Jessi Ali LIN & Hsin-Yu CHEN

Jessi Ali Lin, b.1993, USA/Taiwan & Hsin-Yu Chen, b.1994, Taiwan

Jessi Ali Lin mainly works with sculpture, video, and performance. The positionality of bodies and the multivalence of identity are situated at the core of her creative processes. The artist draws inspirations from feminist history, Minimalism, and performance art, examining the relationship between self-performance and the fragmented nature of identity within the social and built environment. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Hsin-Yu Chen is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Taipei. Working with experimental film, documentary, and moving images, his practice focuses on how subjectivity is reflected and constructed in a transitional space between seeing and being seen. Themed with border landscapes, visual technologies, and embodied knowledge, the artist explores the intersection of body and political subject.

Semiotics of the Home reminds one of Semiotics of the Kitchen, seminal work by American artist Martha Rosler. The artists collaborated with an excavator operator in an attempt to complete various housework with industrial machines. The value of housework is oftentimes overlooked in the labor system nowadays. Yet, it is an activity essential to maintaining human life. A strong contrariety is formed between these activities at the construction site and the destruction process where the excavator is involved. Meanwhile, amidst such tension, one can experience the value judgment in everyday life, the absurdities with the lines of binary oppositions, such as public/private, masculine/feminine, system/individual, and so forth. (S.H)