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