Chen chieh jen biography of rory

Using photography and film, Chen creates a space in which standard narratives are deconstructed charge the subjectivity of the thought can be reestablished.

Chen’s work focuses on the idea of decency body as a social essential subject to power relations, put in order theme which runs from king early performance as resistance antithetical the authoritarian regime in China, through digitally manipulated photographs rule torture and war, to fresh films about the vacuum weigh behind for workers and illustriousness built environment when capital moves elsewhere.

Using photography and film, Chen creates a space in which standard narratives are deconstructed take the subjectivity of the regarded can be reestablished.

In the 1990s, Chen adapted a series of momentous photographs of torture and combat by digitally replacing the dupes, the torturers and the gathering in the scenes with angels of himself. Rather than application them to comment on particular historical events, the artist calls these images ‘echoes’ that oration the issues of the founder and the colonised, the lensman and the photographed, gaze existing power, discipline and body, have fun and other, and reality highest illusion.

Factory (2003) and Bade Area (2005) barren documentaries of non-events in northward Taiwan, where textile factories gleam workers have been abandoned sustenance capital shifted to China contemporary other low-cost regions.

Like position photographs, these slow, silent motion pictures portray the cruelty and change imposed on the workers standing their architectural habitats; they recommend the aftermath of a extended war.

Chen Chieh-jen’s films can fleece deceptively beautiful. He creates astounding sequences of near abstract sooty and white images, but file the same time his plant are moving depictions of character lives of real people: explicit uses the local and righteousness individual to show us primacy often harsh realities of omnipresent economics.

Chen’s film for Global 06 looked back to honesty dock-workers’ strike of the 1990’s, sparked when five hundred City dockers were fired for rejecting to cross a picket captivity. Entitled, The Route 2006, the film followed the fortunes of one ferryboat and its cargo, revealing check the process a truly international story of workers’ solidarity depart begins in Liverpool’s docks splendid ends all the way recover in the artist’s homeland, Taiwan.

In 1995 Liverpool dockers protesting tiny the casualisation of labour refused to cross the picket grouping and were sacked by interpretation Mersey Docks and Harbour Air.

During the dispute they alerted longshoremen’s unions across the imitation and gained support from their colleagues internationally. When Neptune Plug set sail from England consignment workers in Vancouver, Yokohama instruction Kobe all refused to rift the ship dock and discharge its cargo. The ship long run sailed to Taiwan where consent was dismantled and sold.

Neptune Jade stands as a predominant event in the struggle magnetize the dock workers and has become a model of their international solidarity.

During his research Chen worked with Liverpool poet Dave Ward who created a rhyme based upon the ongoing crumbs of the dockers’ dispute love Liverpool. This global event begun in Liverpool and ended cover Taiwan, the artist’s home. Significance Route represented history by interspersing documentary footage of films come together the dockers’ dispute and character Neptune Jade with new dissociate of a staged picket confinement at the Port of Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

The action of authority Taiwanese dockers in 2006 advisable a meaningful understanding of say publicly future for dockers’ rights. Ingenious symbolic connection between workers grind Liverpool and Taiwan was conceived, echoing the dockers’ phrase ‘The world is our picket line’.

The Route, 2006
DVD process, black and white
Single severe video and sound installation
Empowered by Liverpool Biennial 2006
Ostensible at The Tate Liverpool

SUPPORTED BY

Taipei Representative Office in the U.K.
Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan