Chen Chieh-jen: Traumatized Body and Transformed Self

Art Sonje Center proudly presents Chen Chieh-jen’s solo exhibition Traumatized Body and Transformed Self, opening from March 11 to May 2, 2021. Chen Chieh-jen employed extra-institutional underground exhibitions and guerrilla-style art actions to challenge Taiwan’s dominant political mechanisms during a period marked by the Cold War, anti-communist propaganda, and martial law (1949–1987). In 1996, Chen started collaborating with local residents, unemployed laborers, day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth and social activists. Together, they occupied factories owned by capitalists, slipped into areas cordoned off by the law, and utilized discarded materials to build sets for his video productions. In order to visualize contemporary reality and a people’s history that had been obscured by neoliberalism, Chen embarked on a series of video projects in which he used strategies he calls “re-imagining, re-narrating, re-writing and re-connecting.”

Starting in 2010, Chen began actively focusing on the fact that many people around the world have been reduced to working temporary jobs due to pervasive control technology in the neoliberal, post-Internet age. Members of the corporatocracy, including transnational financial service corporations, digital and biotech giants, and the military-industrial complex, have developed a pervasive control technology that not only expands and exacerbates wealth inequality on a global scale, but also discards and alienates an increasing number of individuals from society, and has thus created a contemporary caste system.

The exhibition Traumatized Body and Transformed Self presents Chen Chieh-jen’s seven works from different periods of the artist’s career. It proposes alternative epistemologies and practical methods for reconsidering the meaning of existence for individuals suffering the insurmountable despair of being discarded and traumatized by societies in which wealth inequality continues to spread and deepen. Moreover, ways of transforming the self and imagination based on traumatic experiences are explored, so as to deconstruct the illusion that has been created by the corporatocracy’s pervasive control technology.

About the artist
Born in 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Chen Chieh-jen currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. Chen has held solo exhibitions at the Mudam Luxembourg; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Asia Society in New York; and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Group exhibitions include: the Venice Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, Lyon Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Moscow Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Taipei Biennial, etc. He was also the recipient of the Award of Art China—Artist of the Year in 2018, the Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation’s National Award for Arts in 2009, and the Gwangju Biennial Special Award in 2000.

Curated by Sunjung Kim
Exhibition Management by Heehyun Cho
Organized by Art Sonje Center
Supported by National Culture and Arts Foundation and Department of Cultural Affairs of Taipei City Government