Stephen Chen
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
odology defied boundaries, his commitment to the dialectic, and his prescient concerns about the relationship of art and capitalist production( whereby even the avant-garde gets reduced to mere style for aesthetic consumption).
By the time I left graduate school, I had synthesized and structured my artistic practice into the dictum of Aesth( Ethics); whereby every aesthetic decision is a political one. This is why I conceive of my work as allegory, and try to uncover adjacencies and connections beyond the basic idea, to find some way to recontextualize them or distill them into the work. At the same time I don’ t want the work to become a jumble of random tangents, so I strive for what I term“ Complex Simplicity” – the work appears simple and direct on the surface, but encodes multiple meanings and relationships within.
For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected BOUNDED NATURE, an extremely interesting series, that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article, and which is both a commentary and metaphor for urban dwellers’ ritualized and cultivated unconscious of their impacts on the larger environment in their everyday actions. When walking our readers through the genesis of this project, we would like to ask you what is the role of chance in your process: how much improvisation is important for you?
The genesis of BOUNDED NATURE came about during a dry spell in my photoraphy. A lot of my early work in the medium was in fine-art landscape and urban photography and I stopped taking photographs because I had become somewhat jaded- my immediate surroundings didn’ t seem as interesting or inspiring compared to other places. I tried to kick myself out of it by working on a series with the idea of focusing on little moments of everyday beauty, like a dandelion poking out of a sidewalk crack. However, I eventually abandoned it out of frustration as