Chen Chieh-jen: After the Financial Crisis and Automated Production

Lin & Lin Gallery is honored to announce Chen Chieh-jen’s After the Financial Crisis and Automated Production. This is the third solo exhibition of Chen Chieh-jen in Lin & Lin Gallery.

Since financial capitalism and technology completely joined together to create the financial-technological capitalist system, new forms of administrative technology with unprecedented power to permeate both systems and individual consciousness have developed. This has made it possible for the corporatocracy to manipulate contemporary society and the perceptions, desire, and thinking of its individuals. Is there a way for people to get out from under this situation?

Presented in two galleries, this exhibition includes Notes on the Twelve Karmas (1999–2000/re-edited 2018), Star Chart (2017), and A Field of Non-Field (2017), in which Chen considers these difficult issues.

Chen Chieh-jen believes solutions to this seemingly unsolvable problem include epistemological shifts away from technology and away from the financial-technological capitalist system that is now embedded in society and the individual. To achieve this, Chen has returned to The Middle Way associated with the Madhyamaka School of Buddhism, which was founded by the Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva. Nāgārjuna invested The Middle Way with the precepts dependent-arising, (no) self-existence, and emptiness, and also practiced the multiple dialectical spirit of the Eight Negations, which are neither arising nor ceasing, neither permanence nor nullification, neither identity nor difference, neither coming nor going. Using these principles, Chen hopes to establish a new worldview and value system, and experiments with ways to expand both perception-desire constructs and modes of thinking in our world now permeated by control technologies.

In 1999, as the world entered the new millennium, Chen believed that we were facing a crisis because the collection of data on each individual and was being integrated into extant data to generate a new biopolitics under the technological control system. He therefore started to visualize this crisis in Notes on the Twelve Karmas. Some years later, Chen’s brother attempted suicide after years of severe depression and unemployment following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. While witnessing his brother slowly rebuild his worldview and values, Chen created his works Star Chart and A Field of Non-Field, and realized that the Madhyamaka School’s three precepts and Eight Negations not only have active significance in reshaping the individual, but also can serve as a way to qualitatively transform a world in the grips of those pervasive control technologies.

Chen Chieh-jen was born in 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, and graduated from a vocational high school for the arts. Chen frequently receives overseas invitation, and enjoys high reputation worldwide. His works were collected by several significant art museums, such as Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; Kaohsiung Museum Fine Arts, Kaohsiung; Asia Society and Museum, New York; Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts; Artium Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte contemporáneo, Vitoria, Spain; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; UBS AG The UBS Art Collection, Zürich; COFF Photography Foundatio, Spain; DSL Collection Contemporary Chinese Art, France. Important institutions held the artist’s solo exhibitions include: MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Asia Society and Museum, New York; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. The artist’s important group exhibitions include: Biennale di Venezia, Biennale de Lyon Contemporary Art, Liverpool Biennale, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Bienal de São Paulo, International Istanbul Biennial, Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Biennale of Sydney, New Orleans Biennial, Taipei Biennia, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Aichi Triennale; and photo festivals in Spain, Lisbo, Arles. The awards Chen has won include: 2018 The 12th Annual Artist Award, Award of Art China, China; 2009 The 13th National Award for Arts, The National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan; 2008 PULSE Prize, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, Miami, USA; 2000 The Special Prize, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea.