Les préludes

May 4 – 29, 2012

Gallery hours: 7days a week, 9am-7pm

Ivy Tech Waldon Arts Center

122 S Walnet St, Bloomington, IN 47404

A Window to the Future

Artist Statement

“China” literally means “the central country” in Chinese. For centuries, the Chinese people con-sider their country as the center of the world which is most developed and civilized.
The dream was broken by the failure of the war in 1840, and the country was forced to started its modernization and westernization. Being interrupted times and times again, the process finally become irreversible.
The last round of modernization which is also called “Reforming and Opening up” started in late 1970s. I was born in 1984, a blooming year of the “Reforming and Opening up”. When I was a child, I was educated to establish a life-long struggle for the communist ideal. However, after entered my middle school, the western pop culture was getting popular and influential. Even though the education and propaganda kept the same tone of communist, no one believes it any-more.
It is not my single case to become confused and lost during the years. Traditional Chinese phi-losophy of life and value has been destroyed during the culture revolution and people have got tired to the communist believe. What is in the empty spiritual space? Many people adopt pragma-tism and materialism. The economic growth is everything and the only thing, to the government, and to the masses.
In each of my returns to China, when I look at the landscapes that are familiar but somehow al-ienating, I always find something puncturing, revealing to me the residue of changes hidden in the scenes, as well as the struggling of people’s seeking to a new life and keeping their civil rights in the dictatorship.
This is the reason I started to document the moments of the changing. I was seeking the conflict-ing and compromising elements. The project opens a window for me to look back home with my own perspective, and it is also a glance of the window which China opens to the world and un-certain future.

Vicissitudes: A Life Journey from China to the United States

Recent Exhibition

• December 2 – December 16, 2011
  Opening Reception: 6-8pm, Friday, December 2, 2011

• Gallery 456
  Chinese American Arts Council
  456 Broadway, New York, NY 10013 (Click for Map)
  212.431.9740 www.caacarts.org
  Hours: M-F 12-6pm

• Media Coverage
  World Journal:Newspaper, Website
  The China Press: Newspaper, Website
  Sing Tao Daily: Newspaper
  Mingpao: Newspaper
  SinoVision: Television
  Sino Television 
  
  

Artist Statement

• My work is derived from my thinking about the inescapable influence of the cultural and political conditions that shaped my personal history.

  Born in China in 1980s, I grew up alongside the country’s modernization, westernization and economic boom. Since I started my education in the United States, homeland has become a distant memory in faded family albums. Have the old times truly survived in those photographs? What would happen if I could return and revisit them?

  In my images, I combine my current self-portraits with vintage family photographs as a way to reveal the temporal, geographic, cultural and political transformations of my life from China to the United States. When time has evaporated and turned into a photograph that records a ray of sadness in the everlasting twilight, we can never go back. However, digital technology gives me the rare opportunity to travel back and forth between past and present to formulate a deeper understanding. Through my photography, I see the evidence of vicissitudes, and I seek to discover, capture, remember and reconstruct the eternal meaning that will remain after all the vanity under the sun disappears.

• 我出生於一九八零年代的中國，見證了中國的現代化與經濟騰飛。小時候的我戴著紅領巾，時刻準備著為共產主義事業而奮鬥；與此同時，紅色中國卻向西方世界緩緩揭開了面紗。四年前我赴美留學，東方的故土和家庭的往昔成為漸行漸遠的回憶。唯有翻開老相冊，才看到過往存在的明證；褪色了的畫面卻已黯淡而陌生，宛若黃昏的余輝，提醒著我們那些日子，誠然是回不去了。然而，我仍然一次又一次地自問，假若能回到照片中的時光，我是否還如當初，又將如何面對曾經熟悉的一切？

  如今，數位影像技術提供了難得的機會，讓我得以在過往與現實間穿梭往返、徘徊流連。在本系列作品中，我將現今的自拍肖像融入家族以及童年的老照片中，展現出三十多年間的中國人經歷的劇變。通過攝影創作，我看到了滄桑的見證，也試圖去找尋、捕捉並記念那日光之下的捕風與虛空褪盡之後的永恆。

Exhibition History

• Looking Both Ways: A Contemporary Art Exhibition Coinciding with the Centennial of the Xinhai Revolution 兩邊看：辛亥革命一百週年當代藝術特展

Vicissitudes was awarded the first prize in this exhibition!

University Gallery, Eastern Michigan University

North Campus Research Complex, University of Michigan

September 8 – October 21, 2011

• Indiana University Art Museum

Indiana University Art Museum

Bloomington, Indiana

Friday, April 29th to Friday May 6th, 2011

Image Gallery

Street Photography in China, Summer 2009

International Students at Indiana University Bloomington

14″x18″ Archival Inkjet Prints
Apr 30, 2010, “Photo Synthesis” Group Show, McCalla Art Building, Indiana University

Artist Statement

Despite suffering from long journey, loneliness, homesick and culture shock, thousands of international students from almost all countries over the world come to Indiana University, because of its excellent academic programs and welcoming community. The photographer is originally from China and pursuing the Master of Fine Arts degree here. Starting from his wnn experience, he concerns about the academic and daily life of the international students in their common new home here at IU. Through his residency at the Office of International Services, the photographer had the chance to interview students from several countries and revealed their personality and cultural identity by the environmental portraits.

A Photographic Installation/Performance

Installation with 400 8″x10″ Archival Inkjet Prints

Jan 26, 2010, McCalla Art Building, Indiana University Bloomington

Exhibition Catelogue (PDF)

Artist Statement

“People Mountain People Sea” is a photographic installation and performance project by Yang Chen, a Chinese-born Photography MFA at Indiana University Bloomington.

