Taiwan，China
Born in 1960, Taoyuan, Taiwan. Currently works and lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
Chen employed extra-institutional underground exhibitions and guerrilla-style art actions to challenge Taiwan's dominant political mechanisms during 1983 to 1986. After martial law was lifted in 1987, Chen ceased art activity for eight years and get life support from his street vendor brother. During that period he re-examined his family history and experiences growing up to reflect on the trajectory of Taiwan’s modern history. Chen also explored the trajectory of Taiwan's modern history; from colonial domination, the Cold War/Martial Law period, and Taiwan’s time as a key base in global capitalist production; to its gradual transformation into a consumer society, entry into the neoliberal global infrastructure after the end of martial law, and variations in zeitgeist under Taiwan's status as a state of exception in international politics.
Chen Chieh-jen’s major work includes Lingchi – Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002), Factory (2003), Bade Area (2005), The Route (2006), Military Court and Prison (2007-2008), Empire’s Borders I (2008-2009). His works reflect on the history of Taiwan when it was under the control of USA, and was turned into a society without identity and zeitgeist. The video also re-emphasizes the concept of “national memory” and that Taiwan’s history should be written by its own people.
He has held solo exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; REDCAT art center in Los Angeles; the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Asia Society in New York; and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Group exhibitions include: the Venice Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Gothenburg Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Fukuoka Triennial, and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane. Chen has also participated in photography festivals in Arles, Spain, Lisbon, and film festivals in London, Vancouver, Edinburgh and Rotterdam. He was also the recipient of the Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation's National Award for Arts in 2009, and the Korean Gwangju Biennial Special Award in 2000.
Chen Chieh-jen’s art work Factory is an important part of the exhibition “Weaving & We”
”. It shows the depth of the reality and goes back to elementary working techniques such as weaving and knitting, which is not a utopianism projection of imagination, but a reflection of the current environment.
Processing industries became common in Taiwan after the cold-war/martial-law authority was established. In the 1960s, Taiwan became a major processing base for the capitalist production due to its large population of cheap labor in rural areas. Taiwan’s textile industry has always been a big contributor in earning foreign exchange and was the No.1 industry in Taiwan, with labor-intensive clothing as major business. Around 1996, there were a series of involuntary bankruptcies of weaving and clothing factories and workers couldn’t get their pension and severance payment. Therefore, jobless people who used to work in factories including Lianfu Textile, Fuchang Textile, which were located in Taoyuan, started a series of protests.
In the 1990s, the neo-liberalist globalization attracts the labor-intensive industries to leave Taiwan for the regions with cheaper labors. Numerous workers lost their jobs – either because they were laid off or because of the employees’ involuntary bankruptcy.
In the video Factory, Chen invites former workers of the Lian-Fu Clothing Manufacturer who lost their jobs after the employee filed the involuntary bankruptcy without paying any pension, severance payment, and salary. The jobless workers return to the factory, which has been abandoned for seven years but is still the property of the employee, and they start to “work”. The video focuses on their facial expressions and gestures when they return to the place where they have lost their jobs and start to “work” again. As a comparison, the video also shows an early black-and-white propaganda documentary, made by the government to promote the prosperity of the processing industries, to emphasize the cruel reality of the unemployed workers after the industries were moved offshore.
Meanwhile, the video carefully examines the objects left seven years ago in the factory to be auctioned – the calendar, newspapers, time clocks, working tables, chairs, sewing machines, electronic fans, the dust of the seven-year abandonment, the suffocating air, and the items from the protest such as loudspeakers, amplifiers, and banners. By looking at the abandoned objects, which are both “frozen” and “flowing,” it reflects every worker around the world who has similar life experiences – a cruel story of “migration” and “the inability to migrate.” The employees move the factories to the area with cheaper labor, while the original workers are left here without a job or a place to go to.
