Extrastellar Evaluations

2016 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yin-Ju Chen

year born: 2011
gender: female
nationality: American & Taiwanese

Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. The video takes the form of a channeled message from Adama, High Priest and spiritual leader of the Lemurians. Adama attempts to give viewers clues to decipher the history of the Lemurians, the purpose of their existence on earth, and information about the identities of their agents (artists).


Yin-Ju Chen is a multidisciplinary artist, working in video, photography, drawing, and multi-media installation. She interprets social power and history through cosmological systems, using astrology, sacred geometry, and alchemical symbols to consider themes of human behavior, nationalism, imperialism, racism, state violence, totalitarianism, utopian formations, and collective thinking. Recent works illustrate the inevitability of cycles of history, developing the scope of Chen’s long-term consideration of notions of power and collective (un)consciousness. Chen was in residency at KADIST San Francisco in 2016.


Colors:



Related works sharing similar palette

buZ Blurr, One Telling of the “Origin Story” at Straat Museum Amsterdam
© » BROOKLYN STREET ART

buZ Blurr, One Telling of the “Origin Story” at Straat Museum Amsterdam | Brooklyn Street Art BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY In the shifting culturescapes of urban contemporary art, STRAAT Museum’s latest exhibition, “Moniker: An Origin Story,” emerges as a poignant narrative that bridges the transient heritage of hobo monikers with the vibrant pulse of today’s street art scene...

Curator Lauren Haynes Revisits a 1966 Profile of Spiral, Pioneering Black Art Collective
© » ARTNEWS RETROSPECTIVE

Curator Lauren Haynes Revisits ARTnews’s 1966 Profile of Spiral Group – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All November 4, 2020 5:15pm ©ARTnews I n 1963, 14 Black artists in New York formed the Spiral group...

Controlled Incidents #1
© » KADIST

Nikita Kadan

2013

Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010...

Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz Are Bringing Their Art Collection to the Brooklyn Museum
© » OBSERVER

Brooklyn Museum to Exhibit Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz Art Collection | Observer Singer Alicia Keys and hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz aren’t only a power couple in the world of music...

The Thinkers
© » KADIST

Adriana Lara

2014

Lara uses things readily at hand to create objects and situations that interrogate the processes of art and the spectrum of roles that art and artists play in society...

Untitled (Details from fictional realities)
© » KADIST

Matt Mullican

2018

Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation...

Lea Rasovszky – Dig the Inbetween book launch
© » THE RE:ART

Lea Rasovszky - Dig the Inbetween - The re:art Lea Rasovszky – Dig the Inbetween book launch On March 17th, 2017, Lea Rasovszky launched her book Dig the Inbetween, a collaboration with graphic designer Larisa Sitar and curator and art critic Diana Marincu , together with a one-night only exhibition at Mobius Gallery in Bucharest...

Bhanwari and Lichhma
© » KADIST

Gauri Gill

2003

Bhanwari and Lichhma from the Balika Mela series by Gauri Gill explores human expression through the medium of photography, bringing questions of agency, the role of photography, and feminism together through its portraits of adolescent girls from rural Rajasthan, India...

4 mourners on a mantel
© » KADIST

Gala Porras-Kim

2017

The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)...

You Make Me Iliad
© » KADIST

Mary Reid Kelley

2010

Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two...

Work On Felt (Variation 2) and (Variation 11) Black
© » KADIST

Naama Tsabar

2018

Naama Tsabar’s sculptural works are developed serially...

Mémoire promise #3
© » KADIST

Nidhal Chamekh

2016

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013...

Constituent
© » KADIST

Cameron Rowland

2014

Rowland’s minimal installations require a focus not on the objects themselves, but on the conditions of their creation, use, and distribution...

Tsumeb Fragments
© » KADIST

Otobong Nkanga

2015

Tsumeb Fragments was produced for the exhibition at Kadist, “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine” in 2015...

Postponed: Yina Jiménez Suriel in conversation with Natalia Brizuela
© » KADIST

Postponed: Curator Yina Jiménez Suriel in conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese, Thursday, October 19, 2023, 5–6 pm The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of California, Berkeley: 2334 Bowditch St, Berkeley, CA 94720 Curator Yina Jiménez Suriel will discuss her curatorial process and research project la historia de las montañas (the history of the mountains) , which examines emancipation, perceptual systems beyond the human, and the creation of new imaginaries outside/beyond Western structures...

Collector Files Lawsuit to Prove Ownership of $7m Picasso after Attempted Sale Foes South - via The Art Newspaper
© » LARRY'S LIST

The prospective buyer failed to give anything beyond the down payment, the suit alleges, while at the holding warehouse, a string of suspicious custodial transfers began...

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...

Dérive
© » KADIST

Shen Yuan

2015

Through a seemingly haphazard layering of glass and porcelain, Dérive is part of a larger installation series that address borders and displacement...

Idir
© » KADIST

Carole Douillard & Babette Mangolte

2018

Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria...

The Syphilis of Sisyphus
© » KADIST

The Syphilis of Sisyphus , a conversation with Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley A special event in collaboration with Poetry Day, a weekend-long celebration convened by Centre Pompidou in Paris...