BIO:

WANG Chen (b. 1991) is an artist working across digital video, performance, sculpture, drawing, costume fabrication, and sound. Their work constructs spaces where physical labor and digital image-making collide, populated by hybrid beings that resist resolution and held together by friction rather than coherence.

Wang holds a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (2014) and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2018). Solo exhibitions include Arario Gallery in Shanghai, Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, Shanghai, and Tallinn, Roswell Museum in New Mexico, Lauren Powell Project in Los Angeles, 212 Photography Festival in Istanbul, and Crosstown Arts in Memphis.

Fellowships and residencies include the New York Foundation for the Arts (Interdisciplinary), MacDowell Fellowship, Roswell Artist in Residency, Golden Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. They have delivered visiting artist lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, New Mexico State University, Parsons, Bennington College, Cleveland Institute of Art and among others.

STATEMENT:

A stable image has already decided what it is. I am more interested in images that are still in the process of becoming.

I place things together and let them stay as they are. A costumed body alongside a hand-drawn figure, physical labor translated into digital space. The friction between them is not a problem to fix. It is how the space gets built.

My process begins with physical labor. I paint by hand, build costumes, perform in front of a green screen inside a space that does not yet exist. As my body becomes layered into the digital space, something changes. It becomes lighter, less fixed, starting to drift away from me. My response is to keep adding, texture, density, resistance, until what appears in the work cannot just float away. I am not trying to close that gap. I am trying to make sure what lives inside it has weight.

The space is swarming with hybrid beings, part human, part animal, part myth, carrying different histories and desires that I refuse to let resolve. The viewer's eye has to keep moving. There is no center in these worlds because there has never been one in mine.

I use control to produce instability. I have never experienced a settled identity, so I do not make work that arrives at one.