Che-Wei Chen’s recent work focuses on the condition of the mentally ill who are part of marginalized and deserted groups that are not part of the modern state governance. He attempts to analyze human subjectivity from multiple perspectives within complex structures and narratives, exploring the boundaries between reality and fiction.
The title of his ongoing series Yang-Shen-Yuan refers to the first public psychiatric hospital when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. It represented the restrictions of social order for confining and treating the mentally ill. Yang-Shen-Yuan is a project composed of multiple video works that not only reveal the repressed collective unconscious but re-examine the power and politics hidden in the social system. It also reflects upon the complex contemporary condition and discusses postcolonialism, modernity, classification, biopolitics, etc.