post-neoliberal and post-global contemporary society, yet was physically located within it. Drawn into this exteriority, visitors with dissenting views, aside from deploying critical modalities, discussed how they might develop alternative social imaginaries and art production methods within the existing politico-economic structure, under biopolitical control, and with established art mechanisms.
The title for the project Happiness Building was inspired by Chen’s move with his family to a working class area near Xinfu Road (幸福路, trans. happiness road) in New Taipei City. The move was prompted by their inability to pay the mortgage on a unit in a government-built apartment complex on the site of Chen’s childhood home in Shuiwei, Xindian District, and the three-story apartment building constructed for Happiness Building refers to typical complexes of this type in Xindian District. For the video section of Happiness Building, Chen asked young, underemployed friends to write their impressions of their lives. He then strung these impressions together into a fictional narrative centered on the theme, “our lives have been a plight of global imprisonment and at-home exile.” Chen then separated the audio from the films and projected them in the repurposed apartment building set. He installed each audio part, which are monologues spoken by the same underemployed youths, in the venue that was originally the set where each scene was filmed. This result is that the visual, audio and scenic aspects of the films refer to and separate from one another in the space where they were created. When audience members step into this theater-like temporary externality, they become participants who need to recombine the visual and auditory elements, and in this scene, also seem to be playing the role of thinkers.
When the one-year project came to a close and the set was disassembled, the temporary exteriority and exhibition and performance venues disappeared. Chen then extended this work with a new phase of the project that would reorganize and reinterpret the original film footage, documentation of the production process, audio files, and discarded objects using alternative readings and perceptions.(1) Therefore, Happiness Building does not just present the plight of individuals limited by global imprisonment and at-home exile with a simulated apartment building, but also presents the issue of continuous flux and reconstruction with its own subsequent phase.
Notes
- The documentary archive for Happiness Building is extremely large due to the one-year duration of the project. Preparation of the materials for further use is still in progress.