Chen Yi: Between the Virtual and the Real
Chen Yi Studio: Current/y
Across a career spanning installation, new media, performance and public art, Taiwanese artist Chen Yi has used technology to examine something fundamental: how we understand ourselves and the world around us.
At the heart of Chen’s work is a recurring dialogue between the tangible and the virtual. His practice considers subjects including desire, existence, data, politics, economics, society and the environment, often bringing apparently disparate ideas and media together within a single constructed world. Rather than treating physical and digital experience as opposites, Chen is interested in what happens where the two meet – and in the new behaviours, values and identities that emerge.
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Solar
Born in Yunlin, Taiwan, in 1979, Chen studied Landscape Architecture at Tunghai University before completing a master’s degree in Technology and Art at Taipei National University of the Arts. His early career quickly established him as an important voice in Taiwan’s new-media art scene. In 2006, he received the top prize at the Taipei Arts Awards, alongside the S-An Art Award, beginning a practice spans disciplines, materials and forms.
His approach took a significant new direction in 2010 when Chen co-founded the Taiwanese art collective LuxuryLogico. Bringing together artists with backgrounds spanning sculpture, mechanical installation, spatial and programmed imagery, music, choreography and curating, the group developed its practice around the idea of the hybrid.
Their work combines music, visual art, installation and text while moving freely between theatre, film, dance, architecture and public space. Technology sits alongside an equally strong interest in nature and human behaviour: LuxuryLogico has described its practice as seeking a kind of harmony between the extremes of technology and humanity.
The Sound of Blooming
That philosophy has produced works on dramatically different scales. Fly! No Matter What, begun in 2011 and developed over subsequent years, grew into a large-scale co-creation project; kinetic and sound installation Rain Haze transformed discarded marine materials into an evocation of the surface of the sea; while The Sound of Blooming, created for the 2018 Taichung World Flora Exposition, brought together mechanical movement, light and sound on a monumental scale.
LuxuryLogico’s work has travelled internationally, appearing at the Asian Art Biennial, Asia Triennial Manchester, Thailand Biennale and Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, among others. In Taiwan, the collective has also worked far beyond conventional gallery spaces, creating major public installations and contributing to large-scale civic and cultural events.
Collaboration is fundamental to this practice. Rather than seeing an artwork simply as a finished object, LuxuryLogico approaches making as a process through which new relationships can be formed – between artists and disciplines, but also between technology, environments and audiences.
Lichen_
Alongside this collaborative work, Chen Yi has continued to develop his individual artistic practice internationally.
Artist residencies have taken him from 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris to Openspace Bae in Busan. In 2021 he was artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where his work continued to investigate the increasingly blurred boundary between physical and virtual existence.
His solo exhibition Lichen_ at Künstlerhaus Bethanien reflected a longstanding characteristic of his practice: taking systems and phenomena from the world around us and reconstructing them through technology, space and artistic intervention.
Across these projects, Chen repeatedly returns to questions of connection. What happens when human experience is translated into information? How do technological systems alter the way we see the world? And what becomes of individual identity when our physical and virtual lives can no longer easily be separated?
In 2021, Chen founded Chen Yi Studio, creating a new platform for technological art and experimental cross-disciplinary performance. Working collaboratively across artistic fields, the studio explores the possibilities created by encounters between online and offline space, and between virtual and physical performance.
It is from this practice that Current/y, coming to The Coronet this September, emerges.
In Current/y, a performer encounters and journeys through a virtual world via her digital avatar, surrounded by the systems of self-media, influencer culture and online attention that increasingly determine how value is created and perceived.
Game engines, motion capture, lasers, and large-scale projection allow physical and virtual performers to occupy the same theatrical world. As the dancer moves, digital bodies, environments and identities emerge around her. The technology is spectacular, but underneath it lies a distinctly human question: what happens to our sense of self when it becomes something that can be measured, displayed and evaluated by others?
As the distinction between our physical and digital selves becomes harder to define, Chen Yi’s work asks us to look at the uneasy territory in between.
Book tickets for Chen Yi Studio: Current/y | 17-19 Sep