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-