Introduction / Chen turns her four years of Tiananmen survey filmmaking into a personal quest. My Tiananmen is a three-part video installation. Chen reflects on her journey of self-discovery far from her home country, musing on how history and its representations have mysteriously influenced her life. The installation is selfdeconstructive: there is no conclusion to her investigation of hidden history. Instead, all the pieces combined yield only more questions about the displaced and transformed representations of ‘true’ Tiananmen.
My Commemoration (21 min, silent, loop, DSLR, U.S.A)
When entering the basement gallery, the viewer will face a large projection which takes up the whole wall, My Commemoration, a slow-down, dreamy piece with an ambivalent nature. Former Tiananmen protesters aka current activists in the States, gather underneath the recreation of Goddess of Democracy (which was destroyed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre), posing for commemorative photographs at the end of the 23th anniversary commemoration, 2012. Watch video.
One Man's Long March (14min, sound, loop, SD video, Australia)
In 2009, Chen made her first documentary upon 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre, One Man's Long March, featuring a Sydney-based activist who is a former political prisoner. The documentary is displayed in an old fashioned domestic television - a reminiscent object of the 90s Hong Kong TV news report from which Chen first learned the names of some Tiananmen protest leaders.
Music Video: an editing assignment (4min, sound, loop, found footage, U.K.) Chen deconstructs the personal in the installation 3 Music Video: an editing assignment. With her personal attachment to Lou Ye's Summer Palace, and Icelandic band Sigur Rós' music and concert film Inni, Chen molds the music video into her intuitive reimagination of Tiananmen: melancholy music and incomphrensible lyrics from 'elsewhere' as an annotation for the representations of Tiananmen generation.
