Your name Chung-Hsuan Lan Place of birth Taipei, Taiwan Place where you live now Taipei, Taiwan 3 words to describe you Neutral, poetic, cold Why do you take pictures? Photography is one of my mediums to convey concepts. Sometimes, I use photos directly to present specific contents and I collect them in my daily life. I also use photographs as material and I remake, erase, or forge them into fake information. Where do you get your inspiration? Mostly history. More precisely, wars, fatal incidents, and natural disasters. Past and present are always alike. Countless conflicts were caused by different understandings and limited acceptance of identities. Therefore, I tend to attribute this to tragedies and to imagine a world with no identities in my art practice. Who are your influences? Cigarettes After Sex, Tetsuya Ishida, Michael Heizer What determines the subject matter you choose? I make works about those things that come to me. If a friend gives me a historical object as a gift, I will react to it through my art. If I find a military object that catches my eye in stores or online, I will collect it and make it into art. I am more into a chance encounter than intentionally finding something and granting it meaning. What impact would you like your art to have? I hope people can see the possibility of the absence of identities, even if it is probably just an ideal and utopian dream. What artwork do you never get bored with? Minimal and quiet Is there anything you want to add? Find my other works on Instagram: @lanchunghsuan
Dielusion is a series of staged photographs I made in New York and Tokyo. In the past, death was always a common topic in art. Artists used death to hint at their illusions, like The Death of Marat (Jacques-Louis David, 1793) and the French Revolution. However, it seems death is too straightforward and personal to talk about in contemporary art. Therefore, I decided to start this project as an attempt to discuss death. I invited participants to share the imaginations of their ideal deaths with me, and we later worked together to search for locations, prepare the objects, and create the scenes. During the shooting, I asked the participants to perform their death, and I would slightly adjust their gestures. It the end, I photographed them. By presenting people’s ideal deaths, the project explores the positive possibility of death.
