Empire's Borders II-Workers

2010 - Photography (Photography)

174H x 105W centimeters

Chen Chieh-Jen

location: Taipei, Taiwan
year born: 1960
gender: male
nationality: Chinese
home town: Taoyuan, Taiwan

Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc. (2010), which takes as its point of departure the political context of the 1950s and the Cold War, when American interests in Taiwan overlapped with the Chinese civil war. Cooperating with the Chinese Kuomintang, the American CIA established something called Western Enterprises, an agency whose main tasks included training an anti-Communist National Salvation Army (NSA) for a surprise attack on Communists in mainland China and establishing Taiwan as a base for anti-Communist operations in Southeast Asia. Narrated from the point of the view of the artist’s father, once a member of the NSA, the project interweaves personal experience with historical events. The restaged ruins of the old Western Enterprise base have a haunting atmosphere, silently recounting the complex history of Taiwanese-American relations in an era of global tensions and conflicts.


One of the most established artists working in Taiwan today, Chen Chieh-Jen creates highly politically charged works that are deeply rooted in his homeland, examining the modern history of Taiwan within the larger context of globalization. Through the visual language of video and photography, he explores collective memories, perceptions, and historical constructions that are closely related to the recent rise of neoliberalism. The work resists the existing “logic” of history writing by looking into past events in depth. It also imagines and proposes new forms of history with democratic potential—histories that counter official ideologies and are actually written by the people.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

Empire's Borders II-Passage
© » KADIST

Chen Chieh-Jen

2010

Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...

Los rastreadores
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2014

Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...

Vallegrande 1967
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2008

The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...

Untitled (Women)
© » KADIST

Matt Lipps

2011

Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...

Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2009

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...

This Exhibition
© » KADIST

Tino Sehgal

2004

Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space...

Untitled (Men)
© » KADIST

Matt Lipps

2011

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...

The American War
© » KADIST

Harrell Fletcher

2005

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...

Round and Round and Consumed by Fire
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2009

The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...

Automóvel
© » KADIST

Cinthia Marcelle

2012

Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...

Calendars (2020-2096)
© » KADIST

Heman Chong

2012

The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096...

21 Ke (21 Grams)
© » KADIST

Sun Xun

2010

Sun’s animated film 21 Ke (21 Grams) is based on the 1907 research by the American physician Dr...

La Sombra (The Shadow)
© » KADIST

Regina José Galindo

La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank...

Ante la imagen
© » KADIST

Oscar Munoz

2009

In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...

Collectors’ Favorites
© » KADIST

Jennifer Bornstein

1994

Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...

Stanley "Tom" Durrell, Tinsmith
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2008

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...

Radical Hospitality
© » KADIST

Andrea Bowers

2015

Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...

Days of Our Lives: Reading
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2009

Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...

Forest Gathering N.2
© » KADIST

Gregory Crewdson

2005

Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...

History of Chemistry I
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2004

A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...