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Chen Chieh-jen

Conceptual Framework: World

The nation and culture of Taiwan receives little public recognition due to its renegade provincial standing with China and hence with the USA and the West. As a beneficiary of the Asian boom and its own 'economic miracle', Taiwan has undergone exceedingly rapid economic modernisation. In this post-industrial society, where urbanisation, commercialism and westernisation co-exist with local practices and beliefs, the focus of identity is now on the self, rather than the nation. As a cheap wage country, Taiwan was one of the main centres of the textile industry in the 1960s. Beginning in 1990, however, the intensive production industry migrated to countries with even lower production costs, and many Taiwanese became unemployed. As a result many people who had worked in Taiwan’s factories were suddenly without jobs and their identities as productive members of their communities disappeared, as they seemed powerless to fight against nation-wide changes.

Conceptual Framework: Artist

Chen Chieh-jen was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1960 and is one of Taiwan’s leading contemporary artists. From the 80s to the early 90s, before and after the lifting of martial law (1987) in Taiwan, he was active in performance art. Chen Chieh-jen has become an important international artist through representation in the Taipei Biennial, Sao Paulo Biennial, Venice Biennale, the Biennale de Lyon and the Kwangju Biennale. His films and installations juxtapose different time and spaces and use soundless images to explore issues such as colonialism, globalisation and their impact on peripheral regions, such as Taiwan and on the Taiwanese people.

Conceptual Framework: Artwork
Critical Analysis using the Cultural Frame:

Factory, 2003
Single-channel video installation, without sound

In ‘Factory’, 2003, Chen Chieh-jen offers a silent homage to those discarded by the wake of economic advancement. Beautifully staged sequences set amongst forgotten architecture are entwined with borrowed historical footage to offer a visual sequence that evokes collective memory and personal loss. “Factory” is the videotaped testimony of women who for many decades worked in one Chinese factory and, shortly before retirement, were sacked and the factory closed only so that the owner would not need to pay their pensions. The women, thanks to Chen Chieh-jen, were able to return to their jobs, and relate their story, without words, to the camera. There is a clear narrative to the film: the workers entered the factory as young girls, they return as old women, clean it and get back to work. The film comments on post-industrial decay, conditions in sweatshops, a meditation on the passing of time. But mostly the film recognizes the participants in the drama as people whose identities were stolen. "On the surface, it's to do with globalisation Factories are moveable but employees aren't," said the artist. "The deeper part of the message is to show the human factor that stayed. There are certain things that are not changeable."

Artmaking Practice: Ideas

In the haunting film "The Factory," the idea was for former female garment workers to return to an abandoned garment factory seven years after its closure and perform their former tasks. The carefully staged sequences were interwoven with footage of a time when the factory was helping to drive Taiwan's economy, thus emphasizing both personal and collective loss. In “Factory” the artist is critical of a future that reduces the progress of civilization to multi-national economic expansion, intense competition and technological advancement, leaving out the human element. It is a reflection on the impact of globalisation and the social displacement it can cause. He uses video to produce emotionally stark and desolate scenes of human beings in danger of invisibility, of entirely losing their identity, caught up in the event of the closure of the factory and being powerless to stop it. Chen Chieh-jen once again gives the women of this factory a means to regain their lost identities through the silent reenactment of their story. Chen Chieh-jen bases his sense of beauty on silence and absence somehow conveying the shape of something human and significant through the holes and shadows in this work producing a profoundly moving and very beautiful film.

Artmaking Practice: Actions

In 2003 Chen Chieh-jen invited a number of textile workers to the previously closed Lien Fu textile factory, where they had worked for over two decades, to shoot a documentary. The abandoned factory presented itself like a "relic" of the past: many objects were still there, such as calendars, newspapers, punch clocks, tools and banners, megaphones and loudspeakers from the workers' protest against the closure. What was missing was replaced, and the workers agreed to take up their work again for the film. The camera concentrates on their body language while working, on simple actions and the atmosphere of the space. Several fragmentary sequences from the time of the protest against the closure of the factory were edited in. In keeping with the women's wish not to speak, the film was shot without sound. Chen Chieh-jen takes a phenomenon of globalisation and translates the transformation of the textile industry in Asia into a highly professionally made 35mm film.

Conceptual Framework: Audience

The artist says that as the audience ‘listens’ to the silent video images, he wants them to hear continuous whispers, or a multiplicity of voices. These voices tell the histories the artist is much concerned about. He sees these as the histories often excluded by the mainstream, the histories outside the accepted history.

The film is slow in pace with soft textures and a blue- toned colour scheme. The artist expects the audience to take a meditative approach submitting to the film’s soft, slow, silence so that it becomes hypnotic and deeply poignant - one scene in particular, showing an old woman, eyes weak from years of sewing, struggling to thread a needle, was extremely powerful, and in some ways seemed to capture some essential truth about the human condition and, indeed, life: after struggling, in close up, for at least two excruciating minutes, she threads the needle and continues sewing.

