Feng Chen | Rijksakademie Opening 2014 - Residents 2014

Feng Chen was shocked when his high school friend told him about his visual impairment. Because only one of his eyes functioned properly, he saw the world as a flat image without depth, making him miss steps, drop and break things, and bump into people. Feng decided to help him by building a machine to compensate for this handicap. However, the helmet with a wobbly camera on top that rerouted the image to the healthy eye wasn’t a complete success. Now Feng has improved on the concept by developing what he calls ‘one-eyed cinema’. In the era of 3D cinema and Oculus Rift it’s a surprisingly low-tech undertaking, utilizing the wobbly camera, home-built mechanical devices and even 16mm film. As he is deeply suspicious of the camera and the manipulative power of the image maker, over the past years Feng has produced numerous 'mockumentaries' mixing performance and news footage, both fake and real. Now he has enlisted the camera to see the world in a new, enhanced way, but not without adding yet another constructed layer, that questions the reality of what is shown.