YANG Chen (°1999年, NING XIA, China) creates performances, films and mixed media artworks. With a subtle minimalistic approach, Chen absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.
Her performances feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections which make it possible to revise art history and, even better, to complement it. Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies. With a conceptual approach, she creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.
Her works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. By investigating language on a meta-level, she makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
Her works directly respond to the surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences from the artist as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. By experimenting with aleatoric processes, she wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.
Her works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, she tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface.
Her collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, she tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and believes in the idea of function following form in a work.
Her works focus on the inability of communication which is used to visualise reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. In short, the lack of clear references are key elements in the work. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, she formalizes the coincidental and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes, which are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream worlds, are frequently revealed as assemblages.
Her work urge us to renegotiate performance as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, she creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used.
Her practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for manoeuvring with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of performance: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination. YANG Chen currently lives and works in Tokyo .
Acevedo Hülsbusch Juana Joceline
Bidari Basavaraj Shrishail Bidari
Bonton Bonton Bontongone Nelly
Brasser Valentine Marie Caroline
De Torres Y Sandoval Ramón Argila
González Rojas Adriana Marcela
Hernández Hernández Alejandro José
Himmelsbach De Vries Domenique
International Resource Center For Art Cairo
Junior Dope Lord Illuminati Lives
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Patil (inspirational Speaker) Rakxit
Patricia Smyka Fathermoonandme
Payanene Velasquez Junior Haminton
Pedraza Eodriguez Emma Angelica
Plasencia Magdaleno Juan Moisés
Rodríguez Briseño Gustavo Daniel
Salas Dominguez Mayra Alejandra
Sigurdardottir Johanna Kristbjorg
Vanto Dumisani Vanto Dumfiasco
Vishva Naedurana Pathirannehelage