Resource Websites

www.ok-centrum.at

Images

www.universes-in-universe.de

Background Information

Chen Chieh-jen
(1960, Taoyuan, Taiwan). Vive y trabaja en Taipei, Taiwan? PREMIOS
2000
The Special Prize, Kwangju Biennale 2000, Kwangju, South Korea? EXPOSICIONES INDIVIDUALES
2005
Chen Chieh-jen, La Fábrica Galería, Madrid
2004
Lingchi-Echoes of a Historical Photograph, Claudio Poleschi Arte Contemporanea, Lucca
Chen Chieh-jen, Galerie Alain le Gaillard, Paris
Factory, IT Park Gallery, Taipei
2003
Lingchi-Echoes of a Historical Photograph, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
2002
Lingchi-Echoes of a Historical Photograph, an abandoned factory, Taoyuan
2001
Chen Chieh-jen, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris
1998
Revolt in the Soul & Body II, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei
1997
Revolt in the Soul & Body I, Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei

SELECCIÓN DE EXPOSICIONES COLECTIVAS

2005
Parallel Realities-Asian Art Now, The 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2005, Fukuoka
This Storm is What We Call Progress, Arnolfini, Bristol
Variation Xandu, Museum of contemporary Art, Taipei
The Agony and the Ecstasy, FACT( Foundation for Art & Creative Technology), Liverpool
Slow Rushes for Auckland, Artspace, Auckland
The experience of art, 51th Biennale di Venezia, Padiglione Italia, Venice
Lisboa Photo 2005, Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes, Lisbon2004
Do You Believe in Reality?, 2004 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei
Techniques of the Visible, 2004 Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai
New Zealand Community Trust Art & Industry Urban Arts Biennial 04, Christchurch
Slow Rushes- Takes on the Documentary Sensibility in Moving Images from Around Asia and the Pacific, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania
Ruins and Civilization, Eslite Vision Art Space, Taipei
Histories: Eyelids and Lips, Photo Espan¹a 2004, Antigua Fábrica de Tabacos, Madrid
New Identity Part. 5-Tracing Self, Mitsubishi-Jisho ARTIUM, Fukuoka
The human condition, museum d'Historia de la Ciutat, Barcelona
The Era of Contention- Taiwanese Visual Culture, Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York
Spellbound Aura, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei 2003
2003 City_net Asia, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
Shifting Time/ Space, Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zürich
A Strange Heaven-Contemporary Chinese Photography, Rudolfinum Museum, Prague
Invisible City, The Vancouver International Center for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver2002
Great Theatre of the World, 2002 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei
FIAC 2002, Galerie Alain le Gaillard, Paris
The Realm of Illusion, Main-Trend Art Space, Taipei
Translated Acts, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City
The Rebelling Body, Art Moscow, Central House of Artist, Moscow2001
Floating Chimeras- Contemporary Asian Art, Edsvik konst och kultur, Sollentuna, Sweden
From Iconoclasm to Neo-Iconolatry, Cherng Piin Gallery, Taipei
Translated Acts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Queens Museum of Art, New York2000
Le soleil se lève à l’Est, Hanlim Museum, Seoul
The 31st Rencontres Internationale de la Photographie, Abbaye de Montmajour, Arles
The Mind on the Edge (of the New Centres), Photo Espan¹a 2000, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid
New Identity 4-Digital Edge, Mitsubishi-Jisho ARTIUM, Fukuoka
Sharing Exoticisms, 5th Biennale de Lyon Contemporary Art, Halle Tony Garnier, Lyon
Man & Space- Art & Human Rights, Kwangju Biennale 2000, Kwangju, South Korea1999
International Photography Biennale, Centro de la Imagen, México City
Close to Open, 48th Biennale di Venezia-Taiwan Pavilion, Venice 1998
Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes, XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo
Site of Desire, 1998 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei 1996
The Quest for Identity-Sexuality and Power, 1996 Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei? FESTIVALES DE CINE 2005
Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI), Buenos Aires 2004
2004 Taiwan Documentary International Festival, Taipei
The 48th London Film Festival: Experimental Short Films, London
2004 Vancouver International Film Festival: Experimental Short Films, Vancouver
Image Forum Festival 2004-Experimental Film and Video, Image Forum, Tokyo 2003
Vidéoart et Cinéma Expérimental de Chine Populaire et de Taiwan, Light Cone, Paris BIBLIOGRAFÍA 2004
Brandon Taylor, Art Today, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2004, pp. 192-193
Brandon Taylor, Collage - Practice and Theory in Modern Art, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2004
2002 Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, Laurence King Publishing Ltd (UK) & Abrams and Prentice Hall (USA), 2002, p. 488
2000 Apinan Poshyananda et. al. Fresh Cream, Phaidon Press Limited, UK & USA, 2000, pp. 190-195