The title “People Mountain People Sea” is a jocular word-to-word translation of the Chinese idiom “人山人海”, which means “huge crowds of people”. The project originates from a performance during which the artist explored the boundaries of comfort between strangers in a public space while attempting to get extremely close to them to take their picture.

In the installation the artist creates a huge “people sea” by photos from the performance in order to reproduce the crowded, over-intimate feeling of being involuntarily embraced by a crowd.

During the show, the artist performed “bumping into people” again with the viewers in the paper crowd.

Introduction by Prof. Claude Cookman

What is more fascinating than another human face? Child psychologists tell us the first thing we focus on, as infants, is our mother’s face. From this primal fixation, we branch out to every face, becoming experts in reading the subtle shifts in expression made possible by the complex musculature hidden a few millimeters beneath the epidermis of the face.

In his project, People Mountain, People Sea, Yang Chen offers a universe of faces — men, women, children, infants — each one a small reward for our study. Yang’s work synthesizes two major traditions, street photography and portraiture, but it also alters them. His locus of operation is the street, most often in large cities where for a range of reasons, residents are less likely to challenge his camera. Unlike most street photographers, however, he rarely treats the street as a stage for human drama nor as a design element in the composition. Rather it is relegated to background, typically out of the field of focus and occupying little of the pictorial space. Instead, the human face fills most of his frame. This positions his work as portraiture — not the studio or environmental varieties but the more rarely practiced genre of action portraiture. All his images are candid — faces caught on the fly, rushing to work, to the subway, to a rendezvous. Faces preoccupied. Each with an expression that invites our contemplation.

Yang plunges the viewer into this jumble of faces, at first frustrating our desire for contemplation. His installation transforms a classroom at the old McCalla School near Bloomington’s downtown into a pedestrian rush hour as 400 images hang from the ceiling. Visitors are immersed in Yang’s “People Sea” — forced to brush against the prints, forced to confront them from a few inches instead of the normal gallery distance, forced to engage them several at a time. To have the zone of space in which we westerners insulate ourselves so insistently punctured feels uncomfortable. But it also intensifies the imperative to read the expressions on all those faces. In violating the traditional decorum of a gallery space, Yang engages us in a visceral as well as an aesthetic experience. He has found the perfect form to match his subject.

Professor Claude Cookman
School of Journalism, Indiana University

exposure to risk

Photography captures a moment in time like amber preserves an insect: Looking at a photograph, we see a static glimpse of life’s eternal flux. We notice the intensity and direction of a glance, the depth of a shadow that shades a face, or the forced perspective of a busy city street. Photographs contain clues that allow us to experience what the artist is showing. This presentation is part calculation and part intuition. Good photographs hold layers of information that unfold through studied observation to reveal a truth or universal experience that transcends a single moment in time.

Yang Chen’s People Mountain People Sea, a photography instillation at the Fuller Projects, attempts to reanimate the preserved moments that are his photographs by placing the viewer in a sea of images. Chen’s instillation fills the gallery from wall to wall with hundreds of free-hanging double-sided prints suspended from the ceiling with translucent filament. The viewer has to physically push through the dense collection of images that Chen captured while literally bumping into people as he walked the streets of New York City. As the hanging and slowly spinning images part and yield with forward movement, new faces and expressions continually confront you. One feels a loss of personal space once immersed in his mass of images, as Chen succeeds in recreating the feeling of a densely populated city within a gallery environment.

The Fuller Projects is a laboratory for contemporary artists looking to expand their normal mode of working and experiment with new techniques and practices. Sometimes, a less-than successful result exposes the risk of such endeavors. However, all successful artists recognize that the known and comfortable way is an impasse, and that they must tread the fine line between new ideas and disaster. Yang Chen has walked this line and his instillation stand as testament to the reward of taking risks.

Phil Haralam
Co-Organizer
Fuller Projects

FULLER PROJECTS is a venue with the primary mission of providing emerging contemporary artists with the opportunity to propose, create, and present new work. Established in 2002 by Indiana University School of Fine Arts students and located in the McCalla Building, FULLER PROJECTS encourages dialogue on art within the university, the community of Bloomington, Indiana, and beyond.

A Life-size Photographic Interactive Installation

Oct 19-26, 2009
Fine Arts Building, Indiana University Bloomington

Artist Statement

When I wander in the fine art building, most of the doors are always close, which makes the inner space very mysterious.
In this project, I try to break the dividing wall and reveal the secret inner world to the viewers. By recreating it on the hallway using the photographic approach, when the viewers walk by, they can see the inside which they may have never seen before.
This is an interactive installation. It grows with the viewers’ manipulation on the original artwork. Traditionally, in the gallery system, the artist is the only author of an artwork. However, this piece is created by the artist, but the spectators also become the authors, because of their participation. The artist is the starter and can’t control how it goes.
Something interesting is that one viewer wrote“R.MUTT” on the center urinal, which directly refers to Marchel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), the first example of conceptional art.

An Artist Book for Street Photography

Blurb Version Here

A Series of Four Prints
16″x11″ Archival Inkjet Prints
Jan 26 – Feb 6, 2010, SoFA Gallery, Bloomington, Indiana

ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN and CHEN YANG

15″x10″ Archival Inkjet Prints

Photographer/Creative Writer Collaboration Group Show

McCalla Art Building, Indiana University Bloomington, May 2009

Published in Superficial Flesh Magazine