Ting-Jung Chen
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1985
Taiwan
Gallery Vacancy
In the interactive sound installation Dislocated Voice (2022), three microphones attached with white sculptures shaped from the grip of a hand symbolizeing a hand clenching a weapon swirl while suspended by steel cables at the centre of the space--alternating their paths at intervals according to the audience’s physical presence and the device’s in-built constraint. The work presents the artist’s field research in Kinmen, a group of islands located off the coast of Mainland China and the shoreline of Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait. Chen incorporates the whistling melody of “Good Night Song” (1979) with samples from the different wind soundscapes in Kinmen that are formed by historic buildings and facilities evident of the warfare (for example, the sound of wind howling from a bullet hole of a fort) and composes them into a dynamic sound piece. "Good Night Song" (1979) was played as the last song of the 70s’ every day’s program from the broadcasting wall from KMT-- a message supposed for China, but had been often blown back to Kinmen and become the lullabies for the local people.
The overhanging microphones relentlessly swirl in circular motions and record sounds from the speaker as well as the live environment. Their movements create a sound field that variates and fluctuates due to the constantly changing distance between each speaker and microphone. The whistling echoes and ripples in incessant sound waves, fading but submerging one another to become an infinite cycle that embraces viewers while expanding itself. The fragmented message added up, and through them, a physical feedback noise occurred in the venue, becoming a sonic weapon. The participants co-created a time cycle in which memory traces are infinitely captured, segregated, and dislocated.
In the sound installation You Are the Only One I Care About (whisper), the artist has reimagined the enormous broadcast walls that both socialist and capitalist countries in East Asia erected along their borders to flood their enemy neighbors with slogans and songs from the better world.
The installation features a 90‘s Taiwanese POP song which is re-composed into an 8 minutes a cappella piece and performed by an opera singing duet. The new composition is developed from "I Only Care About You“ (我只在乎你) by Teresa Teng, whose songs were used as sonic weapons by the KMT against China during the 70s’ – 90s’. Her songs were played through the broadcast wall as part of the Taiwanese propaganda campaign aimed at the costal cities of China.
This new a cappella version was composed with the principle of Bach‘s "Gefüge." Every half hour the audience encounter the song in the air. The two professional opera singers‘ voices overlay each other, redouble in the air and occupy the space. The artist conveys a vivid impression of a peculiar phenomenon spawned by propaganda strategies between the poles of projection and appropriation.
Her sculptural and musical composition prompts wide ranging reflections on the transformation of modes of the dissemination of ideology. It is specific to a place and time in today’s global mobile society and draws discussion to conflicts in today‘s society with growing political populism and xenophobia.
The 6-channel sound installation Vanishing Point (2022) is transformed from a special induction loop system. This particular communication technology is commonly used to process informational sounds in public spaces for the use of hearing-impaired individuals with hearing aids. By employing this specialized technology, Chen Ting-Jung attempts to create a comprehensive ultrasonic processing that goes beyond the universal practicality yet emphasizes the intimacy within individuals and between human and machines through interactions, exploiting the concepts of soundscape and collective emotional tonality.
Vanishing Point (2022) delves into the discussion of soundscape within a physical space. Established by the cyclic constraints of audio signals and the intersection of various loop channels, the sounds transmitted to the audiences through headphones connecting to special wireless receivers are all different. The listening experience and the received content depend on the movements and trajectory of individual interactions in the exhibition space. This makes the sound conveyed in the headphones unique to each viewer, delivering a personal and encrypted message that belongs solely to the individual, creating a realm of audio poetry.
During the Cross-Strait propaganda in 1970s, Radio Taiwan International (RTI) would broadcast songs by female singers as an instrument of implantation. The artist collates the most commonly used terms appeared in the lyrics and imitates an artificial intelligence voice according to the phonetic features during the sonic warfare, constructing a one-way dialogue and rhythm that occupies the physical and acoustic space. In addition, Chen adds 2 channels of sine wave frequency to mimic the sound and dynamics of a real female voice.
