When lit by a single source of light, the shadows of multiple objects projected on a surface will be of the same intensity, drawing the outlines of a chimeric pattern.
Sera Yu Wen Chen aggregates shadows. Her works are composed of elements conscientiously stitched together: archives, testimonies, anecdotes, suIused with both humor and quiet urgency. They blend the historical and the intimate; the factual and the theorical.
The quiescent creatures that emerge from these collages tell of the colonial organization of territories, bodies and minds: a defining of identity.
In ‘Imagine a Tropical Island: The Landscape in Someone’s Mouth’ (2023), friends casually discuss the sensory perception of heat in diIerent cultures, while reflecting on the normative-exotic semiotic crafted by “fair skinned” colonial actors.
The video follows with a practical introduction to digitally generating fantasized worlds, made with the help of the numbing archetypes that populate digital assets libraries. The artist confronts her viewers with structures and systems, depicted as ghost-like presences that ensnare and trap: greenhouses, museums, blurred landscapes that convey the anonymous and anaesthetizing qualities of postcards.

For Giorgio Agamben, an apparatus is “anything that has […] the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”*
An apparatus is a potent and elusive network, the shape of a pen, a smartphone, cigarettes, and even language.
In Sera Yu Wen Chen’s works, apparatuses coalesce into mimicries of relics cushioned in bubble wrap (Perceive Shadows in Mother Tongue, 2024); still-life paintings; origami; or the deleterious theory of physiognomy, which seeks to define the spectrum of race and finds its modern extension in techno colonialism (Behold the Glass Before the Cave, 2020): AI, algorithms and statistical averages.
Amid the apparatus, we all become constitutive parts of the shadow, the terrain and culture for determinism and conditioned subjectification.

In ‘Imagine a tropical island II: transplanter’s land’ (2023), one doesn’t look at the shadow of a palm tree, but at its projection: an afterimage, to be thought of as the expansion or duplication of the apparatus.
The artificial shadow only appears at the sound of a female narrator: a voice that resounds like an incantation, a whisper, the toxic soothing of ASMR.
The narrator is Japanese and tells, in Taiwanese, how imperial Japan reshaped Taiwan’s territory by introducing plants and landscape practices. The inverting of languages, far from redeeming, conveys the chill of the passive violence of colonial strategies: the bio- cultural arsenals; the ubiquity of apparatuses.
In her use of simple visual artifices, Sera Yu Wen Chen resists the tentacular and false complexity of the apparatus.
She oIers an eclipse, echoing Virginia Woolf who urges us to flee the inhibiting glare of the light: “to strive from darkness, the realm of complete shadows.”**

* What is an Apparatus, Giorgio Agamben, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford University Press, 2009)
** Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf, 1938

Text by Bernard Flanet