Decentering site and time with Chen’s [Remote]
After its inaugural years of gallery programming, Brooklyn-based gallery Chen's directed by curator Howie Chen and artist Alex Ito launched its [Remote] series in 2020. Featuring online screenings, events, and discussion, Chen's [Remote] emerged in response to the crescendoing of the global pandemic and political uprisings in the U.S. and abroad. The virtual program focused on issues of hegemony, representation, solidarity, and new futures to create a space that was communal and restorative. [Remote] featured artists, filmmakers, researchers, astrologists, archivists, and organizers, among others.
The [Remote] conversations covered topics ranging from imaging democracy movements to stateless cinema, racial hegemony to forensic counter-surveillance technologies, radical-ecofeminism to decolonial astrology, unrest in American streets to the historical truths of America.
This conversation between Chen and Ito, takes stock of the pivot from physical to digital platforms for a gallery space and the archival access of the remote program across different online portals and indexes, all driven with an ethos that is discursively specific yet site agnostic.
Howie Chen: We started Chen’s in 2018 as a physical gallery in a townhouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn. By 2020, with the onslaught of the pandemic we pivoted to virtual programming since it was impossible to exhibit art and gather in real life. Since we are looking back, it would be great to recount the impetus for starting Chen’s and how those goals and visions were transposed into digital space through different channels. How do you remember the inception of Chen’s as a gallery project and what was that particular moment for the art scene in NYC?
Alex Ito: Looking back, we had been having casual conversations about current work being shown in galleries, the conceptual frameworks that were saturating the artworld and others that were being brushed under the rug. I remember you approaching me over lunch and swung the idea very casually. In that spirit, Chen’s was conceived to bring a different kind of energy– something intentional, challenging but also temporal and simply fun that pushed against the professionalization of art and more towards our lifestyles as multifaceted creative participants.
Chen: Yes, I remember those early conversations – particularly, the shared need for a rigorous and responsive space to reflect on the art production and conversations we were part of amongst artists and our peers in various fields. The idea was to have a space that could be a platform for artwork, performances, and most importantly a social space to be together – that could take different forms from openings, talks, screenings, music, and of course our legendary BBQs in our outdoor area. Also, temporally, the programming was designed to be off-season as a way to navigate our own life schedules and to unsync from the professional art world calendar. So within the original Chen’s DNA, there was an idea to decenter site and time and to concentrate on being together in different ways, including karaoke and cookouts. How would you describe Chen’s programming in relation to the approach and ethos of the space we are describing?
Ito: Haha I miss those BBQs! One thing that stuck with me in our early conversations was when you said “We don’t need performative diversity, we need complexity”. This was in relation to some disappointing choices made by Asian American art professionals in NY in the aftermath of the Dana Schutz controversy in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. I remember a roundtable that you hosted at the Museum of Chinese in America and a senior museum curator and staple in the NY Asian American arts community said along the lines of, “If you don’t like museums, then don’t exhibit in them. But everyone here wants a museum show and would never decline that opportunity.”
It was disappointing to hear, but I think that energy gave us something to push away from in our gallery and virtual programming. COVID lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests in Summer 2020 were such a whirlwind of social media noise, hope, fear and polarization. Since we couldn’t do anything at the gallery from the lockdown, we weren’t planning for any in-person programming. We just needed to survive. But after some time seeing an avalanche of online virtue signaling, I think we wanted to come back and bring some complexity and focus into these very precarious conversations.
Chen: This is an interesting point and I think it is crucial to think about the context and discussions we were responding to and also trying to exceed with our programming. As you mentioned, we had been navigating the complexities of 21st century identity politics in America and in the art world – the heightened vigilance, backlash, and institutionalization of it.
Our programming tries different ways of approaching, showing, and framing artists and artwork in opposition to reified modes being presented in museums and galleries. This also informs the type of artwork, media, and events we present. I think most of the artists, designers, and researchers we have presented have this sensibility – in which their investigation, medium, materials, and use of technology have a relationship to navigating identity and being in the world in unusual ways.
