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Video Artist | Chen Chieh-jen

  • Date:2017-05-28
Video Artist | Chen Chieh-jen

  • Chinese Name: 陳界仁
  • Born: April 11, 1960
  • Birthplace: Taoyuan City (Northern Taiwan)
  • Did You Know That…?
  • Before becoming an artist, Chen used to work for Wang Film Productions, an animation studio based in Taipei that animated cartoons for overseas productions such as those by Disney.


Chen Chieh-jen is a Taiwanese visual artist who raises his voice on social issues through photography, installations, and video art. Chen's artworks have been showcased in exhibitions around the world since the 1990s. He was the winner of the Special Prize at the Korean Gwangju Biennale in 2000 and was honored at Taiwan's National Awards for Arts in 2009.


Growing up when Taiwan was under martial law (1945-1987), Chen experienced life under the government's control. All kinds of social restraints prompted Chen to produce performance art in the 1980s to protest against the system.


After the end of martial law, Chen ceased to create art for eight years, examining his personal experiences and the society and history of Taiwan. He believed that there were still many restraints on society which were neglected, even as Taiwan entered a new era of freedom. Thus, Chen began new projects in 1996 by collaborating with the unemployed, migrant workers, foreign spouses, and social activists, to reflect these social issues.


Chen tried his hand at video art in 2002 by producing "Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (凌遲考).” Inspired from a photograph taken by a French soldier in 1904 that showed a man in China being tortured, Chen made a black and white film to examine Chinese feudalism and western imperialism from his perspective.


In the following years, Chen produced "Factory (加工廠)” and "Bade Area (八德),” using colored films to reflect the social phenomena of Taiwan in the late 1980s. He expressed the voices of the workers who lost their jobs due to the outsourcing of manufacturing projects and the closure of factories, and reminded the public of issues which were ignored by most government officials.


In 2006, Chen produced "The Route (路徑圖)” for the Liverpool Biennial to tell the story of the Neptune Jade incident, a strike in 1997 involving workers from cities in England, Canada, the U.S. and Japan protesting the container ship Neptune Jade's strikebreaking activities and refusing to let her unload cargo.


The strike was caused by the sackings of more than 500 dockers in Liverpool for resisting a union-busting campaign. Chen found a similar incident in the Taiwanese harbor city of Kaohsiung and re-created the "reality” of the incident at Kaohsiung port with a 16-minute film.


"Horror is one of the essences of photography,” Chen once said, and the silent images of terror and sadness in Chen's video art are, therefore, how he stays true to his life experiences and the reality. Chen has brought his video art to New York, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, Fukuoka, and Istanbul, hoping to serve as a reminder of historical facts and social issues.