Stephen Chen - VUCAVU

Bio

Stephen Chen is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, having been an avant-garde concert pianist, fine-art photographer, filmmaker, performance artist, poet, composer and opera singer. His work often draws upon his diverse skills as well as his investigations in form and social concerns.

Works

BROKEN ANGEL (GEBROCHENGEL)

2015
Stephen Chen

In Frankfurt near St. Peter's church on Klaus-Mann-Platz, there is a memorial with an angel sculpture (aka Frankfurter Engel) for the homosexual men and women persecuted and murdered during the Third Reich.

DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR!

2015
Stephen Chen

Using the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America.

INTER-MEZZO

2015
Stephen Chen

Through a triptych, which treats the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America.

NORTH SOUTH

2015
Stephen Chen

Reworking recently rediscovered 15-year-old footage, NORTH SOUTH is a personal and political allegory of freedom and repression in Singapore.

PACED

2015
Stephen Chen

By exploring the different meanings of pace (as speed, as measure, as constraint), PACED investigates the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place.

STILLE.D

2015
Stephen Chen

STILLE.D is a meditation on Walter Benjamin's concepts of ruin (as nostalgia, regret, decay, loss), as well as the paradox of the bourgeois interior constituting both refuge and amplification of the alienating impulses of the city. It plays with the different definitions of “stille” such as stillness, to put (in place), a drop (of liquid), finding a corollary with Stephen Chen's musical setting of Philip Larkin's poem.

MY WOUNDED HEAD

2015
Stephen Chen

A transwoman puts on makeup. The makeup and her movements are a metaphor for her transformation, as well as the dialectical revealing and concealment of herself from the scrutiny of the outside world.