The works of Che-wei Chen often use parables to cross different kinds of boundaries, interweaving reality and fiction, jumping in time and space and creating plots and scenarios with images, sounds, texts and objects. Following the four-channel video work I’m with You in Rockland in “HOWL in Howl Space” featuring four former inmates of mental asylums in 2013, he has developed the project “Oblivion” about the asylum “Yang-Shen-Yuan” to be presented at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Founded in the 1930s, “Yang-Shen-Yuan” was the first state asylum to house, institutionalize and treat mental patients during the Japanese rule in Taiwan. Using it as a prelude, the artist examines the problems that cannot be overlooked in the development of modernist society and the people that are naturally and unjustly excluded – mental patients. Drawing on their situation, he develops the works Notes on Oblivion, Body Not Mine and Dual Portraits to explore forgotten personal memories and collective consciousness, and highlight the hidden power and politics in the system in different contexts such as history, society, space and the body.
About Che-wei Chen
Born in Yilan in 1986, Che-wei Chen now lives and works in Taipei. In 2011, he graduated from the School of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts with an M.F.A. He was shortlisted in the 2014 Taipei Arts Awards and his exhibition application was accepted by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2015. In 2013, he was selected by the Cloud Gate Dance Foundation’s Wanderer Project and went to Istanbul in Turkey. From 2011 to 2016, he took part in residency programs in Melbourne, Berlin and Busan.
About the Artworks
Notes on Oblivion recreates a former mental institution that has been demolished. The camera wanders like a ghost across the area and the buildings. Another video shows the present site – the Jiufu-Haihua community, whose spatial features are a familiar sight. Using images and narrative, and shifting between the details of street scenes and the model, this work combines historical facts, field investigation and the artist’s interpretation and imagination and wanders between history, memory and dreams.
There are many levels of absence in this work, including the narrator’s face, places that no longer exist, residents’ silence on the psychiatric institution, and finally, the absence in history, since the mental patients were unjustly excluded in the process of modernization. The artist refers to the absence in the narrative, starting many sentences with the words “You remember…”, as if everyone remembers it all. Memory is reconstructed upon what is forgotten, by interweaving documentation, writing and fabrication, and mixing fiction and reality.
Taking several kinds of mental illnesses and the symptoms described from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Body Not Mine reinterprets them to match the so-called system, framework or black box, which helps to identity mental disorders and distinguish between normal and abnormal. This work attempts to reveal the structure of mental health care, such as the relationship between the body, power and politics. It examines the criteria and questions the boundaries of madness, as well as who has control over our body.
After the mental patient has been diagnosed, his body will be analyzed and dissected as a text. His body seems to be separated from his feelings in his consciousness. The treatment ranged from institutionalization and segregation in the early days to treatments like lobotomy and electroconvulsive therapy. Since the invention of psychiatric drugs after the 1950s, these treatments have been replaced by long-term medication and injection. With the patient suffering from traumatic treatment and social stigma, who has dominion over the body of the mental patient? Who controls our bodies? Is it the best solution to immunize the body and eliminate the self?
By confronting and revisiting images and narratives, Dual Portraits presents the image of psychiatric patients within the social framework and the ambivalent structure behind it. The duality is formed by images and narrative by rearranging the relationship between the visual and textual elements. The relationship could be between singular and plural, part and whole, individual and group.
The images show how the public and the media see psychiatric patients, and how the memory fades and eventually disappears. On the narrative level, this work adapts newspaper reports about the deaths of mental patients and uses the first person to make them come alive and look back on and reveal their experiences. By presenting the real collective image of psychiatric patients, it explores the stigma, prejudice and violence that they suffer.