Vincent Cy Chen: Nocturnal Moonrise
New York-based artist Vincent Cy Chen carefully weaves themes of sexuality, otherness, euphoria and spirituality into his illuminating sculptures. VETA by Fer Francés is pleased to present Nocturnal Moonrise, his first solo exhibition in Spain.
Chen's work is at once seductive and menacing, beautiful and grotesque. Drawing inspiration from human and plant anatomy, speculative biology, queer culture and camp, the Buddhist temples he encountered in his youth in Taiwan and science fiction. Chen blurs the boundaries between humans, animals, plants and technology. The result is sculptures that look like relics of alien shrines either belonging to a future yet to come or to a remote and forgotten past.
In this way, forms and objects that could be found in the old Cabinets of Curiosities and other studios that have historically fetishized the exotic in flora, fauna and culture, serve as inspiration for Chen to combine them into a single taboo artifact, this time capable of emancipation. The gallery's exhibition space is occupied by three bodies that no longer seek a sense of belonging, but embrace their foreign condition, overflowing any cataloguing to the point of becoming luminous parasites that exude seduction, but also show vulnerability. Their appearance suggests transitional states, either larval or decadent, equally unfathomable to our eyes that, although we recognize certain forms, we ignore their function, age, gender or becoming.
Made of fiberglass, polystyrene and other synthetic materials, these sculptures are an exuberant celebration of otherness, the marginalized, the hybrid. They are an aesthetic bet of ancestral inspiration that poses, from biological oddities, sexual fantasies and artifacts of power, a futuristic interspecies-cyborg-queer world where the boundaries between different categories have finally dissolved.
In opposition to the technological arrogance of the human being and the inclination for the continuous acceleration of all aspects of life that characterize our present, Chen explores an alternative. The installation Nocturnal Moonrise claims the interconnection with nature, not from its mere contemplation but from the body and its possibilities of mutation. All this through the slow rhythm imposed by the spirituality transmitted by these altars that seem to visit us from another world, another time.
