Artists: Chen Chieh-jen in conversation with Meiya Cheng and Jeanette Pacher

Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the artist Chen Chieh-jen and the curator Meiya Cheng and the curator Jeanette Pacher. It was conducted in Mandarin and recorded on June 30, 2023 in the context of the exhibition:

Chen Chieh-jen
Worn Away
30.6. – 3.9.2023

A long-time denizen of Taiwan’s art world, Chen Chieh-jen’s work from the 1980s to the present has been exhibited internationally. To the local scene, he became renowned for Dysfunction No. 3, an interventionist performance on Taipei’s streets in the early 1980s. Wandering along dressed as hooded inmates, Chen and his contemporaries rejoinded government control through civil disobedience, forging a public sphere during times of oppression: From 1949 to 1987, the country was subjected to martial law, an emergency state governance banning free speech and public assembly. Distancing Taiwan from the neighboring People’s Republic of China, the innately anti-communist martial law coerced power through a one-party system, with the military and secret police assuming control. In Chen’s multifaceted work, the Japanese rule over Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century, the country’s kinship with the US during the Cold War, and its present-day neoliberalization feature as periodic points of departure. More

Meiya Cheng is a curator from Taipei. Before co-founding the Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC), an experimental art association and independent art space in 2010, she worked as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, MoCA, Taipei. As chair of the TCAC association from 2012 to 2014, she initiated exhibitions, forums, residencies and publications with contributions of Asian art workers that were presented in Taipei, New York, and Southeast Asia. She co-curated Trading Futures with Pauline Yao at Taipei Contemporary Art Center (2012), the  6^th Queens International with Hitomi Iwasaki at Queens Museum, New York (2013), and The Great Ephemeral with the New Museum team at the New Museum, New York (2015). Her research on Southeast Asian art was presented in the exhibition Public Spirits at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdów Castle, Warsaw (2016).

Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Secession and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna / Site-Specific Art department. She was part of the editorial team of Ö1 Kunstradio and began working in the curatorial field at Kunsthalle Wien.

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Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Meiya Cheng
Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Produced by Christian Lübbert