All posts tagged: Joseph Chen

Virtue Village

Published by Brady Ng

Even in the most diverse communities, clusters of people must share culture, space and experiences for bonds to form. As individuals mingle and interact with each other, their identities are sculpted by external forces. We may conform to norms established by others, or rebel to smash the status quo and shatter homogeneity.  Village Porn, the first major solo presentation by the artist duo Virtue Village, formed by Joseph Chen and Cas Wong, deploys the visual grammar of BDSM, auto repair and shibari, layered with urban grime, queerness and anal sex, all dropped into PHD Group’s raw space in Wanchai. The show started with RUSH (all works 2022), a digital print that spans more than 5.5 metres to present an orgiastic mishmash of sparse references pointing in different conceptual directions, with a couple of visuals that thread through other works in the show – flames and hearts.  More interesting was the physical presentation of RUSH at PHD. A shallow bed of dirt ran along the wall on which the print hung, with several green plants situated …

Joseph Chen 陳敬元

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Christy Lee /  In 2018, Joseph Chen was sauntering through the street markets in Sham Shui Po when he happened upon a stack of 50 hard drives. The Hong Kong artist bought all of them for “under HK$100” and extracted the deluge of personal images and documents.  That exercise culminated in Shameplant in Glory Hole, a series of performances, a series of performances, a research group and exhibitions from 2019-21 exploring the idea of “second-hand memories”. The latest event was a solo exhibition, Shameplant in Glory Hole, that ran from June 19 to July 17 at Videotage. At the dim art space, one sees as well as enters Chen’s immersive installation, where 8-10 terabytes of “second-hand memories” have been collaged into a psychedelic whole. Walls are plastered with a mishmash of images and documents, from selfies to song lyrics to travel photos to pornographic images, while the objects in the space offer a glimpse into lives, real or imaginary, underlined by the artist’s predilection for juxtapositions.  Having kicked off his career as a video artist, Chen is increasingly …

Hong Kong – Tales of the City

Published by Artomity Magazine

Denny Dimin Gallery & Videotage / New York / Mar 13 – May 2, 2020 / Mimi Wong / Even before the pandemic struck, the dystopian visions and reimagined histories presented in Hong Kong – Tales of the City felt extremely relevant and timely. Media works from nine artists belonging to Hong Kong’s oldest video collective address a range of vital issues, from civic engagement to the impact of globalisation on contemporary urban life. The collaboration between Videotage and Denny Dimin Gallery opened in New York just as the city headed into lockdown. As part the ongoing effort to prevent the further spread of Covid-19, the gallery’s temporary closure meant that the group exhibition could only be viewed online. Instead of moving through rooms with monitors and headsets, one simply had to scroll down the page to navigate the three parts devised by curator Isaac Leung. With most run times clocking in at 10 minutes or under, the videos could comfortably be watched in one sitting. The first section, Publicness, introduced the notion of a collective consciousness through …