As an artist I find the uncertainty of ceramics exhilarating; it is essential to understand how the world is constantly in the process of creating itself. Things happen spontaneously; when I look deeply, I realize there is nothing permanent and constant. By nature clay is a very tactile and sensitive material, it remembers touch, and records fleeting memories and emotions. After firing, the creative moment and emotional fragments are frozen in time, which results in a mysterious beauty. This aspect of clay continually changes the way I see myself and how I make art. Clay has so many possibilities, I can sculpt, glaze or paint on the surface, leaving me with endless ideas. The communication between myself and clay reflects the reality and desire of my life. By furthering ceramic material exploration to video projection, the interdisciplinary crossing of mediums, it endows my work with profound emotion. Experimentation is essential for innovation, which spurs one to push the boundaries and investigate different types of surfaces.
My work attempts to reveal the profound paradox of life, the duality of existence regarding life and death. I look into human nature, and material to continue the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, to implement a balance between the inner feelings of myself and the outside world. The balance is when it comes to my creation of work, I am deliberately introduced to a contradiction of nature, culture, and material. My performance and action arts express individuals’ intense emotions and experiences. Using body and memory as main material as well as language and behavior, are always including multi-dimensional absurdity, contradiction, deconstruction and repeating.
— Yang Chen
Bio