Opening: 13/06/2019 at 17:00
Period:13/06 – 30/06/2019
Open: Fri/ Sat/ Sun 12:00-17:00
Location: Stroinksbleekweg 2, 7523 ZL, Enschede, NL
Sun – 02/06/2019 14:15-14:45: I-Yen will talk about her work and hometown at the Central Library of Enschede as part of the Cultural Sunday. (More information)
Sun – 15-06-2019: I-Yen will give a tour through her exhibition at XPO.
A State of Obscurity
First we draw lines, and from these emerge a map.
Thus are borders defined.
I-Yen Chen is a visual artist currently based between Taiwan and Australia.
With her background in the humanities and personal experience, she is very interested in historical events and human mindsets. This also has endowed her with a strong and sensitive approach toward issues of culture, allowing her to remain at once open and yet critical when confronting difference. I-Yen also holds a strong sense of physical space and surroundings, thus her works often take the form of spatial installations.
In the last several years, I-Yen has been exploring and developing the concept metaphorical landscapes to present landscapes not as eternal or objective, but as a reflection of human memory and dreams. I-Yen believes that it is through the unending transformation of this space that we settle in, and find affinity with, the world around us.
Continuing to develop this concept, the exhibition A State of Obscurityfocuses on invisible borders and strives to articulate the sense of partition and belonging. What is a border? Is it a physical line, or rather a state of mind and belief? The borders I-Yen investigats travel through time and continents, meet at one point, and create a rather devious map. The exhibition involves various layers of personal life histories collected by I-Yen during her residency in Enschede. Each aspect of the personal story comes together to constitute the profile of “borders”. As always, what I-Yen does in her works is to suggest a way of seeing, whether political or aesthetic. Seeing is inventing. After all, before the first line was drawn, the world was just a state of obscurity.
I-Yen holds a Bachelor of Arts, in History from National Taiwan University. She received her Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2016. She has since then showed in galleries and art spaces around Australia and Taiwan. She is also a freelance writer and art critic.
See the Facebook event for more information
