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Taiwanese contemporary sculptor.
Chen Long-bin was born in 1964 in Taipei, Taiwan. He received a BFA from the Fine Arts Department at Tung-Hai University in Taiwan, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is known for using the cultural debris of our modern society, such as old, discarded books, newspapers, phonebooks, and magazines as the medium for his sculptures. Chen is self-taught in carving wood, but started showing interest in our paper culture as a viable material for art – phonebooks, magazines, and computer paper when PC’s began growing popular in 1993. The advent of the personal computer changed the entire nature of information documentation – a role books used to play. Thus, by turning paper into the original wood for his sculptures, Chen offers renewed value to the meaning of paper. He uses chainsaws, drills, band saws, sanders, and scissors, along with other carpenter’s tools to shape his remarkable busts and figures, which appear stone, or even marble like from a distance.
Chen who has won prizes in Europe, Taipei, and Japan, has exhibited extensively at galleries and museums for many years in Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, London, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States, and can also be found in numerous international public and private collections. He has been awarded artist fellowship grants from Taiwan’s National Endowment for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York and the Freeman Foundation. In 1995, he received the Visitor’s Prize of the Sixth Triennial of Small Scale Sculpture in Stuttgart, Germany. And in 1998, he received the Silver Prize at the Osaka Triennial in Japan.
For Chen, using recycled materials to make art stresses the challenges presented by endless human consumption and waste, as well as the tantamount ecological problems of waste accumulation and disposal, the destruction of forests, and the mindless use of nonrenewable resources. The reams of used computer paper disprove the assurance of the electronic paper-less office, which instead augments the use of paper, as printing is made much easier. Furthermore, his choice of medium also poses as a commentary on the loss of books as aesthetic objects, which have been replaced by mass-produced cheaply made paperbacks. Books are extremely important to Chen. However, it is not the book itself, but its educational heritage, literary importance, historical knowledge, and the sacredness of the written word that he treasures most.
The type of materials he acquires in a sense determines the sculpture he creates. While in New York, he scoured the streets of Manhattan collecting discarded refuse, scouted offices for their rejected reams of paper, visited brownstone streets to gather cast off telephone books when new ones were distributed. And now, living in Taipei, Chen obtains his material from university libraries and bookstores, publishing companies, archeological museums, and telephone companies.
The special quality of Chen’s works is that people can still read the pages. “I try to make sculptures that are appropriate for the content of the books. In my concept, the form and content is united together; the content gives me the idea of the form. Yellow Pages give me one kind of idea; books discarded from libraries inspire different styles…” Often times, his art reflects the content of the pages within, such as one hanging installation featuring spirals of books with peepholes in which one can view a scene from the story within the original pages.
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