Electronic interfaces
If Chen's concentric color circles are a love-letter to the comics and cartoons of her childhood, her "electronic interfaces" are a profound reflection on the world of digital images.
Her 2007 Messenger series explored humanity's dependence on electronic media. In it, she arranged televisions, computers, and cell phones such that you saw people staring at screens everywhere you looked, gravitating to these "signal" lights like moths to a flame.
She offers a grimly humorous perspective on the phenomenon, showing people fixated on screens at KTVs, bus stops, and movie theaters. In the "Phototaxis KTV" set of images, she gives us deindividualized views from the front, side, and back, depicting the people in the scenes as symbolic phototactic objects "getting high by themselves" by staring at the same monitor from different locations.
For the exhibition, she also installed 24 sculptures of bobble-headed "messengers," arranging the lighting at different angles to show phototaxis in three dimensions. The work suggests that when life is lit by electronic media, it loses direction and people lose their sense of self: they simply move in the direction of whatever signal light happens to be flashing.
In 2009's The Reproduction series, she sent up the notion that the Internet has infinitely expanded and extended our imaginations, that it is a digital prosthetic moving us beyond our physical limitations and making us capable of anything. Instead, she suggests it has caused us to ignore and marginalize our physical bodies and senses.
For the series, Chen created 3D external scans of men, women, and fruit, then turned them into 2D images and lantern installations, in much the same way that the Internet turns the events of everyday life into Facebook pages on an easily grasped chronological axis. Reproduction: Man and Reproduction: Woman depict human forms mediated by electronics. Once unfolded, nothing remains of them but their skins. They are lampshades, surfaces emitting a faint light but lacking any of life's depth.
In our era of rapid innovation, cartoons encourage our imaginations to race forward and the Internet connects us to the whole world. But our senses are now constrained by computer keyboards and our brains filled with stolen images. Most of us are captivated by the current state of affairs and simply go with the flow. But these fragmented images vaguely glimpsed are robbing our lives of their depth of field.
Viewers willing to lift their gazes and join Chen in seeking a higher vantage will notice that they've been caught in a whirling vortex of stimuli in which life has been reduced to a toy top, wearily spinning and vague as a color memory.
From this perspective, Chen's works can be seen as laments on the state of the contemporary world.
The Heroic Color series places concentric color circle representations of heroes in cartoon backgrounds, encouraging viewers to guess their identities. The photos shows Spider-Man, Batman, and the Incredibles.
Chen's 2010 Key Frames series is the most mature realization of her concentric color circles concept to date. It draws on the popular Sponge Bob Squarepants cartoon, depicting characters engaged in a variety of over-the-top acts as seen through various lens effects.
The Heroic Color series places concentric color circle representations of heroes in cartoon backgrounds, encouraging viewers to guess their identities. The photos shows Spider-Man, Batman, and the Incredibles.
Chen's 2010 Key Frames series is the most mature realization of her concentric color circles concept to date. It draws on the popular Sponge Bob Squarepants cartoon, depicting characters engaged in a variety of over-the-top acts as seen through various lens effects.
Phototaxis KTV suggests that the Internet era has turned people into phototactic objects. Everyone stares at the screens in a KTV, each person "getting high by him or herself."
In her Supermen series, Chen depicts four beloved superheroes using her "concentric color circles," an innovative vocabulary that draws on the "color blocks" of human memory.