Ito: Right! This was something that we had extensive conversations with ektor garcia and Miko Revereza for their group show, Soft Shadows, at the gallery. Miko’s video was addressing what he would later call “fugitive cinema” as it documented his train trip to the East Coast from Los Angeles where his train was suddenly stopped and searched by ICE. By the time the pandemic started, Miko (who was undocumented while living in the US), had already left the US and was living between multiple countries. At the same time, Tiffany Sia (who exhibited in our group exhibition, Better Homes and Gardens) was already documenting the protests in Hong Kong and the continued fallout of the city through 2020.
Seeing their relationships to urban and political architectures through the lens of social media helped push me into thinking about what the virtual program ended up becoming. Do you remember what was the main push that initiated Chen’s [Remote]?
Chen: It was a confluence of many complex things. As pandemic lockdown deepened, the novelty and growing use of Zoom events as a forum to connect for social and activist purposes was taking off. The ability to create a new space during such isolation and to mobilize people for marches and mutual aid was really meaningful, especially in the early days. Within the art field, there was an effort to think about how this virtual forum can be a space for conversation and programming, but also to respond to the intense political and social moment of George Floyd, democracy movements, Trump era, and the overall crisis of contemporary art’s relevance.
I think with Chen’s [Remote] we also wanted to figure a way to continue our own momentum and programming – and also to see if we can have a space for the community that had been coming to see our shows and following our activities through different channels like social media and online. Also, I think our aim for Chen’s was to highlight people who were also thinking wider than the art milieu – to think together from different perspectives such as artist, technologist, activist, environmentalist, astrologist, filmmaker, etc.
Ito: In my experience at that time, virtual space had become so hostile, accelerated, and without any pause. My roommate at the time worked in journalism at Vice and was kind enough to show me a variety of fake news and weird false flag twitter operations happening with bots and such. Amongst all that chaos, Chen’s [Remote] was trying to bring some pause from the daily doom scroll. In some ways, relating to what you said about “thinking wider than the art milieu”, Chen’s [Remote] could be interpreted as a call to action for others.
Chen: In terms of pragmatics of transitioning from IRL gallery programming to virtual Chen’s [Remote], we set out a few parameters, which looking back were insanely ambitious. For the summer of 2020, we mapped out weekly Zoom programs which had an intentional overall arc that moved through specific community activism and political protest, fugitive media and ontologies, radical feminism, and landing on a capacious assessment of America through historically conscious image making.
Each program was organized with participants in different locations, meeting on a virtual platform with an audience tuning in and responding via chat online and most interestingly texts offline, which I learned was happening amongst viewers. I would also get texts during the talks from audience members. I like the idea of this extra channel for conversation outside the Zoom platform, this includes the way people learned about our programming. The audience grew each week and the archived videos on Instagram, Vimeo, and Library Stack continue to be accessible beyond the moment of original “broadcast”. It’s also interesting to note we mostly used Instagram and social media to get the word out about the program’s weekly events – the velocity of programming matched better using these channels than traditional slow spam email.
Ito: In preparation for this conversation, I took some time to rewatch some of the programs from that time. It’s interesting to look back at such a pivotal moment in our history and also in our organization of Chen’s as a whole. The archive reminds me not only of the conversations and the sociopolitical climate at the time, but also a very unique set of feelings I was experiencing in response to those conditions.
With this in mind, it’s interesting looking back at our first conversation with Maia Ruth Lee, who’s work interrogates the traces of migratory becoming, and Guadalupe Rosales, who organizes the digital archives Map Pointz and Veteranas And Rucas. Both practices capture the urgency of preserving community against the violence of erasure, and maybe we were unintentionally trying to do similarly by producing a remote gathering and discussion space during a time of geopolitical uncertainty.
Chen: Yes, good point. The kind of revisit-ability of Chen’s [Remote] has a different materiality and encounter than the exhibitions we had in our gallery. Of course, it’s impossible to have a virtual BBQ or digital beer on Zoom, but we were able to explore a different way to program Chen’s that foregrounded discussion, artist/people’s voices, and not so much the actual art object. Rather than the artwork being the mediating object, it became technology itself as mediating artist and viewer. In a way, we were relieved of hanging art on walls or placing sculpture on the ground. It made us concentrate on the discursive component of running a “space”.
Ito: The program almost has an arc of feeling to itself, especially since some of these programs were being organized within 3-4 weeks of the live event- which is kind of insane. But looking back, the initial critical conversations with artists like Tiffany Sia, Miko Revereza and Bora Erden– touching on topics of statelessness, surveillance and state violence– developed into later conversations of eco-feminism, astrology, and time. That last conversation Renée Green, Americas: Veritas, bookended the program nicely about what artistic practice could become in the face of an unfolding historical moment.
