Land scape
Stephen Chen
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
reflect beyond what is manifest before them. This is why I prefer a less explicit approach, and why I often don’ t like to talk about my work, as that would be telling the audience what to think. Yet at the same time, I don’ t want the work to be so esoteric and so veiled that I have to explain every reference!
These tensions and decisions between what is latent vs. manifest, what is immediate vs. resonant etc. inform the type of language used, and how it is used( as language encodes relations of power in its meaning). In BOUNDED NATURE, I chose to bracket the visual language of fine art photography as it relates to landscapes and urban subjects, as a means of showing what they have excluded.
Other times, I have explored the use of language both as connective thread, and as context to add layers of meaning. For example, in BALLAD 4( that was created to counter the whitewashing hype of Sochi Olympics) a single aria connects the anti- LGBT hate and violence in Russia, Uganda, Nigeria, India and other parts of the world. The aria I chose is a French aria that Tchaikovsky used in one of his operas. In tracing the aria to a French( who are against marriage equality) opera about an English king, I connect the colonial roots of language and homophobia in the other countries. In BALLAD 4, this history appears in English subtitles, in tandem with the French words I am singing, while I am gesturing in sign language( to represent the silence of the victims).
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Stephen. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
Thank you so much for having me, and for the opportunity to share my practice with others! I am actually not working on anything at the moment, which is new for me! I had been averaging a new work every month for the past 3 years, and I think I need time off to reset, to re-evaluate where I have been, and rethink where I want to go.
One of the areas I think I would like to get into is the so-called New Media Art, things like interactive installations, virtual reality, robotics etc. I find a lot of what has been done in that space rather gimmicky and merely demonstrate how“ cool” the technology is instead of saying anything meaningful. I think it would be interesting to explore how this diverse set of practices and technologies could be shaped and harnessed as commentary and critique.
Another area I have been giving a lot of thought to is ways of extending the notion of the artistic gesture, moving beyond the model established by Tehching Hsieh, using non-art forms as a mode of expression. It is something I began experimenting with a year ago when I created the CENSURED IN CANADA film festival, which subverted and commented on the cliquish Canadian art scene, and how film festivals are curated.
An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape @ europe. com