Artists' Fellowship - 2011
Digital/Electronic Arts
Artist Statement:
In 2006-2007 I made my first attempts at working with projectors that did not just stay in one location. I mounted a projector onto a pickup truck and drove around Manhattan, projecting images onto buildings while a friend manned the wheel. Even in New York, where people see so much everyday, I was surprised to see how sensitive and nervous people become when projections left the stationary realm of the theater and entered the interactive realm of social reality. When I projected the image of a Taiwanese flag onto the UN building, the authorities grew scared, and the FBI and UN security arrested me. But even at non-governmental places like the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and Times Square, I saw how mobile projections had the power to deeply move people.
Why should this be so? The answer relates to the context of projected imagery as much as to the content projected. Usually, projectors are very hard to move around, so projections remain in one sharply delineated location. When video imagery leaves this safe area, however, and when it takes on an added, interactive dimension, people are uncertain how to react. As my experiences have shown, people do tend to react more strongly to roving projections than they otherwise would had they seen the same thing in a more traditional setting. Limiting video images to the darkness of a theater, however, seriously hampers the effectiveness of video as a tool toward making strong statements about the world and human society. A stationary projector is only a machine adjusted to display to a series of moving images. But a mobile projector is more than a machine; it allows the presence of the artist to become significant in a way that stationary projections cannot allow for.
For my interactive project “Coughing Earth” (2010), I mount a projector onto a wheelchair and project images of underwater environments. In this way, I demonstrate what the world would look like if it were underwater—which is what it will be if we continue to abuse the natural earth. The interactive quality made possible by the mobility of the projector expresses my concept more clearly and forcefully than documentary footage alone could do. Similarly, I use hand-held micro-projectors for my interactive performance “Broken Mind”. In this way, I am able to freely project images wherever I like; in the case of “Broken Mind,” creating an environment that swarms with the literal promises of television ads and political leaders
More about the Artist:
Born in Taiwan, multidisciplinary artist Chin Chih Yang has resided for many years in Lower Manhattan. Among other honors, he has been a recipient of the Urban Artist Initiative Fellowship, an individual artist grant from the New York State Council for the Arts, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has granted him a Swing Space residency at Governors Island. His interest in ecology and constructed environments has resulted in interactive performances and installations that have been exhibited in such spaces as: the UN, Union Square Park, the Chelsea Museum, Queens Museum, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Exit Art, and Flux Factory, to name a few. His work has been highlighted in The New York Times, Taipei Times, CBS, NY Art Beat, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Flavorpill, Daily News, and Art Asia Pacific magazine; and he has been the subject of interviews by Ruschell Boone for NY1 news, and Humphrey Hawksley for BBC world news, the latter concerning a program on NYC Artists whose work resists “Corruption.”
Originally stemming from a deep study of Asian philosophy, Yang’s work has since come to incorporate the actual rhythms and discords of human society, exhibiting them in terms of the waste materials wantonly discarded by human production. Finding the modern world both disturbing and entrancing, his work aims to capture the complex state of anxiety and compulsive-fascination specific to the contemplation of the problems of our age. Beginning with a concept, he fashions his ideas in terms of sculpture, multimedia installations, or performances, as the occasion calls for. Underlying each manifestation of his art is an interactive emphasis that dramatizes the divided quality of the self; and he often uses video projections to create a discordant ambience specific to the theme of each work.
At once irreverent, philosophical, and inescapably political, Chin Chih’s projects meld different technologies to give concrete form to messages and ideas. One finds in his installations LED lights and video projections satirizing the destructive behaviors of humanity; and his interactive performances generally put into play a variety of new media. The messages conveyed by his work are born of the insight that both city and nature exist within each other. And to express this, his work creates an environment that participants can move about in, emphasizing an interactive quality which cuts through the whole of his art.
|
