攝影/King

對於「時間

Song-jei Chen's Statement on Creation
The depiction of attachment to "time/vestige" has been a focus of Song-jei Chen. He often uses crude media or techniques to construct an absurd space with concise design mixed with complicated emotions. As technology guides the humans to hi-fi window, the creation was completed in a rather low-fi approach to detach from the conventional appreciation of beauty. It offers a new experience to the audience on "deformation aesthetics". The work portrays the reality existed in the younger generation and reflected the existing absurdity and conflict. The artist inspired the audience in the mechanical period through different sensory paths (vision, smell, and touch) to seek out the subtle feeling that faded from their memories in the compressed space. Although the media used for Chen's works varied, his determination and attention to "the warmth of humanity" persisted.

Looking at Song-jei Chen's creative thinking in the past, there seems to exist a certain attempt, an attempt to touch all sorts of non-visual formal languages. In his past art pieces, he tries to use our senses, the sense of smell through all kinds of smells, the sense of vision and touch through different body interactions and the sense of hearing through familiar sounds in life to enliven bodies and minds that are squashed under rationality and modern living paces. This is obviously quite a soft approach going through human beings' most common senses and perceptions to break away from rigid cultural differences and social values. When human body's primary instinct and its experience in life are guided to enter into a space that it creates, people's perceptions collide, divide and reassemble among one another in the process of interactions. As the experience of life for each individual differs, the path to search for "the perception" becomes sensitive and complicated, and is entirely broken down under the "non-perceptible" or "imperceptible" conditions. It seems to let people or all objects return to the primary state, or the state close to zero. To catch instant perception of each individual by the lightest measure may often touch people's nature of perceptual or poetic thinking.

Song-jei Chen always tries his best to search for human nature in plain life, and for the remaining sense of beauty from ugly objects. This beauty comes from the destruction of natural law, from the residue after consumption, or maybe from the trace after violence.... Its abstracted marvel - memory fragments from daily lives between the form and the meaning reveals the multi contradictory relations of each individual toward the absurd reality. By the roughest materials, incarnation dramas of change and rebirth are constructed one after another. In this absurd, fabricated life show, the audience is invited to witness each and every real life that we are familiar with while ignorant of. What have been shown in front of us are death rituals full of holiness. Any fallen life or substance does not end here, but opens up the beginning of another transformed rebirth.