Feng Chen: Beats: Venice Project Room 2

Capsule Venice is delighted to present to the public Chinese multi-media artist Feng Chen’s (b. 1986 Wuhan; lives and works in Hangzhou) special project “Beats”, featuring his cognominal site-specific installation. 

Feng Chen takes over the greenhouse in the garden as Project Space 2 to re-create one of his iconic site-specific pieces: The Darker Side of Light, a light and sound installation paired with the video Untitled (2015). Through the transformation and control of the blinds, Feng Chen creates an experience focused on stimulating visual and aural senses through which the audible becomes visible. In this suspended and almost alien room, sound sculpts space creating a disorienting field of experience in which the material and immaterial interlace; common rules of perception vanish to summon a new sensorial reality. Once entered into the space, the viewer is invited to embrace a new spatial and temporal logic in order to become fully aware of its function as another possible element activating the space or being activated by it. Synchronised rhythm becomes central to the experience of the works: sound is imbued with a certain tangibility, as in the projected video images that pulsate rhythmically, as in a sort of heartbeat of the space itself. The sight of the garden house from afar - appearing as a mirage, an alien pulsing body with its almost hypnotic lights, their alternate movements - becomes another vivid aspect of the work.