Taiwanese artist I-Hsuen Chen will be having his first solo show, Nessun Dorma in Taiwan. Using different art forms like opera performance, video, photography and artist book, Chen tries to explore complex dimensions between communication, understanding, and how we feel. The concept of Nessun Dorma derived from his personal experience. Lots of his friends like to tell him intimate secret, whereas the artist himself always have the feeling of not being understood. “There must be some misunderstanding, ” says Chen. He will be showing interdisciplinary works that was made while living in New York, trying to investigate the dilemma between understanding and not being understood.

Chen sang the famous aria, Nessun Dorma, which is also the work title, with new Chinese lyrics but sounded like singing in Italian. Changing the context of the aria lyrics allowed him to make a contradictory statement about communication. The singer sings whole-heartedly, and the audience loves it without knowing the fact that the Chinese lyrics are so ridiculous.

Chen also used his personal intimate memories accumulated in the two years he'd spent in the States to make the artist book, In Between. Every image’s “studium” has been intentionally positioned in the book gutter, making any facial expression invisible. The reader is then only able to peek at the abstract figures or ambiguous narrative elements at the book, but the emotion of the “unseen images” are perceived even stronger.

At the video piece I Know, Chen wrote a hundred personal things about himself, tried to read them in front of his friends, and videotaped their responses to all the intimate secrets. The video documentation allows viewers to experience the vulnerably synchronized moment, almost as if hearing a friend saying: "I know.”

Born and raised in Taiwan, Chen received an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2012. His work has been selected for the New York Photo Festival’s 2012 Invitational, his series Nowhere in Taiwan is in the Permanent Collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he was chosen as one of Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Emerging Photographers 2012. He was the 2012 New York Photography Award Student Fine Art Category winner, and he also won Jen Bekman Gallery’s Blurb book prize and a Hey Hot Shot! Honorable Mention.

Chen’s work has been published in magazines and online, including Photograph Magazine, Conveyor Magazine, PHOTONEWS(Germany), THE NEW YORKER PHOTO BOOTH, American Photo, and CCNY blog. His work has also been shown at hpgrp GALLERY NEW YORK, Foley Gallery, Ed. Varie Gallery, 25CPW Gallery, and ISE Foundation in New York.

*image (left)
Nessun Dorma, 2012
Performance, music sheet, video documentations, and single-channel video (color, sound)
© Chen I-Hsuen
courtesy of the artist
To watch the video, please click here.