Besides from the headphones and radio receivers, the visual layout of the cables in the inductive loop system displayed on the celling corresponds to the idea of soundscape. The blown glass sculpture series Speaking Length (2022) serves as an illusion and representation of the role of the “speaker” in the room. Mouth, as a tool, shapes the blown glass and its adjustment in space between inhalation and exhalation, guiding the audience to perceive the space and the sound installation Vanishing Point (2022) in a sensual manner.
If She Is Not Sitting In The Room (2021), is an 8-channel sound installation with spatial intervention. In this work, Chen samples from 32 songs performed by female singers that were considered patriotic or banned in Taiwan between 1932-1971. Based on their homogeneous lyrics and the inscribed female role, the artist composes a new love song examining political propaganda and the gender role of female identity. Besides the fragments of the assembled lyrics, Chen attempts to synchronize the different tonal characteristics of the singers‘ voices into a harmonic series, ultimately bringing all the voices together into the root of this harmonic series.
The 8-channel sound piece sings towards the audience from different directions of the venue through 14 speakers embedded in the schematic wooden construction/wooden walls. Chen transforms similar lyrics from the original songs into a sonett poem, converts them into Morse code patterns, and brands them on the wooden boards with laser cut. These seared cutting patterns allow the 8-channel sound piece to flow out from the 14 speakers. From the audiences’ perspective, one might interpret them as secret language or visual decorations. The viewers are invited to interact with these movable boards, the second layer of the wall construction, thereby controlling the sound and resonance of the room.
The project deals with the propaganda instrumentalization and objectification of the female voice in different epochs. It examines and deconstructs the given images of femininity and the ideology represented by them, the instrumentalized sonic weapon, and their implied complexity. The work follows Chen’s focus on collective memory, identity, and their vectorial relationships to political propaganda, empowerment and transmission.
Chen Ting-Jung, born in 1985 in Taipei, Taiwan, now lives and works in Taipei and Vienna. She graduated with a diploma in Fine Arts at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in 2018; a BFA in Fine Arts at HFBK Hamburg in 2015; and a BA in Philosophy at National Taiwan University in 2009. Her artistic practice concerns historiography and cultural-political semiotics, with a special focus on collective memories, appropriation, empowerment processes, and political identity. By reproducing artifacts of the cultural industry, representing ideologies, and showing their relationships to human beings, the artist explores the transformation of identity and turns the overlapping, mingling cultures into a spatial atlas.
Her solo exhibitions include: This Is A Complex Sentence., Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2022; Wind Arrows On A Corner Side, Digital Art Center, Taipei, 2022; Harmonielehre, TheCube Project Space, Taipei, 2021; and Keep me close to you, with Hui Ye, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2018. Selected group exhibitions include: Challenging Orders, Vienna Art Week, Vienna, 2022; Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, 2022; Nostalgia Is a Waving Flag: Taiwan and Hong-Kong Video Art Exhibition, Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, 2022; Foams, Live Forever Foundation, Taichung, 2022; Final Projects: Group XLIX, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, 2020; Sisyphus Ver. 20.18, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2018; and Double Façade: Multiple Ways to Encounter the Other, Koganecho AMC, Yokohama, 2017. She will have her solo exhibition at Gallery Vacancy in 2023.
Chen Ting-Jung has been awarded various prizes, scholarships, and fellowships. She is the recipient of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, 2023; the Fostering Prize for Fine Arts of City Vienna, 2022; the Visual Arts Scholarship from the Federal Chancellery of Austria, 2020; the Visual Arts Grant from the National Culture and Arts Foundation of Taiwan, 2020; the MAK-Schindler Scholarship, 2019; the Kunsthalle Wien Prize, 2018; the Koganecho Bazaar Residency Fellowship, 2017; and the Judges’ Award of the Taipei Art Awards, 2015. Her work has been published by Taipei Fine Arts Museum (This Is A Complex Sentence., 2022) and Kunsthalle Wien (Ting-Jung Chen. You Are the Only One I Care About (whisper), 2022).
Image copyrights:
Dislocated Voice, 2022: courtesy of the Artist and Digital Art Center, Taipei
You Are the Only One I Care About (whisper), 2018: courtesy of the Artist and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
Vanishing Point, 2022: courtesy of the Artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei
If She Is Not Sitting In The Room, 2021: courtesy of the Artist and TheCube Project Space, Taipei