When lit by a single source of light, the shadows of multiple objects projected on a surface will be of the same intensity, drawing the outlines of a chimeric pattern.
\nSera Yu Wen Chen aggregates shadows. Her works are composed of elements conscientiously stitched together: archives, testimonies, anecdotes, suIused with both humor and quiet urgency. They blend the historical and the intimate; the factual and the theorical.
\nThe quiescent creatures that emerge from these collages tell of the colonial organization of territories, bodies and minds: a defining of identity. <\/p>\n
In \u2018Imagine a Tropical Island: The Landscape in Someone\u2019s Mouth\u2019 (2023), friends casually discuss the sensory perception of heat in diIerent cultures, while reflecting on the normative-exotic semiotic crafted by \u201cfair skinned\u201d colonial actors.
\nThe video follows with a practical introduction to digitally generating fantasized worlds, made with the help of the numbing archetypes that populate digital assets libraries.
\nThe artist confronts her viewers with structures and systems, depicted as ghost-like presences that ensnare and trap: greenhouses, museums, blurred landscapes that convey the anonymous and anaesthetizing qualities of postcards.
\nFor Giorgio Agamben, an apparatus is \u201canything that has […] the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings.\u201d*
\nAn apparatus is a potent and elusive network, the shape of a pen, a smartphone, cigarettes, and even language.<\/p>\n
In Sera Yu Wen Chen\u2019s works, apparatuses coalesce into mimicries of relics cushioned in bubble wrap (Perceive Shadows in Mother Tongue, 2024); still-life paintings; origami; or the deleterious theory of physiognomy, which seeks to define the spectrum of race and finds its modern extension in techno colonialism (Behold the Glass Before the Cave, 2020): AI, algorithms and statistical averages.
\nAmid the apparatus, we all become constitutive parts of the shadow, the terrain and culture for determinism and conditioned subjectification.<\/p>\n
In \u2018Imagine a tropical island II: transplanter\u2019s land\u2019 (2023), one doesn\u2019t look at the shadow of a palm tree, but at its projection: an afterimage, to be thought of as the expansion or duplication of the apparatus.
\nThe artificial shadow only appears at the sound of a female narrator: a voice that resounds like an incantation, a whisper, the toxic soothing of ASMR.<\/p>\n
The narrator is Japanese and tells, in Taiwanese, how imperial Japan reshaped Taiwan\u2019s territory by introducing plants and landscape practices. The inverting of languages, far from redeeming, conveys the chill of the passive violence of colonial strategies: the bio- cultural arsenals; the ubiquity of apparatuses.
\nIn her use of simple visual artifices, Sera Yu Wen Chen resists the tentacular and false complexity of the apparatus.
\nShe oIers an eclipse, echoing Virginia Woolf who urges us to flee the inhibiting glare of the light: \u201cto strive from darkness, the realm of complete shadows.\u201d** <\/p>\n
* What is an Apparatus, Giorgio Agamben, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford University Press, 2009)
\n** Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf, 1938 <\/p>\n
Text by Bernard Flanet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","categories":[],"class_list":["post-45225","kb_exhibition","type-kb_exhibition","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":{"article_image":45222,"article_image_bu_de":"","article_image_bu_en":"","datum_suche":""},"yoast_head":"\n