:
陳界仁
CHEN Chieh-jen
-
Chen Chieh-jen
Wind Songs, 2015
single channel video installation, blue-ray disc,
b+w, sound in selected portions, 23 min 17 sec
backThe background for Chen’s most recent series, Realm of Reverberations, is the Losheng Sanitarium, a complex of structures established to house victims of Hansen’s disease, opposition to the appropriation of its land for use as a maintenance depot by the Department of Rapid Transit System of the Taipei City Government, and the more than 10 years of history of the Losheng Preservation Movement. In 2014 after seventy percent of Losheng buildings had been seized and demolished, Chen began filming this four-channel video based on the perspectives of different individuals: aging sanitarium residents, a young woman who had accompanied residents, a hospice nurse from China who had lived through the Cultural Revolution before coming to Taiwan, and a fictional character—a female political prisoner living in Taiwan from the period of Japanese colonization to today. Through these perspectives, Chen questions whether past events that seem settled actually ever end, and if they might set off multiple dialectics or other divergent imaginaries.
In 2015, Chen returned to the Losheng Sanitarium to screen Realm of Reverberations in a theatrical manner with a quasi-ritualistic dimension to it. This screening ceremony was recorded and then reenacted to create a post-documentary style video titled Wind Songs, which discusses how the event and the complexity of the Losheng Preservation Movement might continue to spread and propagate through reenactment, pilgrimage, and re-watching.
In 2016, Chen gave a lecture performance titled Dissenting Voices of the Unwashed, Disobedient, Non-Citizens, and Exiles in Their Own Homes. Topics in his lecture included contributions by the Losheng Sanitarium and the Losheng Preservation Movement to a growing discourse on the fluid history of colonial modernity; reflections on the internal paradox of evolving citizens’ movements under fourth wave colonial modernization; and the construction of a new Losheng Sanitarium without walls in contemporary society by ruthless policies of dispatched labor.