Classroom use

Arts & Activities, April, 2004 by Marjorie Cohee Manifold

THINGS TO LEARN

* Jin-shiow Chen was born in 1965 in Chang-Hua, located in rural central Taiwan, the Republic of China. As a child, Chen often helped her four older sisters and their parents with the necessary chores of cooking, cleaning, sewing and tending the family vegetable garden. When not busy with chores or schoolwork, Chen played outdoors in the fields and farmlands. These childhood experiences strongly influenced Chen's present-day ideas about art and art making.

* Chen began her artistic career as an oil painter, but soon found that two-dimensional, self-contained canvases could not evoke a sense of being surrounded by her art. Flat canvases demanded visual focus; Chen felt this isolated them and distanced her from intimate interaction with them. She wanted to be in the site of art, working in living or organic materials. She wanted to smell and touch her art and experience the empty spaces between their visible aspects. She wanted her works to seem natural, recessive and environmental, "like vines creeping over ruined walls."

So Chen began creating site-specific installation art. This meant the spaces her artworks occupied were taken into consideration when the works were planned. The space occupied by the art became part of the art. Some of her pieces were designed to fill warehouses, hang from several-story-high atriums, or crisscross the spaces of an outdoor market. Other pieces were small enough to fit in a corner of a room or cover a tiny bit of wall space. This idea--that the spaces her works occupied were as important as the visible or tangible forms of her art--was indicative of Chen's cultural heritage.

* The ancient Chinese notion of Tao still asserts that opposing energies of nature must be in balance in order for harmony to be maintained. In art this means the visible form, or "Yang," of a work must be kept in balance by its "Yin," or invisible, negative spaces, in order for the work to appear harmonious.

* Chen's works of art are not intended to last for long periods of time. Because organic materials are often used as structural forms of the installation, some of the materials may start to deteriorate even as they are being applied to or molded into art. This forces Chen to act very quickly when putting an exhibition together. Sometimes her parents and sisters help her construct her works, or student art teachers from Chia-Yi University, where Chen is an associate professor of art education, might volunteer their assistance. Chen considers these collaborative processes to be an important part of her installation art, because she understands art as a shared experience.

* Chen likes to think of her artworks as being "viewer friendly." She wants viewers to feel comfortable about entering into and interacting with her art. In fact, Chen plans her artworks as audience participation pieces. She wants viewers to enter into the works in order to smell, touch, and experience the positive forms and negative spaces from many different viewpoints. Viewers of the works may sometimes act as co-creators of her works. For example, in Transmission of Memory, another of Chen's installation pieces, viewers were invited to take a piece of chocolate from a candy box and, in exchange, print a memory on a piece of paper and place it in the space once occupied by the candy.

For Breezes in May, Chen hung long skeins of wool as permeable walls crisscrossing the site space. Flour blown over the wool caught in its fibers or sprinkled down to the floor. When a tour group of school children began playing with the flour dust that had sprinkled down from the strung wool, Chen documented their play in photographs. She wanted us to recognize their interaction with the exhibit as an important part of her art.

THINGS TO DO IN SCHOOL

* Compare and contrast the materials used and ideas engendered by Jin-shiow Chen with those of Nancy Graves (see Sept. 2003 issue of Arts & Activities).

* Discuss or debate the role of collaboration in the planning, making and viewing of art.

* Have students consider how Jin-shiow Chen creates art in a way similar to the way a gardener creates a garden. She plans where objects may be placed or planted. She may add moisture and artificial light in order to speed up or manipulate natural processes and effects; but beyond that her art, like a garden, develops naturally without her controlling it. The objects of her installations go through processes of growth, ripening, and decay, just as do the plants of a garden.

* Consider what defines a work of art. Can a garden be considered a work of art? Why or why not? If some gardens may be artworks, what would be required for them to be considered art? Are these elements also present in Chen's installations?

* Have students locate Taiwan on a world map and research how the climate and landscape of Taiwan differs from or is similar to that of their own environment. Have them brainstorm differences and similarities between the organic materials available to Chen and those they might find in their own community.