Artist Statement

An integral part of Millie Chen’s work are collaborative interdisciplinary projects that engage the public and public space. In her installations, performances and public interventions, she explores the functions and myths surrounding the cultural body through ritual practices in the everyday, drawing associations between the sensual and symbolic qualities of common yet potent materials such as bread, human hair, rice, spices, blood, rust, noise. Evolving from earlier experiments with the senses (e.g. smell) Chen’s recent art production involves the capacity of tactile materiality and architectural space to form immaterial sonic environments (i.e. sound). Stemming from her interest in site-specificity and interactivity, she has been incorporating specific spaces and visitors' bodies as articulators of sound in several recent installations and performances. Negotiations are played out between acoustics, architecture, membranes, interfaces and sound as a cultural trigger. The relationship between seeing and hearing is shifted back and forth. By advocating acts of reconstitution grounded in the physical body, she articulates a perspective that links the biological and phenomenological to a politics of shifting cultural sites, identities and geographic locations. Within her visual art practice, the act of looking is subtly interrogated.