BIOGRAPHY
Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) is a Chinese American artist creating performances and socially engaged art in live and virtual contexts. Awarded Mozilla Foundation’s 2022 Creative Media Award and Best Emerging Talent at the 2019 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, her work has appeared at Transmediale (Berlin), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), Centre for Contemporary Art (Derry~Londonderry), Times Art Center (Berlin), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), INVERSE Performance Art Festival (Bentonville), Tempting Failure (London), and Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival, among others.
She has been awarded grants and residencies from Sundance Institute, Mozilla Foundation, UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, Millay Colony for the Arts, Pittsburgh Foundation, Office of Public Art, Burning Man Global Arts Fund, Civic Media Lab, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Wave Pool Gallery, Women’s Media Center, and Kelly Strayhorn Theater. A founding member of the artist collective, Maternal Fantasies, she is the recipient of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation Advancement Award 2019/2020. She has spoken widely on feminist art and activism at venues such as Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Ars Electronica, SXSW, and re:publica. She is the founder of Heal Her, an expressive arts initiative that has convened storytelling circles, festivals, and events in seven countries for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.
She earned a BA in sociology from Harvard University and a MFA at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. She is pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Informed by my experiences as a sex worker and a survivor of revenge porn, my practice examines the impact of technology on gender, intimacy, and labor. I am fascinated by the fractured experience of womanhood: the state of being simultaneously revered and vilified, desired and rejected, empowered and objectified. As a 20-year-old college student, I became of the earliest documented survivors of revenge porn and cyber-stalking. Amid ongoing online harassment and post-traumatic stress, I moved to Germany, where I lived as my alter-ego and worked as a nude model (Elle Peril, 2012-2017) to reclaim agency over my narrative.
From scrying in bowls of menstrual blood to breastfeeding members of the public, my performances immerse audiences in one-to-one rituals of intense yet fleeting intimacy. Subverting the power dynamics between the observer and the observed, I employ the historically subjugated Asian female body to challenge systems of social discipline and capitalist extraction. Locating the origins of gender and racial violence in state control of the body, I embody the emancipatory possibilities of erotic capital as both victim and accomplice to the contradictions of neoliberal feminism.
As a social practice artist, I center participatory and collaborative processes, which often blur the line between art-making and community organizing. From performative rituals to immersive installations, I engage audiences in reimagining personal and collective histories. Creating feminist networks of care and platforms for self-representation, I have produced socially engaged projects with communities such as mothers, trauma survivors, sex workers, and abortion providers.
CONTACT
lena@lenachen.com