Chen Chieh-Jen is a Taiwanese contemporary artist who emerged during the period of martial law in the 1980s. Employing guerrilla-style performance art and organizing exhibitions outside the official system, he disrupted the martial law regime. After martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987, he was perplexed as to how to understand and interpret history and reality and consequently ceased creating art for eight years.

He resumed his artistic practice in 1996 and began collaborations with with local populations, unemployed workers, temporary workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth, and social activists. He formed collaborative filming teams and temporary communities with excluded individuals, social activists, and filmmakers. Through actions like occupying capitalist-owned factories, he infiltrates legal gray zones. He constructs fictional scenarios using discarded materials and proposes alternative filming projects that shed light on obscured histories of people and contemporary reality under neoliberalism. He advocates for a “re-imagination”, “re-narration”, “re-writing” and “re-connection”.

While Chen Chieh-Jen primarily addresses political and economic issues, he believes that the significance of art lies not only in revealing and criticizing the manipulative strategies employed by political and economic mechanisms, but also in the experimentation of new social relationships and mutual learning throughout his filming process. He seeks to unlock alternative political and aesthetic imaginations through poetic and dialectic images derived from unspeakable bodily experiences and memories, subtle states of being amidst spiritual fragmentation, and various ambiguous border zones in social spaces.

He has held solo exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, REDCAT Art Center in Los Angeles, Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Asia Society Museum in New York, and Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. He has participated in group exhibitions at contemporary art biennials and triennials in Venice, Lyon, São Paulo, Liverpool, Sydney, Istanbul, Taipei, Gwangju, Shanghai, Fukuoka, Brisbane, and others. Chen Chieh-Jen was awarded the National Arts Prize in the Visual Arts category in Taiwan in 2009 and the Special Prize at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2000.

As an artist, Chen Chieh-Jen is a significant collaborator with ICAST and has participated in many of its core projects, including West Heavens: India-China Summit on Social Thought forum (2010), the Ho Chi Minh Trail field trip (2010), Publics & Beyond symposium (2012), the Image VS Spectacle: The Political Economy of Image and Sound workshop (2013), and the Tribute 2018-Future Media/Art Manifesto (2017). In 2018, Chen Chieh-Jen was invited by ICAST to host a video workshop at the CAA entitled “’Subliminal Motion’ Constructed by the Residual Sound, Image, and Body within the ‘Panoptic Control Technology’ “(“在‘全域式操控技术’内的残响、残像、残躯所共构成的‘潜运动’”), and held a screening of his works at the School of Intermedia Art in 2022.