CHEN CHIEH-JEN::::
born 1960, Taoyuan, Taiwan
Works in Taipei

The condition of humanity has been the very center of this Taiwan-based artist’s concerns. After producing powerful photography and video works that revisit, through a Buddhist perspective, the historic chinese torture images made famous by Georges Bataille, he has shifted his focus to the contemporary condition of humanity that is manifested by the “restructuring” of the industrial world, especially in developing countries as prompted by current globalization. He has developed a highly personal yet distant, often black and white language of both photography and video to testify to and denounce the dramatic impact of this process on the working class. After his now well-known film Factory (2003), he continues to develop his filmic vocabulary with new works to be shown in phase 2 of World Factory.

In Bade Area he invites unemployed workers, as a temporary reoccupation of their working space, to penetrate those areas of a bankrupt factory, entrance to which had been deemed “illegal” by a court ruling. In The Route, which was originally produced for the 2006 Liverpool Biennial, the artist has re-created the spectacular and emotional scenes of dock-workers movements in both liverpool and Taiwan in the 90s. What is powerfully demonstrated in the dock-worker protests against the privatization of the harbors is not only the collective action of the strike, but also the newfound international sympathy and collaboration that developed as a part of the anti-/alter-globalization trend: a new international route of common struggle is now being constructed.