text by Sophie Mclntyre
Different people at different moments in different locations. These pictures are traces of life and memory. -- Chen Shun-Chu
For Chen Shun-Chu, family and home environment form the nucleus of one's identity Having been born and raised on Penghu (Pescadores), which lies approximately half way between Taiwan and China, Chen habitually returns to his home and family which are the central point of reference in his works.
For more than seven years, Chen has faithfully devoted himself to creating what he describes as a "family album" (1992-95), from which the series, "Family Parade" first evolved. Using photography as his primary medium of expression, Chen took thousands of 8"x10" black and white portraits of nine family members. Each portrait was taken at various angles: front-on, back-on and close-up, at different times and in different locations. Chen has carefully cropped each photograph, so that each subject, compressed within identical metal frames, conveys a sense of uniformity as they stand to attention, motionless, expressionless, frozen in time and space.
Returning to the harsh, dry and desolate island of Penghu, Chen then plants these photo portraits in an uncultivated peanut field, or places them on the walls of a derelict house, or crumbling building: vestiges of life on this windswept island. Like the waves of foreign explorers and traders who once visited Penghu en route, the artist travels around this island, locating and mapping sites which are now all but forgotten. In perfect parallel lines, Chen carefully arranges the one thousand framed portraits at his chosen location, photographs the work in situ, and then proceeds to remove the images, leaving the site in its original abandoned state. This four-stage process, of selecting, situating, documenting, and dismantling the installation, is essentially ritualistic, and for Chen signifies the re-generative cycle of life and death.
In his most recent work titled, "Portrait of a Family I & II", (1998) Chen creates an assemblage of memorabilia: faded black and white photographs, a pair of trousers, a 5 watt light bulb, and a old electric cord, which for this artist invokes memories of his grandparents, and of the era in which they lived. During the 1960s, when these photographs were taken, consumer goods and resources, such as electricity, were still extremely limited and were used sparingly in Taiwan. Ceramic tiles, such as those which adorn the frames of these works, were commonly used as an inexpensive means to cover and decorate the floors, walls and often the outside of buildings in Taiwan. While these works evoke a mood of nostalgia and melancholy there is also a deeper philosophical meaning as Chen re-collects and re-constructs the past and present, and in doing so, explores notions of identity and memory. |
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