Coming to terms with...
(A revisit of Kray Chen’s video works under different circumstances)
—
Marc Gloede

When I was asked to put together a series of works for the occasion of the inaugural A+ Online Festival of Video Art, it was clear to me that a curated programme during this time could not ignore the fundamental crisis that is impacting all of our lives. We all are facing a situation in which a pandemic has changed almost all aspects of life (our health, our social lives, our work, our everyday behaviour), and we need to reflect upon it. With a huge part of the world population self-isolating and the increasing erasure of all “non-essential activities”, this is a moment where we all are radically challenged. We can see and experience in all fields of society how we are trying to come to terms with this new status quo. It is pretty much a rollercoaster ride for all of us, with continuous ups and downs. Ups—when we, for example, see that these realities of social distancing and isolation have led to new strategies of gathering in the digital sphere to overcome the new normal. But, even though these developments are often inspiring and create dynamics that make us hopeful for the things to come, there are intense downs as well—downs we experience when our daily meetings and gatherings end, when the digital meeting platforms turn silent, the Netflix pharmakon turns from cure to poison, the attention grabbing competition of online events fading away and we face the impact of existential emotions. Emotions that also unite us these days, which are a result of moments when we are confronted with loneliness, fear, anxiety, insecurity, boredom, monotony.

It was these emotions that I had in mind when I started to think about possible works for this festival. The questions that have grown for me over the last months are: How do/can we speak about these fears? How can we begin to see them as a common ground on which we are gathered? Which works would offer a renegotiation of our daily experiences or our anxieties about getting infected, losing our jobs, our friends, and families?

Following these questions and thinking of the art that has addressed these specific aspects somehow led me back to some of Kray Chen’s works which I have continuously seen over the last few years. Obviously, they were not created as a direct result of Covid-19. But even though these works were not conceived in relation to the reality of a pandemic, for me, they address some of the above-mentioned emotions.

In a wider historical frame, we can, on one hand, relate Chen’s works to radical reductions of physical exercises or movement patterns connected to minimalist interrogations of the body and space. The works of Lucinda Childs, Bruce Nauman, or Yvonne Rainer come to mind. These artists have raised questions not only about the body in space, but also about the filmic medium, and the image which negotiates this relationship. On the other hand, Chen’s works re-phrase the enquiries that can be seen in more conceptual works that address the crucial connection of time, space and the artistic process. David Lamelas’s Time as Activity (1969) or John Baldessari’s I will not make any more boring art (1971) are two examples that perfectly echo what Kray Chen re-negotiates decades later.

But art historical references aside—during the lockdown Kray Chen’s video works have become an interesting experience to watch again, not because of their contextual frames, but because they had somehow gained a new actuality, a new relevance in the last few months.

There was something about these negotiations of repetitive patterns. These works were guiding me into a sphere that oscillates between brutal physical reductionism and our current absurdity, and this all seemed to perfectly fit the A+ Festival occasion. This first impression, the relevance of the works, seemed to be a very direct result of Chen’s general interest in topics like the body, isolation, fear, or repetition—modes of functioning and regulating that seem to be mirrored in our Covid-everyday. Formatted behaviours of bodies that are repeated to a point that everything feels like a Samuel Beckett scenario—an emotional mixture of existential angst and absurd humour.

But as much as this is true, the longer I exposed myself to the experience of Chen’s works, the more they began to offer another level of resonance: every step further into this physical same-but-different moment seems to open up an increasingly critical reflection of a psychological environment that defines us through our habits, routines, differences and repetitions. The longer one stays in this moment, the stranger it becomes. And once the hope for/expectation of a narrative has faded, a different experiential form can start to take place. More and more, we are taken by forces that open towards more philosophical questions, which allow us to reflect on human identity. With each repetition, differences start to appear. And once we allow these ideas and potentials to unfold, we are able to experience what Gilles Deleuze had paraphrased when he wrote: “It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even with itself, that everything returns—or rather, everything does not return.”* We start to understand the horrors and fears of the everyday as well as the connection and potential of difference and repetition. And it is exactly this opportunity and challenge that Chen’s work offers us, which makes it so precious. It allows us to come to terms—not only with ourselves in a pandemic situation, but with our post-modern selves in general.

*Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Kray CHEN
Exercise now and fit a standard size coffin later #3 (2016)
HD video
Duration: 8 minutes 41 seconds

In this video, we experience the physical act of walking up the stairs. We see the routine of the everyday—a moment that usually always slips our minds. Here, this act is brought to the center of our attention and becomes a sisyphean task. Always the same pattern, but actually never the same. With the expanding duration of Chen’s work, our senses recalibrate and we become aware of slight differences. While the depicted body of the artist is increasingly exhausted and the perceptual capacity of the audience is increasingly challenged, the only static aspect in the work is the position of the camera that mercilessly records.

Kray Chen lives and works in Singapore; his practice largely deals with lived experience and body politics, reflecting on the body and the self within the economical machine, and observing the fissures and ruptures of the psyche in the face of parallel quests to progress and to conserve. His solo exhibitions include 5 Rehearsals of a Wedding, Objectifs Chapel Gallery, Singapore (2018) and It’s a Set Situation, Grey Projects, Singapore (2016). He has participated in group exhibitions such as the Bangkok Art Biennale, China Remixed Initiative, Indiana University Bloomington, USA (2017), The Making of an Institution, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2017), and Paradise Sans Promesse, FRAC Des Pays De La Loire, Nantes, France (2015). He obtained his MFA from Goldsmith’s College of Art in 2014, and was awarded the Young Artist Award by the National Arts Council in Singapore in 2017.

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Kray CHEN
Stop and Watch (2014)
HD video
Duration: 2 minutes

How many times do we check for the time each day? These glimpses towards our watch or our mobile phone keep us to our daily schedules, organising our time and keeping intact the conceptual divide between meetings, work and free time. Instead of a glimpse, Stop and Watch expands this viewing experience to a different scope. What we see is “just” real-time in passing. But then again there are so many things to acknowledge: What time of the day is it? Which day? How is the display organised? How long are we watching in real-time? In some way, this work corresponds with works like David Lamelas’s Time as Activity. But while it was crucial for Lamelas in the 1970s to connect this temporal experience to a certain location in the world, in 2014 Chen has modified this location of this experience to the arm of the artist. In this way his work connects the actual temporal experiences of audience and performer and constructs a shared time of endurance.

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Kray CHEN
The Great Singapore Without Workout (2017)
HD video
Duration: 1 minute 22 seconds

Watching The Great Singapore Without Workout, there is something strange that lays within from the beginning. The scenes and environments seem to be familiar Singaporean settings, but then there is something ghostly and uncanny to them. All spaces we encounter are somehow everyday Singapore environments, except that they are unpeopled. While the sound of the work suggests a happy atmosphere, the visual side of the work presents something different. The longer we watch, the more all these images seem to be modified, “doctored”. Which is exactly what has been done. In a meticulous process, Chen has erased all human forms from the pre-existing 1992 commercial video The Great Singapore Workout. But while the sound suggests an upbeat, happy mode, what we see is something closer to a truly post-human/post-apocalyptic scenario. In this strange discordance, Chen addresses what Martin Arnold has referred to as Deanimation: a critical process that contrary to animation, is not a product of addition, but of subtraction. In these emptied environments, we are encouraged to contemplate our physical experience of spaces to come.

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Kray CHEN
I Think of Eating When I am Sleeping and I Think of Sleeping When I am Eating (2014)
HD video
Duration: 10 minutes 3 seconds

How often have we lately been caught in a pandemic-determined in-betweenness of sleeping, cooking and eating? Days turned fluid, when, instead of being determined by rigid time schedules and time frames, have become dreamlike sequences where physical routines merge into one another. While a rigid approach to this shift could be interpreted as a purely different format of time and space, the reality is that this reduced everyday and alternate form seems to be one of the key origins of fear and anxiety. This limitation seems to fundamentally contradict ideas of self-realisation. Therefore in I Think… Kray Chen embraces the reduction of patterns and turns these into a sequence that allows us to see this reduced mode as a counter position to the continuity of neo-liberal self-fulfillment. It becomes a chance for a true moment of encountering the Self.

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