Joseph Chen: Shameplant in Glory Hole
Visual Arts
Description
Description
Videotage is pleased to present Shameplant in Glory Hole, a solo exhibition of Joseph Chen. The exhibition features the artist’s multifaceted works, including videos, images, audio, installations, and archival materials. These works result from artistic research on personal archives that explore the relationship between matter and time.
Shameplant in Glory Hole presents the final phase of the eponymous research project by the artist. It originated from retrieving abandoned data from second-hand hard drive disks found in the Sham Shui Po flea market while drawing inspiration from philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s theory on the inseparable relationship between technology and memory.
In three years, the artist conducted continuous recovery and research of data in personal archives. The textual, audial, and visual data have been transformed from official documents and daily consumption records through the artistic interventions. The artist juxtaposes these externalized memories of others with his own uninscribable, unmemorable or unforgettable internal memories in Videotage’s exhibition space, where he uses artificial and organic materials, fluids, lights, and digital objects to resurrect a private and intimate temporal and spatial experience.
A medium to people’s memories, the exhibition stands between voyeurism and exhibitionism. In the social media and dataveillance era, Shameplant in Glory Hole invites viewers to peek through, eavesdrop on, sneak in, and stalk the micro-histories of familiar strangers.
In the exhibition, each piece is loosely connected to a habit, dialogue, ritual, trauma, trip, or moment that recollects the speakable/unspeakable and visible/invisible stories. For the artist, summoning the pasts of others is reflexive. The phantom possessing the artworks also activates the viewers’ imagination to collage, montage, and assemble an intertwined sensory and emotional order between themselves and the exhibition time-space.
Info
Indoor
Local