Opening soon | Yin-Ju Chen & Li-Chun Lin （Marina）

Installation View: Close Your Eyes and You Will Know with Yin-Ju Chen and Li-Chun Lin (Marina). ICA at NYU Shanghai, 2022. PHOTO: Zhu Zhenyu. Courtesy of the ICA at NYU Shanghai.

On 13 October 2022, the Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai (ICA at NYU Shanghai) finally opens the long-awaited exhibition Close Your Eyes and You Will Know, an exhibition by Taipei-based artist Yin-Ju Chen and shaman practitioner Li-Chun Lin (Marina). Their collaborative project Sonic Driving (2018–ongoing) employs shamanic methods to access altered states of consciousness and to create alternative realities. Sonic Driving further invites others to learn and to experiment with shamanic practice, to create radical knowledges of self and for an expanded collectivity.

Read more about the exhibition: Close Your Eyes and You Will Know｜Another Knowledge Is Possible II

“The Way to Mandala: The Artistic Practice of Connecting the Self to the Universe” 

by Yin-Ju Chen

        Chinese 

Registration is required for all events. To register, please scan the QR code below.

Installation View: Yin-Ju Chen, Notes on Psychedelics III: 2-19-20, 2021. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Artist Yin-Ju Chen interprets social power and history through cosmological systems. Utilizing astrology, sacred geometries, and alchemical symbols, she considers human behavior, nationalism, imperialism, state violence, totalitarianism, utopian formations, and collective thinking. Recently, she has been exploring the material effects of spiritual/ shamanic practices and the metaphysical potentialities of consciousness.

She has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals, such as the Taipei Biennial (TW, 2020, 2012), the Gwangju Biennale (KR 2021), the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (RU, 2019), the International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL, 2018, 2011), Transmediale (DE, 2018), Liverpool Biennial (UK, 2016), Forum Expanded at the 66th Berlinale (DE, 2016), the Biennial of Sydney (AU, 2016), Yin-Ju Chen: Extrastellar Evaluations (US, 2016), Action at a Distance–Yin-Ju Chen Solo Exhibition (TW, 2015), The Starry Heaven Above and the Moral Law Within (TW, 2015), the Shanghai Biennale (CN, 2014), and A Journal of the Plague Year (HK, KR, US, TW 2013-2014).

Li-Chun Lin (Marina) drumming, Taipei, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Yin-Ju Chen.

Li-Chun Lin (Marina) has spent over ten years traveling around the world to study from various shamanic cultures, provide shamanic healing, teach shamanism courses, as well as lead rituals. She has been invited to give lectures on shamanism in cross-strait galleries and has spoken on ayahuasca shaman training at the Ayahuasca—KosmikJourney VR Exhibition in Taiwan. Her collaborative artwork has been exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale (2021) and around the globe.

Li-Chun has maintained a deep connection to and studied plant spirits intensely. She is familiar with the relationships between sexual energy, the sacred feminine force, shamanism, and magic. Believing in the non-duality of body and earth (身土不二, literally: “body soil no two,” which means that the body’s present condition is the result of its environment), she continuously refines approaches of touching another person's soul through the five senses and consciousness expansion. Li-Chun is one of the few practitioners in Asia to have been fully trained in the authentic Ayahuasca lineage. She draws on core shamanism teachings to develop unique shamanic world experiences. Under the guidance of Israeli and British occultists, Li-Chun has received initiation into magical organizations.

Currently, Li-Chun’s only teachers are her own body and the ground beneath her feet.

To help prevent the spread of COVID-19, and in accordance with NYU Shanghai guidelines, the ICA gallery remains open to visitors from the NYU Shanghai community only and temporarily closed to the public until further notice. All visitors, including the public, may join the online events. Events held in the ICA gallery will be open to the NYU Shanghai community only.