Jiaxin Chen is a visual artist whose practice investigates the material ontology of photography and its shifting role in contemporary image cultures. Her work draws upon the legacies of experimental photography, process-based art, and materialist aesthetics, engaging techniques such as chemical staining (e.g. Cyanotype and Van Dyke), blocking, physical abrasion, and weaving interventions. Her exhibitions across Europe and Asia continue to evolve around questions of perceptual displacement and self-reflexivity, inviting audiences to encounter images not as passive representations but as performative events of matter, time, and transformation.
City in Dual Exposure: Between Memory and Present situates itself within the discourse of post-photographic practices and the ongoing interrogation of urban modernity. Drawing from strategies of double exposure, montage, and material intervention, it constructs a visual palimpsest that resonates with the legacies of Fluxus experimentation and the material turn in contemporary photography. The works mobilize techniques of folding, weaving, and layering to fracture the singular perspective, echoing theories of heterotopia (Foucault) and urban simultaneity (Benjamin). In these oscillations between density and void, monumental façade and fragile gesture, the city is revealed as a site of temporal disjunction and perceptual negotiation. What persists is not the stability of a city-image, but the shimmer of multiplicity — where the visible harbors the spectral, and where urban identity unfolds in the interstices of progress and remembrance. Just as memory compresses lived experience into a fragile surface of recollection, the shadow represents a form of reality that exists precisely through its elusiveness.
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