The Artist on Her Creative Approach

"Experience" contains many stages and levels. Like a seed, it grows and changes with the passage of time; an initial triggering experience undergoes fermentation from an objective memory into subjective perceptions as it interacts with other memories and insights.

Responding to a deep-seated desire, I visited Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain), and as I roved among its landscapes, their touching beauty planted a disturbing seed in my heart. For a time, I was worried about what kind of artistic medium or creative approach I could use in to present these scenes: the process of filming and editing could bring the essentials of its scenery into focus; the vocabulary of abstraction was one through which I could honestly reflect my emotional excitement; a pictorial depiction at the appropriate time could transmit its charm; animation and installations could recreate its sense of space and atmosphere. Perhaps only breaking down the barriers between forms could allow me a truly free and unrestrained presentation of all sides of my experience.

The German composer Richard Wagner once said, "Only uniting the separate branches of Art in a total art work ("Gesamtkunstwerk") can satisfy man's artistic needs: because each separate artistic faculty of man is bounded, and none can completely express all the artist's capabilities; but the total art work is free, allowing one to use of all one's capacities, to become self-completing." In "Representation of Phenomenon: The Huang Shan Experience," I chose a combination of many different visual elements and techniques, linking video footage and paintings of Huang Shan with my creative process in the studio, melding them into a complete presentation in which I hoped to reconstruct the multitude of feelings and impressions with which Huang Shan left me. This is a new experiment for me, one I hope will be the door to future of greater freedom, and through which viewers can gain insight into my own view of Huang Shan.
Jenny Chen, New York, summer 2005