Long-Bin Chen “Diaspora, Drifting and Accumulation”

Elga Wimmer PCC

This event has ended.

Frederieke Taylor Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Taiwanese artist Long-Bin Chen on view at the Elga Wimmer Gallery.

Known for using books of every kind; phone books, catalogs, newspapers, and magazines, Long-Bin Chen creates complex, beautifully detailed sculptures of Buddha heads, Western icons such as Beethoven and Freud, human faces, warriors and animals. These creations, at first glance, resemble stone or marble. Long-Bin also creates installations of life-scale hanging figures, as well as larger-than-life heads one can walk into, made up of approximately one thousand phone books. All his sculptures and installations are made of recycled materials because the reuse of old material is an important aspect of his work.

For this exhibition, the artist has created a large scale hanging installation composed of several hundreds of books. An emotionally torn figure floats in the air followed by a trail of literary works, books and papers. This overload of information, flowing from the sculpture, represents the artist ‘s critique of our consumerist “paper society”.

Using traditional sculpting techniques, Long-Bin challenges both the cultures of his homeland and his American home to create an art based both on a reverence for the literary culture and an appreciation of contemporary sculpture. Long-Bin Chen explores different cultural meanings seeking to combine ideas and concepts from the East with those from the West and expresses what he considers a cultural conflict and problem with communication in the world.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1964, Long-Bin Chen currently lives and works in New York and has exhibited widely, in the United States, Germany, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong. He has participated in several exhibitions at the Frederieke Taylor gallery and his work was featured at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Long-Bin was an artist-in-residence at MassMOCA. His work was included in the Holland Paper Biennal, and has been shown around the world in locations including the Taipei Cultural Center and the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA , and was included in the group exhibition “The Missing Piece” organized by the Dalai Lama Foundation. Most recently, his work was featured at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, PA, in an exhibition titled “Between The Covers: Altered Books In Contemporary Art”. Catalogues to this exhibition are available from the gallery.