Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
LandEscape meets
Stephen Chen
An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape @ europe. com
Multidisciplinary artist Stephen Chen ' s work rejects any conventional classifications and is marked with freedom as well as rigorous formalism, when exploring complex ideas and issues immanent in his works through experiments in form and technique. In his BOUNDED NATURE Project that we ' ll be discussing in the following pages, he investigates the dialectic and tension between the natural and the man-made; how nature is contained, pruned, and rendered“ invisible”. One of the most impressive aspects of Chen ' s work is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of unveiling the ubiquitous connections between Man’ s and his surroundings: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to his stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.
Hello Stephen and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your multifaceted background? You have been an avantgarde concert pianist, fineart photographer, filmmaker, performance artist, poet, and opera singer. How do these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? In particular how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?
Thank you for having me! It sounds as if I did a lot of different things at once, but what happened was I moved from discipline to discipline trying to find the medium best suited to the ideas I was exploring at that time.