Chen chieh jen biography of michael

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. He formed collaborative filming teams and temporary communities with excluded individuals, social activists, and filmmakers. Chen Chieh-Jen is a Taiwanese contemporary artist who emerged during the period of martial law in the s.

Chen Chieh-jen Born in in Taoyuan, Taiwan, and graduated from a vocational high school for the arts. Through actions like occupying capitalist-owned factories, he infiltrates legal gray zones. 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.

He seeks to unlock alternative political and aesthetic imaginations through poetic and dialectic images derived from unspeakable bodily experiences and memories, subtle states of being amidst spiritual fragmentation, and various ambiguous border zones in social spaces. He creates striking sequences of near abstract black and white images, but at the same time his works are moving depictions of the lives of real people: he uses the local and the individual to show us the often harsh realities of global economics.

When Neptune Jade set sail from England dock workers in Vancouver, Yokohama and Kobe all refused to let the ship dock and unload its cargo. Neptune Jade stands as a significant event in the struggle of the dock workers and has become a model of their international solidarity. Factory and Bade Area are documentaries of non-events in northern Taiwan, where textile factories and workers have been abandoned after capital shifted to China and other low-cost regions.

While Chen Chieh-Jen primarily addresses political and economic issues, he believes that the significance of art lies not only in revealing and criticizing the manipulative strategies employed by political and economic mechanisms, but also in the experimentation of new social relationships and mutual learning throughout his filming process.

Support Liverpool Biennial You make amazing things happen! 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. He constructs fictional scenarios using discarded materials and proposes alternative filming projects that shed light on obscured histories of people and contemporary reality under neoliberalism.

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. Employing guerrilla-style performance art and organizing exhibitions outside the official system, he disrupted the martial law regime.

In Liverpool dockers protesting at the casualisation of labour refused to cross the picket line and were sacked by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company. After martial law ended in , Taiwan was again remade, this time as a neoliberalist society. You make amazing things happen! Donate now to help support community projects and to keep our programme free for all.

Chen chieh jen biography of michael: For his exhibition at REDCAT,

Like the photographs, these slow, silent films portray the cruelty and void imposed on the workers and their architectural habitats; they suggest the aftermath of a long-drawn-out war. In the s, Chen adapted a series of historic photographs of torture and war by digitally replacing the victims, the torturers and the onlookers in the scenes with images of himself.

Toggle main menu. 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. The ship eventually sailed to Taiwan where it was dismantled and sold. He formed a temporary community and a filmmaking team with those marginalized by society, especially social activists and movie industry workers.

Chieh-Jen Chen Biography – Chieh-Jen Chen on artnet

He resumed his artistic practice in and began collaborations with with local populations, unemployed workers, temporary workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth, and social activists. This has added an activist quality directed at re-envisioning society in his creative process. Using photography and film, Chen creates a space in which standard narratives are deconstructed and the subjectivity of the viewed can be reestablished.

Returning to art in , Chen started collaborating with local residents, unemployed laborers, day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth and social activists.