— Tatana Kellner
Artist Statement
Formally trained in foreign language and literature and inspired by cinema, poetry, familial history, and personal experience, linked by blood to a fading Indigenous Taiwanese tribe. Shifting amid the constant flux of a small sociopolitical environment some consider nonexistent. With these inheritances both tethered and untethered, I cannot help but explore through fragments, further eroded by a wide array of media, mediums, platforms, methods, and internal motivations. For the “cross” in cross-disciplinary is the only way I know how to express the feeling of being lost in ongoing intergenerational conflicts, amid the confusion and conservation of identity, and facing the loss of persistent anchors to memory, as well as questions of authenticity itself.
The action of taking pictures binds memories and experiences into a continual growth. Not unlike finding comfort in motherhood, a way of reconciling oneself to memory through the promise of another future. My pictures—always made on the go—are simply a way of examining myself, engaging with the world.
That said, the intention of making differs from the intention of taking. The moment of taking a picture also serves as evidence of its passing. Image-making attempts to reengage the trace left in an image, exploring the plasticity found in reorganizing memory and intention. However, no amount of altering can completely erase that initial sense of passing, death as a picture.
This intense gravity toward manipulating things already past is due to my own insecurity toward authenticity, continually de-centered by the dramatic shifts in generational norms and values commonly found under the rapid development of East Asia. Any attempt to relate to Taiwan from the perspective of being a woman finds my mother’s generation increasingly abstracted and my grandmother’s heritage nearly extinct (Indigenous People in Taiwan).
Medium into material and back into becoming another medium. Photography and the photograph bridge, in their countless reflections, intentions, and personal memories, to bring something back, namely, an impossible sense of security as an Indigenous Taiwanese woman. A half-blood offspring of the Kavalan Nation, populated more by old amateur photographs than by those living today.
— Wen-Li Chen
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Bio
Wen-Li Chen (Taiwanese American, b. 1981; resides in St. Paul, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and independent publisher whose work bridges visual art, photography, book arts, video, installation, community engagement, and collaboration. She is moved to encounter and present intergenerational dwelling and inheritance through oblique poetics, vulnerable histories, enduring relationships, and personal experiences.
The Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Central Library collect two of her artist books. Chen has exhibited internationally and nationally in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. She was recently awarded the McKnight Fellowship for Book Artists from the Minnesota Book Art Center. She has received grants, fellowships, and residencies, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals, the VAF (Warhol Foundation), the Lanesboro Artist Residency, Women's Studio Workshop Residency, and the NCAF (National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan).
She serves as Adjunct Faculty at St. Cloud State University and has previously taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the University of Wisconsin–Stout. She received her M.Des. in photography from The Glasgow School of Art in the UK and an M.Ed. in Dual Language Immersion Education from the University of Minnesota. She is also the co-founder/director of FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, a platform supporting contemporary art, publishing, and cultural exchange.
Website: cwenli.com | wlchen.com | fogstand.com
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Exhibition
2025 | 2025 Taiwan Art Biennial: Black Water
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Taichung, Taiwan
2025 | Oceans Divided, Hearts Intertwined (On The Other Side of Sea, Artist Book), CMU Second Floor Gallery, UMN,
MN, USA
2024 | 37th Annual McNeese National Works on Paper Exhibition (On The Other Side of Sea, Artist Book)
McNeese State University/Dept. of Visual Arts,
LA, USA
2024 | Arts North International 29 (On The Other Side of Sea, Artist Book, Award of Merit)
Hopkins Center for the Arts
MN, USA
2024 | 39th Annual International (On The Other Side of Sea, Artist Book)
Meadows Gallery, University of Texas at Tyler
TX, USA
2023 | On The Other Side of Sea
Online
2021 | Title Collective
Niche Gallery, Century College
MN, USA
2020-2021 | Lanesboro Artist Residency
MN, USA
2020 | Belonging
Northfields Arts Guild Gallery
MN, USA
2019 | Wisp
FOGSTAND Gallery
MN, USA
2019 | UnRipening: Recipes for Decolonization
Kelowna Art Gallery
Canada
2018 | To My Unborn Child
Richmond Art Gallery
Canada
2018 | Untitled 14 Juried Group Exhibition
Soo Visual Art Center
MN, USA
2016-2017 | Island
FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio
Hualien, Taiwan
2015 | Untitled
UW-Stout School of Art and Design
2015/16 Faculty Group Exhibition
WI, USA
2013 | The Distance Between
Cupar Art Festival
Fife, UK
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The Distance Between, 2013