LIANG-JUNG CHEN
WE LOVE WOMEN
PHOTOS BY CLAIRE O'KEEFE
It was the point in the evening when the candlewax trickling onto the dinner table had formed an irresistible pool, and Liang-Jung Chen sat stirring her fingers in its warm oil. Her mind had drifted from the conversation. “I was thinking, how could I push the limit of wax as a material to more of an extreme?”
Liang-Jung followed that thought all the way to her installation Ebb is to flow as wax is to wane, building, drip by drip, a scaffold-like structure of elongated beeswax candles whose limbs stretched and evaporated with the impermanence of the material. “A lot of the ideas for my installations have very humble beginnings of me just fiddling, toying around with one specific material in my everyday life,” says the artist. “And then I just feel like: ‘Oh, actually, this is very interesting. And sometimes, very performative."
Liang-Jung’s deep interest in materials stems from her background as an industrial designer. Born and raised in Taiwan, she studied industrial design in Taipei before moving to London in 2018 to work at a furniture design firm. As a designer, Liang-Jung felt stifled engaging with her creations through a computer screen. She wanted to touch them, to activate them with her body, and gradually found a new medium in installation art. “Installation is very naturally interactive,” she explains. “For example, the candle installation. You need to light it, and you need to make it, maintain it. There’s just a lot of movement involved, and I think I want to include that in the presentation.”
It's harder to dip one’s fingers in the artist’s current fixation: electricity. She’d become unusually aware of electricity’s presence on trips to Taiwan, continually confronted with sockets and voltages unfit for her UK devices. “It made me start to pay attention to how electricity is flowing through spaces.” Soon, she couldn’t help but sense the silent yet constant hum of an electrical current. “And our life literally depends on it.”
Liang-Jung’s studio, located in a fire station turned live-work art residency in East London, is currently overtaken by a network of colorful cables. Nimble and unruly, they draw three-dimensional scribbles in the air. Along the web are circuit boards, earphones, mismatched plugs, or tiny, flickering LED lights—moments of everyday life. “With this installation, I think I'm visualizing electricity.” She continues: “The fact that electricity is flowing everywhere around us, but it's not something we think about. And I'm trying to visualize it in a poetic structure.” The show, Open circuit and short circuit test, was exhibited in July at Vasto, the Barcelona gallery representing the artist. On its first three nights, Liang-Jung activated her installation in a performance charged by an electric soundscape, where movement artists became temporary nodes in the circuit.
“My ultimate image of an art practice is a holistic one,” says Liang-Jung. “Most of my installation requires activation.” She perceives the body as matter— “Your muscle is also a material”—and, where possible, works with choreographers to bring movement into her installations.
In Liang-Jung’s video performance Regarding the retractability of boundaries, a dancer engages with a matrix of retractable barriers—the kind that form lines at airports and protect art from trespassers—zigzagging like lasers across a room. The question is one of control: does the body lay the boundary, or the boundary guide the movement? And the project, once more, begins at the artifact. “I find this mechanism of the retractable barrier really interesting because there’s a spring in the cassette. And I was just admiring this invention,” says the artist, describing how satisfying she found the roll’s click into place. “But then again, each material, there's always so much more to them. Like this border system, if we were to explore further, we could dive into the line of authority and control. Like, who gets to impose this border onto the public?” Meanwhile, “this playfulness in it, this retractability and flexibility it has—it’s actually, at the same time, very performative.”
Liang-Jung is still exploring how to wholly immerse herself in her art, both in her installations, through performance, and in the art-making practice itself: since leaving design, she is relatively new to life as a full-time artist. To that end, living with eleven other artists has become an anchor for Liang-Jung. Her fellow residents help her find stability in an otherwise vertiginous field, from holding morning workouts on the terrace to nurturing a general sense of camaraderie. “Everyone’s going through a lot of ups and downs as an artist. And I think that's quite helpful to know, that I'm not alone facing a lot of instabilities in our career.”
Now, once a month, the firehouse residents gather in Liang-Jung’s studio for a supper club, or what she calls “experimental dining experiences.” “I guess it’s where my everyday life and my installation meet,” she says. “It’s very interactive and sociable.” Each evening, the group engages in a new cooking endeavor. “I have to admit, the quality of the food isn't that great. It’s just normal food,” Liang-Jung laughs. It’s more about bringing creativity to the cooking process and presentation. And research is always on the table: “The other day, I was hanging some rice dumplings in the back, and then I was like: ‘Oh, this is actually interesting. And I feel like, actually, this might inform my future installation.’”