The installations by Taiwanese artist Chia-Yi Chen (born 1992 in Taipei, Taiwan, lives and works there) appear like miniatures of urban landscapes. This impression becomes all the clearer when one realizes that the materials the artist uses are actually by-products of urban life: Styrofoam packaging, waste paper, painter’s fleece. Only a few objects are recognizable as having been produced for the purpose of viewing. Recurring motifs, however, are holes and tears. Chia-Yi Chen found these on her walks through Berlin, photographed them and distributed them on her installations and on the wall. The sight of such architectural wounds is probably commonplace – almost omnipresent – for many Berliners. Building sites, bulky rubbish, crumbling plaster and gaping holes have almost become part of the city’s iconography. For the artist, however, they are an indicator of the history and dynamics of the city, whose structure is constantly changing, whose skin stretches, hardens, cracks, bleeds and scabs.
Chia-Yi Chen’s works pay almost tender attention to this phenomenon without reproducing the brutality of changing cities and their wounds. She juxtaposes her observations with a small gesture. As such, her art claims an exemplary character: it wants to point to something. Chia-Yi Chen’s “Pieces for Cities” are thus characterized by a pronounced awareness of places. They do not call for change but are designations of certain places that she found in the blind spots of cities.

With kind support from the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion – Department of Culture and the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.) and the Taipei Representative Office in the Federal Republic of German.