Stephen Chen
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Now that I had a new framework for“ seeing”, I found photographic opportunities everywhere in the city, that my own ritualized way of seeing had blocked out. I started the project by replicating landscape and urban photography tropes in infrared, but it got constraining as things started to look the same after a while. I realized that if I am proposing a new way of seeing, I would have to do better and began to improvise and experiment with subjects and framings that would not have“ worked” in conventional B & W or color. So the process itself became a monad of the tension between the natural( i. e. chance, what is out there) and man-made( e. g. rules of composition) that the project explored.
BOUNDED NATURE accomplishes the difficult task of centering the relationship of the natural in the urban landscape by the intimacy of the subject matter: in this sense, your project could be considered a successful attempt to create a body of works that stands as record of existence and that captures non-sharpness, going beyond the elusive relationship between experience and identity in our globalized mundanity. Even James Turrell’ s obsession with light and color is often associated with his early experiences as a pilot... So we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Thank you so much for the compliment, and for articulating that problematic, as trying to transcend categories of thought is an ongoing concern of mine!
I think while some artists have attempted to utilize esoteric theories or abstracted