Lecturer : Chen Chieh-jen︱Artist
Born in 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Chen Chieh-jen currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. Chen employed extra-institutional underground exhibitions and guerrilla-style art actions to challenge Taiwan's dominant political mechanisms during a period marked by the Cold War, anti-communist propaganda and martial law (1950 – 1987). After martial law ended, Chen ceased art activity for eight years. Returning to art in 1996, Chen started collaborating with local residents, unemployed laborers, day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth and social activists. They 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 was obscured by neo-liberalism, Chen embarked on a series of video projects in which he used strategies he calls “re-imagining, re-narrating, re-writing and re-connecting.”
Time : March 21, 2015, Saturday, 14: 30-17: 00
Venue : TFAM Auditorium (BF)
From Li Shih-ke to Multiple Dialectics in Art and Politics
Outline
Having achieved fame in New York for his mass-produced portraits of celebrities and images of commercial products, Andy Warhol established his well-known Factory art studio in 1963. The Factory later became a base for queer cultural production, which contributed to the dissolution of boundaries between high and low culture and had an undeniable influence in the history of modern and contemporary art. But shifting our focus away from the center of capitalist empire and onto the true state of global affairs, we realize that the history of modern and contemporary art is just a part of a broader history that has ignored the perceptions of deprived people living in other regions.
Taiwan’s Nationalist Government, under pressure from termination of U.S. foreign aid, established the island’s first export processing zone in 1966. Thereafter, countless youths from the countryside were funneled into these zones and stripped of their right to form their own perceptions, becoming cogs in a machine that afforded no opportunity to dream. Although Warhol, who suffered from debilitating illness as a child and was the son of a coal miner, famously stated (perhaps ironically) in a 1963 ARTnews interview, “I think everybody should be a machine,” he had never worked on an assembly line and probably never gave a thought to how those products on the supermarket shelves were manufactured. And even if he knew how, it was impossible for him to know how it felt for those workers on an assembly line to be deprived of their lives and perceptions—just as the LGBT community is still not accepted by mainstream society.
How those who are deprived should seek liberation or fight back is a question that only the victims can properly entertain. Using the logic of common people, artist Chen Chieh-jen discusses how the deprived might leverage impossible circumstances to write about their own perceptions and experiences, and responds to important political ideas and paradoxes in contemporary art.
About Lecture Series 2014 “(Art) After Conceptual Art”
Do you want to know the story of how a urinal became art? Did you know your home can become a museum? Everyone can be an artist – would you like to be one? These secrets are revealed in the lecture series “(Art) After Conceptual Art”...“(Art) After Conceptual Art” explores the major trends and forms of expression in avant-garde art since the 1960s. By examining the processes of specific contemporary art phenomena, the lecture series provides an organized introduction to the conceptual idioms arising from the recent rapid developments in contemporary art, serving as a reference for viewers to appreciate contemporary art.