video
A Peaceful Strike
A portrait of a lively street - the Dapperstraat in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This 3-channel video work is commissioned by the Karel Appel House OPEN. All the images were shot at the Dappermarkt during the garbage strike of 2010.
"On Monday 25 April, precisely 90 years after the birth of the famous painter, Karel Appel, who studied at the Rijksakademie, the Karel Appelhuis is open to the public as the start of a public programme on the theme 'Mijn omgeving' (My environment). Resident artist Yin-Ju Chen is presenting a new video work for the occasion. Open: 25 April from 12 – 17 PM, Dapperstraat 7, Amsterdam. " - excerpted from Rijksakademie News April/May 2011
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| Part one, 8'03", mute A long and slow shot of a city worker cleaning a public billboard - the steam creates a beautiful cloud between the trees in a small street. A beautiful yet a very common moment, almost unnoticeable for a city person. The video is in slow motion. At first viewers could mistake it as a photograph, but in time the steam cloud is visibly, yet slowly increasing in size. |
Part two, 1'34", stereo An offbeat but regular neighbor that lives in the Dappermarkt is the crane. They were the actually the happiest ones during the strike, profiting from food left in the garbage. This part of work is in a very brisk rhythm, with the original sound recording from the market. |
Part three, 2'38", stereo This section shows a series of images of garbage piling up in the Dapperstraat, with dialogues between the curious neighbors and the artist. |
End Transmission
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40th International Film Festival Rotterdam Tiger Award nominee for short film |
Strange messages are sent to humanity. They are frightening and poetical at the same time; they report of a takeover and the end of it all. The messages alternate with ominous black-and-white images of lifeless cities under control, frozen industrial landscapes, sterile laboratory machinery and nature in an abandoned state. "We were here before you". "Fear is natural". A final warning: the planet is re-colonized, and human life only seems possible in the protected, artificial and enclosed environment of a large-scale indoor resort. Stephen Hawking once wrote, "If aliens ever visit us, the outcome will be much as when Christopher Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans". In this case, who are the colonizers and who are the natives? |
 Video - 4 min. excerpt |
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Lessons of the Blood
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More info, click here. Watch the trailer, click here. |
Focusing on the history and victims of Japanese biological warfare, "Lessons of the Blood" is a meditation on propaganda, historical revisionism, and the legacy of World War II in China. "Lessons" highlights how nationalism and the United States have influenced the Sino-Japanese history conflict, and how governments, ideology, and propaganda affect the reception and perception of "historical truth." |
Dogs of Straw
11 min | HD | Color | Stereo | 2009 |
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Anchored by an excerpt from the 6th century BC text, the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), Dogs of Straw is both a portrayal of Taiwan's 2008 presidential election and a meditation on democracy, manipulation, and nationalism.
In Taiwan's fledgling democracy, it is only during a presidential election when the "people exists" as a formless abstract multitude removed from concrete social structures. *in collaboration with James T. Hong |
Transactions
7 min 42 sec | HD | Color | Stereo | 2008
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 Video preview |
In 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. - International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2008 |
CH3CH2OH
5 min | HD | B&W | Stereo | 2007
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Two memories of alcohol abuse -- reconstructed from found sound tracks, and put into a metaphorical image montage. Two women from different generations talk about their life struggles and how they became alcoholics.
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Three Decades of Static
4 min | HD | Color | Stereo | No dialogue | 2006 |
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This video work combines both performance and video art. The artist portrays a state of stress -- the stress from self-pressure and the fear of turning 30 years old. Using a unigue architectural structure and video techonology, the artist imagines three decades of herself.
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Suprematist Kapital
5 min | Video | Color | Stereo | No dialogue | 2006 |
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A symbolic history of Kapital -- a symbolic history of the West. Inspired by Kasimir Malevich's minimalist artworks and the struggles for resources in the age of peak oil, Suprematist Kapital was born of the want to create a visual artwork that could be displayed on many different-sized mediums regardless of resolution, e.g., theater screens, mobile devices, ipod's, etc. When once technology as progress was an end in itself, it became the handmaiden of capitalist accumulation and war, and is now a form of capital itself in the age of peak oil. *in collaboration with James T. Hong |
Bored of Boredom
2 min | B&W | stereo | MiniDV | 2005 |
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An artist faces her banal daily life. |
Total Mobilization
8 minutes | color | stereo | MiniDV | 2005-2007 |
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Migration is fact; immigration is destiny. The disappearance of White America could mean the end of the United States of America as we have known it. The West could be reduced to Europe and few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without America, the West becomes a miniscule and declining part of the world’s population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of the Eurasian land mass. *in collaboration with James T. Hong |
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2 min | color | stereo | MiniDV | 2002 Nature is a circle – those who damage the environment will eventually be damaged themselves. Video preview |
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2 min | color | stereo | MiniDV | 2002 Video preview |
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2 min | color | stereo | MiniDV | 2002 When one is underwater, one thinks only about staying alive. Escaping for a while is escaping from the material world, escaping from the prison of language, from boring mundane tasks, from personal doubts, and from money. Video preview |