Jiayi Chen

I only have eyes for you...

"Four Dances for Three Couples" repurposes footages of leisure, ambiguous instructions, nature and fire, trying to forage some comfort in old travelogue, examine image-making mechanisms, bring minute surface details from the analog medium and unseen archiving labour to light while capturing a sense of longing and waiting amid a time of uncertainty.

Part of an on-going hand-process project that echos 17th century Chinese novels and the current political plights. Drifting from being controlled and out-of-control, from film negative to positive, from compositional clash and evasion, the film applies labor-intensive processes, questioning suppression choreographically

A three-channel, double 8mm and 16mm projector installation.

A stranger's quest in Chicago, particularly Chinatown, for a sense of being in a uncertain time. It derives from experiences of translation and transportation, negotiations with foreignness and intimacy, and attempts to physically and emotionally inhabit a place.

Based on a mathematical equation, the work CASE STUDY OF AN EQUATION is made to ridicule the process of coping with fear, to quantify emotion in space and in relation to others. It is the full length of a 50 feet reel of super 8 film with in-camera editing, and is the result of an immediate investigation and spontaneous measurement of the haunting ghost from a past incident.

Beautiful images of southeastern Alaska’s majestic natural landscape drip, flow and take root in the accompaniment of the complex phonetic sounds of the indigenous Tlingit language and a lush sonic collage of local fauna. This landscape grows ever greener each year as the glaciers, like the language, begin to recede.

Mounds Above the Earth contemplates ecological cycles, perception, and environmental transformation, anchored in the rare emergence of two periodical cicada broods surfacing simultaneously for the first time in more than two centuries. The film follows the flicker of red—through the cicadas’ developing eyes, a blood moon, and an ancient fable.