Lin & Lin Gallery is presenting Her and Her Children – Introduction and Prologue, a solo exhibition by Chen Chieh-Jen, from September 16 to November 25, 2023. The exhibition will include the artist’s most recent video works In a World Losing Multiple Worlds I (2022) and Worn Away (2022 – 2023), as well as still photography and sketches, from the series Her and Her Children.
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In light of the neocolonial caste system produced by this reality, Chen has been developing his project Her and Her Children since he started working on the video Notes on the Twelve Karmas at the turn of the last century. Throughout the project, he sets forth perceptual thinking that entertains the possibility of rebuilding subjectivity and society for the multitudes that have been discarded by ever accelerating mechanisms of seemingly transparent yet more stringent control. Discussing these themes from different perspectives in each video, Chen makes them either viewable as independent works, or as part of a larger narrative.
The title In a World Losing Multiple Worlds I suggests that there is no escape from the world in which we are forced to live. In the video, a solitary person stands in a nighttime wilderness, and is soaked by a driving rain suggesting a deluge of information. Chen portrays this plight of contemporary individuals as a juxtaposition between a calm demeanor and a continually shifting onslaught of information. In Worn Away, Chen takes humanity’s entrance into a new Dark Age as the starting point of his narrative. An unemployed individual who cannot apply for credit arrives at the Transit Area after he has no choice but to apply for the empire’s Optimization of Biological Function Assistance Program. While waiting to become some disposable subject of a human experiment, he gradually learns from other apparently useless and discarded people that it is still possible to rebuild his subjectivity even though he is faced with a seemingly impossible situation.
