Crossing Pain and Intimate Memories
I-Yen Chen
Gallery 4
Opening 07.08.19 6-8pm
Artist Talks 29.08.19 6-7pm
Struggle is not easy to be seen, unless it shows its marks on flesh.
What at first most entices, in the end brings you pain.
Since 2016, I have been working on the concept of the “metaphorical landscape,” using landscape as a carrier to investigate how human beings strive to shape their surroundings with their dreams and desires in order to find affinity with the world they inhabit. With the language they use and the image they create, humans construct their world view. So intricately are such “worlds” constructed that they reveal the mental activities of their creators. With this project, I shift from a focus on the external world of others to my own internal world.
“Crossing Pain and Intimate Memories” recreates and represents the various stages of one’s mentality during the process I think of as “passing through.” Borders and lines are not easily recognized or defined. Living in a contemporary society, we experience crossings of these lines more frequently than we may notice. Such crossings that seem enticing in the early stages often become barbed. But how could one’s struggle be acknowledged when there is no obvious wound? This project presents the subtleness of such struggle. None is accused as perpetrator, and yet many suffer. The audience are invited to enter a psychological landscape cautiously formed by the artist. The artist materializes the conceptual crossing into a physical action, through which perhaps memories of one’s own crossing may be awakened, float to the surface, and fall into the space itself to mingle with those of the artist.
Images
I-Yen Chen, A Heavenly Way, 2019, video (HD 1280 x720), 10m 00.
I-Yen Chen, A Heavenly Way, 2019, video (HD 1280 x720), 10m 00.
I-Yen Chen, Intimate Memo, 2019, projection image, installation dimension variable.