Land scape
Stephen Chen
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Having experienced how different disciplines have their own set of aesthetic standards and boundaries, which in turn imposes limitations on what can be expressed and how it can be expressed, made me realize the boundaries of style, theory, interpretation et al. imposed on art are not only arbitrary, but made to appear“ natural” and immutable.
I think when I started to evolve as an artist was when I rejected how the institution of art enframes( to borrow Heidegger’ s term) the artist and the artwork such that meanings are circumscribed by the ontologies they are assigned to. Playing in those sandboxes no longer appealed to me, instead I am more interested in subverting these boundaries, and poking at the slippages in-between.
Your approach reveals an incessant search of organic investigation about the dialectic and tension between the natural and the manmade that marks out our media-driven lives that affects our unstable contemporary age. The results convey together a coherent and consistent sense of harmony and unity: before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http:// www. dissonanceonline. com in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process and set up, we would like to ask you how did you develope your style and how do you conceive your works.
One of my first photographic series, PLACES OF THE SPIRIT, juxtaposed American landscapes and churches to compare and contrast different ideals of the sublime; so even early on I was attracted to dialectic and tension.
However it was not until graduate school, when I began to delve into the critical philosophy of Adorno, did I acquire the language to articulate and expand on what I had been doing. I felt a real affinity to Adorno – his meth-