Chen chieh jen biography of abraham lincoln

He currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. This has added an activist quality directed at re-envisioning society in his creative process. After martial law ended, due to difficulties produced by an inability to understand or recognize history and reality, Chen gradually ceased making art, which lasted for eight years. The environment of his youth was filled with places of discipline, governance, and illegitimacy, such as military courts, munitions factories, industrial areas, and illegal shantytowns.

It was during this time that Taiwan joined the system of the capitalist and international division of labor, becoming an export-led, lower-end economy reliant on labor intensive, high polluting industries.

Chen chieh jen biography of abraham lincoln

After martial law ended in , Taiwan was again remade, this time as a neoliberalist society. Taiwanese society has been repeatedly forced to become one with historical amnesia and has lost the ability to imagine and reflect on the future from the context of past. Returning to art in , Chen started collaborating with local residents, unemployed laborers, day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth and social activists.

Chen Chieh-Jen offered similar and yet very different explanations about penalty and the mutilation of the bodies. About penalty, Chen Chieh-jen said,. Penalty is a ritual of the embodiment of the structure of exclusion. The gaze brings the ritual of penalty to a real climax that makes the subsequent extension of emotional effect possible.

During the ritual of penalty, what did the victims think at the agonizing moment of suffering and death? How earnest was the executioner in his obsession with the techniques of execution? Why are the spectators, and we, bewitched by the techniques of this management? Is it possible to find the map of their thinking and emotions from their faces or bodies?

And, will this map be inscribed once again on the bodies of the spectators? Chen asked, are we not inscribed in our body the past histories, past experience, and past visions? These two dimensions , the collective and the individual, collide upon his photographic visions. What is more important, to me, is that his images hint at a special mode of the gaze: the gaze of Revolt, the gaze that leads us to question the flat explanation of our history, and to penetrate into the complex infrastructure of our past.

The Gaze of Revolt: Taiwanese conditions reinterpreted. Chen Chieh-Jen grew up in the neighborhood of the Martial Court and Martial Prison at Xindian, the location in which political prisoners are interrogated and put on trial, including the ones arrested in the Kaohsiung Incident of Chen said that what had been kept in prison pricked his curiosity ever since he was a child.

His village was composed entirely by people like his father, who suffered through wars, came alone with the army to the island, leaving their families behind on the mainland, too poor to have a proper marriage in Taiwan and therefore married either poor orphans, or aboriginals, or handicapped persons. Chen said that the queer thing about his village was that many families had retarded children.

He himself had one, who was not only retarded but also paralyzed, lying on bed naked throughout the years, till his death at the age around thirteen or fourteen. Chen shared the same room with this retarded younger brother, lived with him, and watched his death. We do not see the violence of history or that of the State. We could only imagine it. Indeed, Taiwanese people have not seen wars or public massacre ever after People under 50 grew up in a world of peace and stability.

But behind the screen, there was the silenced fear. The bloody scenes of the massacre executed by the KMT troops in the February the Twenty-Eighth Incident had been hushed and suppressed right after the event and was banned from all forms of discussion or historical books. The sense of the unspoken and unspeakable fear and horror continued along with various transformations of intra-ethnic hostilities, secret types of political persecutions during the White Terror period, people disappeared and did not return.

The forced transition, from naive faith in the Nation and the cheerful pictures of stability and democratic freedom, to slow and painful disillusionment, to the shocking knowledge of the traumatic history and the injustice, to the sense of conspiracy in the State cruelty, is the experience Taiwanese have gone through in recent decades. What Chen has interpreted about the Martial Law period reveals a typical Taiwanese experience.

Chen Chieh-Jen seems to suggest that the Taiwanese condition is the accumulation of layers and layers of histories before us. If we come back only to one historical point, the Incident and its historical iconography, we then would be blinded by its fetishistic aspect and forget about the histories behind it. Unless we looked into the reality behind the history, we would not able to understand our own situation.

When we really come back to the historical scenes, Chen also seems to suggest, we have to admit that the intra-ethnic malice does not only begin with the February 28 th Incident and the White Terror. All these records of malicious battles are linked with the histories of violence and exclusion, the residues and vicissitudes of the supplices Chinois.

Chen described his method of synchronization of images, fusing his body image with the images in the past, as a state of trance, as if facing the mirror in hell, with the flashback of the imagery of the Karma. Looking into the lining of the visible surface, the extreme state of horror, Chen Chieh-Jen has disrupted the objective gaze, the gaze from the State, and he has also eroded the subject-object binary relation through the objective gaze.

He seduces us to look at the wounds with blood and the chopped-open corpses, the most repulsive and sickening images that we tend to avoid. In facing with such abject images, we also face the fragility and fluidity not only between life and death, but also between violence and joy, between sadistic and masochistic pleasures, and between the repetitions of historical violence.

What had also been silenced are the crimes the Chinese had done to them during the first half of the twentieth century. The process of going through his photographic images, for us, has also led us to the answers to the questions we raised in the beginning of this paper: how do we face our history and where do we locate our subjectivity. Perhaps finally a little bit more tolerance for different positions could be allowed too.

The Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art, In Chinese. Catalogue of Art Taiwan: Biennale di Venezia Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Reflection and Reconsideration: 2. Taipei Biennial: Site of Desire. Taiwan Province Document Committee, Unofficial Incident Research Organization, Barthes, Roland. Richard Howard.

New York: Hill and Wang, Bataille, Georges. Reprinted in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, Edited and with an Introduction by Allan Stoekl. By Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, By Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights Books, Collaborating with factory workers, migrant labourers and unemployed youth, Chen gives a voice to these rarely heard communities, revealing hidden personal histories to complement the dominant narratives, and making visible stories that have either never been recorded or have been deliberately suppressed.

The central work within the Bianwen Book I archive is Realm of Reverberations , a four-part black-and-white film installation housed in a temporary, makeshift cinema. The work is inspired by the Losheng Sanatorium, a hospital for lepers that was established in Taipei in the s during the Japanese colonial period but which has lain in ruins since the Taiwanese government decided in to renovate the site and move its residents elsewhere.

Realm of Reverberations features four protagonists: an elderly former patient who sings a lament to the poor and powerless as she looks over the devastated valley of her home, in Tree Planters; a young female companion to sanatorium residents, in Keeping Company; a hospice nurse from China who lived through the Cultural Revolution, in The Suspended Room; and a fictional political prisoner who travels through Taiwanese history from the Japanese colonial period to the present, in Tracing Forward.

His actions were staged in the public sphere in guerilla-style performances and underground exhibitions. Less concerned with an exact historical reconstruction, he exposed feelings and emotions that the charged space provoked.