Double Square 双方藝廊

Born in Hsinchu, 1982, Chen Wan-Jen graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts. He was awarded the first prize of Taipei Arts Awards in 2006 and invited to be an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York in 2012. In addition, he staged many exhibitions in art museums and spaces across Taiwan. He is skilled in capturing the repeatedly alternating blank fragments in his daily life with videos and installations. His one-of-a-kind visual vocabulary features an attractive combination of multiple elements and collaged digital images as finely as realistic paintings. Against the digital environment in which the human body is often codified, flattened, and decontextualized, the artist, by virtue of his artworks, represents the elapsing fragments of time as unapproachable and mechanical objects in motion. He evokes the metaphor of a continuous loop in a closed space to symbolize the social mechanism, transforming all kinds of actions into a ritual of waiting. It seems that waiting has become a collective consciousness or behavior along the elongated timeline, suspending in the flat and endless efflux of time with futility and nihility. Wan-Jen Chen’s oeuvre has focused on images having neither beginning nor end. In his previous artworks, the quotidian situations or the moments of devastation tended to go on and on in an endless manner. The content of these images lingered over the moments right before the events unfolded, prompting the viewers to be on tenterhooks and find it absurd at first glance. After careful observation, however, the viewers would notice the profound insight it yielded about the present. As far as the artist is concerned, every chance encounter carries specific implications. The figures haphazardly passing by in front of the lens of the artist’s video camera were captured as unknown characters in his artworks. In the time-consuming and painstaking creative process, the artist treated and named these figures with an indescribable sense of intimacy. They are not only deprived of their histories and purposes but also detached from their original characteristics. Nonetheless, they find their own positions and leave their traces of movement in the artist’s works. The viewers are immersed in the world harboring infinite possibilities, as if they live the day in an endless loop.