Sijiang Chen

Seeing and hearing have never been so urgent for me before, although I’ve been working with them for some time. As one of the many international students in London, I am so encouraged by the intensity of the English language and contexts to dive down deep into the ocean of shapes and sounds and meet, freshly, sometimes oddly, with clusters of fish of suggestions and meanings. As an individual artist and the lead singer and songwriter of the Chinese indie band Hiperson (originally meaning saying hi), I have been working with different media, and more importantly, in multiple scenes with people from around the world.

If I have to say one sentence to express my interest in artistic creation it would be: I am interested in the paradox that contradictions and fractures of cognition exist in a continuous world of action: if humans are alike, why would people end up with intolerant worldviews towards each other? If humans are, basically, absolutely unique individuals, how could any actions be taken to reach any consensus? The apparent paradox is in deep the dialectics driving and demanding my practice.

I am interested in the historical and contemporary examples of the idea of nature and the symbolic and constructive aspects of human society and knowledge, and I consider that how my practice could tap into them in an intimate and alternative way. My practice is often driven by imaginations where reality goes upside down in a poetic and crazy way, no matter if they turn out to be images, songs, performance, or installations. However, I see these illusions as ways in which reality would express itself at its boundaries, and my work is to channel them to the audience. And this reality, accompanied by the digital culture which you, the audience, is experiencing right here right now, and the changing tides of the international environments given the current pandemic situation, is whispering by my ears about future projects.