Looking back at Chen’s [Remote] programming as a series, documented and formatted into a specific user experience like Library Stack, allows for a different spatial relationship to both the individual discussions and historical context of the program at-large. The online archive of the program has a different relationship to reality than a traditional library experience- something a little more organic and shapeless than typical publications.
Chen: Right, the entire program being accessible via digital archive feels native to the way Chen’s [Remote] was experienced by the audience. Zoom “space” was a channel to screen films, see artwork, present lectures, and to assemble people. For Chen’s [Remote] to be archived on Instagram Reels, Vimeo, or Library Stack makes much more sense than traditional media. I am thinking about how Dia used to transcribe their lectures and publish them as printed books – this kind of transmediation for Chen’s [Remote] would seem to lose a type of media-specificity akin to losing site-specificity for sculpture.
For me, I’m agnostic about how the audiences encounter our material whether it be via the search bar on any of these platforms or if a specialist is using a site like Library Stack in a specific way using their way of tagging media objects. I’m a realist about how these worlds don’t intersect and how people find what they are looking for as long it is accessible – that’s the most important factor with this kind of information.
Ito: Our second [Remote] conversation with Tiffany Sia after screening her film, “Never Rest/Unrest”, touched on this type of access to images and video that would normally go unpublished by mainstream news outlets- content that is about affect as opposed to spectacle and mainstream urgency. Many parts in that film took place in spaces of waiting or transient moments during a time of uprising in Hong Kong. Artists– and the initiatives that archive artworks– allow for languages that often disappear or are overlooked by mainstream distribution networks to find spaces for intentional discourse. I like to think that Chen’s [Remote] contributes to this practice of preservation and, in some cases, resistance to larger powers that persist to erase that which does not fit the normative mold.
Chen: True, I think preservation could also mean creating platforms for works that are fugitive, immaterial, and ephemeral. The different online archives for conversations and screenings embodied by the [Remote] series sustains things easily lost into the ether of the general media environment. Miko Revereza, an artist we featured, had mentioned in his talk that the “Camera movement functions as a migration from point a to point b”. I feel digital archiving can be a kind of shelter in the constant migration of people, ideas, and images.
Ito: Similarly, our discussion with Bora Erden from SITU Research focused on his practice of spatial analysis and media assemblage to create forms of evidence for public and legal awareness. This kind of affirmation of an event through stitching together fragments resonates with the “sheltering” you mentioned with Miko. Through produced media and its subsequent storage and distribution, narratives that are initially dispersed or hidden in political shadows are recognized and given a new form of life.
I like to think that Chen’s [Remote] did something similar by allowing these conversations and artworks to be contextualized with a historical global health crisis, persistent state violence, social uprising and neoliberal contradictions through an unfolding movement. With this, future audiences can see how the work temporarily existed in lived time.
Chen: Looking at the [Remote] archive, it’s interesting to think of them as media artifacts of a specifical historical time and moment. For example, featured artist ET Chong was invited after his viral moment on Instagram and Twitter when he announced his hypnotherapy to eliminate his attraction to whiteness as a provocation, performance, and real action. Looking at the talk we hosted, you get a sense of a time and discourse of something of cultural virility that is always so fleeting. We ended the [Remote] series with a screening and discussion with Renee Green on the topic of historical consciousness in expansive ways to consider America as an institution and built environment. It seemed like a perfect place to land in our [Remote] journey.
Main image
Chen’s [Remote] 3 – “Stateless Cinema”, Miko Reverezza
June 17, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Chen’s
Image description
A gallery-view screenshot of a videoconference showcasing the screens of three speakers, all Asian men. The top left screen is labeled “Miko Reverezza”. Miko is captured speaking and gesturing with his hands. He has long dark hair and a mustache, and is wearing glasses and a gray T-shirt. The lop right screen is labeled “Howard H Chen”. Howard has long dark hair and a mustache, and is wearing a black baseball cap and a salmon-colored T-shirt. The bottom screen is labeled “Alex Ito”. Alex has short dark hair and is wearing an orange T-shirt and has AirPods on.