Transactions, 2008
Hong Kong 2016
Chi-Wen Gallery
Video/Film
Single-channel Video, HD, Colour, Stereo Sound, Mandarin & Taiwanese Dialogue, English Subtitles, 7min 42sec
0In a sewing workshop, the making of a piece of clothing is filmed in detail while we listen to a phone conversation between a Taiwanese mother and her daughter, the director of this film. The mother spends her days and nights toiling away so she can afford to send her daughter to school in the United States. They are discussing the credit card bill. Not only their physical distance, but especially their emotional one manifests itself in an increasingly emphatic way. Their worlds are light-years away from one another, which leads to miscommunication and lack of understanding. A talk between two people who love each other is reduced to a business transaction; after all, the language of the dollar is universal. Transactions is about the boundaries of a love that supposedly knows no bounds.
Yin-Ju Chen (b.1977) studied video and performance art at the San Francisco Art Institute in the New Genres Department, currently lives and works in Taipei. She was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has participated in many important international exhibitions and film festivals, such as “Traversing the Phantasm”, Forum Expanded at 66th Berlin Film Festival (Germany, 2016), "Social Factory”, Shanghai Biennial (2014), “A Journal of the Plague Year”, (Para/Site, HK, 2013), "Modern Monsters Death and Life of Fiction”, Taipei Biennial(2012), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2011), EMAF - European Media Art Festival (2011), “Multitud Singular”, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Spain, 2009), International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (NL, 2008), and San Francisco International Film Festival (USA, 2006).
Yin-Ju Chen has invited to participate “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”, 20th Biennial of Sydney (AU, 2016) and Liverpool Biennial (UK, 2016).