These screenings survey the moving-image practice of Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen. Spanning Taiwan’s transition from martial law (lifted in 1987) to the present, these works trace the persistence of political violence, historical memory, and embodied perception as they reverberate through visual and sonic registers in the context of postcolonial transformation and global capitalism. Central to Chen’s practice is an investigation into reverberation – how delay, recurrence, and echo shape perceptual experience and historical consciousness. Drawing on the Buddhist concept, an intermediate, transitional state between death and rebirth, the program approaches the moving image as a threshold: a site where history, narrative, and sensation migrate between absence and emergence. For Chen, the moving image functions not as a record of events, but as a terrain where aftershocks and latent futures converge, opening space for reimagining political feeling, collective memory, and ethical attention.

Curated by Alice, Nien-pu Ko.

PROGRAM 1:
DYSFUNCTION NO. 3 (1983 (restored 2017), 10.5 min, 8mm-to-digital)
FLICKERING LIGHT (1983-84, 3.5 min, analog-video-to-digital)
LINGCHI – ECHOES OF A HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPH (2002, 21 min, Super-16mm-to-digital)

Total running time: ca. 40 min.