Stephen Chen
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
odology defied boundaries , his commitment to the dialectic , and his prescient concerns about the relationship of art and capitalist production ( whereby even the avant-garde gets reduced to mere style for aesthetic consumption ).
By the time I left graduate school , I had synthesized and structured my artistic practice into the dictum of Aesth ( Ethics ); whereby every aesthetic decision is a political one . This is why I conceive of my work as allegory , and try to uncover adjacencies and connections beyond the basic idea , to find some way to recontextualize them or distill them into the work . At the same time I don ’ t want the work to become a jumble of random tangents , so I strive for what I term “ Complex Simplicity ” – the work appears simple and direct on the surface , but encodes multiple meanings and relationships within .
For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected BOUNDED NATURE , an extremely interesting series , that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article , and which is both a commentary and metaphor for urban dwellers ’ ritualized and cultivated unconscious of their impacts on the larger environment in their everyday actions . When walking our readers through the genesis of this project , we would like to ask you what is the role of chance in your process : how much improvisation is important for you ?
The genesis of BOUNDED NATURE came about during a dry spell in my photoraphy . A lot of my early work in the medium was in fine-art landscape and urban photography and I stopped taking photographs because I had become somewhat jaded - my immediate surroundings didn ’ t seem as interesting or inspiring compared to other places . I tried to kick myself out of it by working on a series with the idea of focusing on little moments of everyday beauty , like a dandelion poking out of a sidewalk crack . However , I eventually abandoned it out of frustration as