Ting-Jung Chen & Hui Ye

Lucas Gehrmann, curator of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize, will talk to the artists Ting-Jung Chen and Hui Ye about their works and their exhibition "Keep me close to you".

Ting-Jung Chen (b. Taipei/Taiwan, 1985) studied performative art and sculpture with Prof. Monica Bonvicini at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She graduated in 2018.
Ting-Jung Chen’s audio installation "You Are the Only One I Care About (whisper)“ conveys a vivid impression of a peculiar phenomenon spawned by propaganda strategies: the artist has reimagined the enormous “broadcast walls” that both socialist and capitalist countries in East Asia erected along their borders to flood their enemy neighbours with slogans and songs from the “better world”. Her sculptural and musical composition prompts wide-ranging reflections on the transformation to modes of disseminating ideology specific to a place and time into present-day commercialised space.

Hui Ye (b. Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China, 1981) studied transdisciplinary art with Ricarda Denzer and Franz Thalmair at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She graduated in 2018.
The media and sound artist Hui Ye presents the 32-minute video "Quick Code Service", which scrutinizes contemporary digital communication technologies and their limitations. Using WeChat, the most popular communication platform in China today, and her personal QR code, the artist “constructs” her own – digital – identity on the network from a distance. She is separated from her avatar by the Great Firewall, which the government of the People’s Republic has installed to regulate data traffic. Balancing somewhere between documentation and fiction, Hui Ye’s video draws attention to the potential for manipulation inherent in digital media while also grappling with how far she has come.