Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

The Sandbar Project: Edge Selection——Chen Wan-Jen

Exhibition Dates: September 6 to October 29, 2021

About the Exhibition

Those are not vegetables being grown in the greenhouse but people – a message sent from the future.

People tanning indoors under artificial light are sitting on mats of various colors. Their subconscious social behaviors delineate the relationship they hold with others, as they each occupy a temporary piece of dwelling. Stretched out while maintaining a proper distance, they appear like organic, non-toxic healthy vegetable sprouts. Although sharing a physical space, each of their mental space is kept independent. Seemingly doing something but not actually doing anything substantial, time is just spent, nonchalantly.  

Life is often calm and bland, which is why it is rare to notice that a brief second can unfold a change. Once the logic behind how time operates is altered, those fleeting ordinary moments can spark infinite opportunities of amplification and concentration. This work curiously captures humans’ ordinary lives. People that are neatly arranged on a platform with light shining on them attract repeated looks. As time is mundanely and blankly killed, concealed and indistinct features of the generation are explored and examined.

About the Artist / Chen Wan-Jen

Chen Wan-Jen was born in 1982 in Hsinchu, Taiwan and is currently based in Taipei. Video art is the foundation of his creative practice, which he has expanded to include spatial installation, theatrical performance, transmedia collaboration, and other experimental creative endeavors. Chen’s oeuvre often focuses on circulating images that evoke a faint sense of absurdity and humor in the viewers as they go through the viewing experience. In his previous artworks, he has created images by recompositing pedestrians he has filmed by painstakingly lifting them frame-by-frame away from their backgrounds, and he has also shown the moment before a disaster, presented in an endless loop. The artworks project an uneasiness and prompts thoughts on the numbed and repetitive psychological conditions observed in the digital society.

The Sandbar Project

The pandemic has altered the way we live and changed the distance we keep from others and from our environment. At the lobby of Taishin Tower, Tashin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture has employed art to create a “sandbar” amidst life’s hustle and bustle. Outside the boundaries imposed by the pandemic, we invite you to stroll by or pause and take a break away from work and everyday routines. Resembling cumulative effects generated by repeated tidewater, it is where a new refined energy can be conjured.