Chen’s work focuses on the idea of the body as a social construct subject to power relations, a theme which runs from his early performance as resistance against the authoritarian regime in Taiwan, through digitally manipulated photographs of torture and war, to recent films about the vacuum left behind for workers and the built environment when capital moves elsewhere.

Using photography and film, Chen creates a space in which standard narratives are deconstructed and the subjectivity of the viewed can be reestablished. In the 1990s, Chen adapted a series of historic photographs of torture and war by digitally replacing the victims, the torturers and the onlookers in the scenes with images of himself. Rather than using them to comment on specific historical events, the artist calls these images ‘echoes’ that address the issues of the coloniser and the colonised, the photographer and the photographed, gaze and power, discipline and body, self and other, and reality and illusion.

Factory (2003) and Bade Area (2005) are documentaries of non-events in northern Taiwan, where textile factories and workers have been abandoned after capital shifted to China and other low-cost regions. Like the photographs, these slow, silent films portray the cruelty and void imposed on the workers and their architectural habitats; they suggest the aftermath of a long-drawn-out war.

Manray Hsu