Still Life Analysis II: The Island series

2016 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

I-Hsuen Chen

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Part of the series Still Life Analysis II: The Island , the two photographs The Objects under the Civic Boulevard and A Yellow Blanket on a Wooden Pallet feature household objects of vagrants living beneath the Taipei’s Civic Boulevard expressway. Such objects include trash, unidentified discarded objects, and plants. For the artist, the underside of Civic Boulevard resembles a subtropical island with its artificial stones and potted plants decor. On this island, “citizens” carry with them “objects” that temporarily occupy spaces that could be called home before being removed by the authorities. In contrast, real estate advertisements are crowded together nearby and praise an idyllic, beautiful housing environment and depict the collective desire of Taipei inhabitants for home and lifestyle. The artist collected the written information and advertising slogans, yet eliminated the sales details, such as project names and locations, leaving apparent the blanks and punctuations. What is left of these commercial messages takes the form of poetry, gathered in Real Estate Poem #9 and #10 , shown alongside the photographs. A shift in the viewing perspective with the photographs’ subject occurs when pages of the poems are reversed (sometimes presented upside down), echoing the experience of the island “citizens” under the expressway. Between satire and mourning, the work attempts to situate oneself on the thin line separating the private and the public, to address tensions between homelessness and senses of home and to question the nature of property in constant, fluctuating relationships of occupation, re-occupation, and elimination.

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I-Hsuen Chen started focusing on visual arts in the late 2000s after working as a professional opera and choir singer in Taiwan. He moved to New York to attend school and returned to Taiwan in 2012 where he developed series of works informed by his personal experience of straddling between two worlds. If photography plays an important role in his practice, Chen also works with video, installation, and performance to explore how imagery as a medium of communication generates fallacy and obscurity, while portraying the daily history of a place, a person, or subject.

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Colors:

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• exploitation.n.01
• homeless.n.01
• housing.n.01
• sarcasm.n.01
• city.n.01
• poverty.n.01