Yin-Ju Chen & Li-Chun Lin （Marina） Opening on 3 March

Detail: Yin-Ju Chen & Li-Chun Lin (Marina), Sonic Driving, 2018–ongoing. Mixed media installation; dimensions variable. Commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale and V-A-C Foundation. Courtesy of the Artists.

Detail: Yin-Ju Chen & Li-Chun Lin (Marina), Sonic Driving, 2018–ongoing. Mixed media installation (watercolor drawings, pencil sketches, ink on paper, HD video, 7.1 surround sound, and workshops); dimensions variable. Commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale and V-A-C Foundation. Courtesy of the Artists.

Chen and Lin’s multimedia installation charts out the space of the ICA gallery into the tripartite cosmology of 巫 (“wu”—the Chinese character for shamanism): an upper world manifested in a video of two arduous intertwining journeys—both spiritual and physical—to the realm of deities; a middle world invoked by a deep visceral drumming through which humans, in coexistence with the more-than-human, access the upper and lower worlds; and a lower world depicted in watercolor drawings and notes scrawled by Chen, recalling her own shamanic journeys. An ink drawing made by Lin illustrating the “wu” cosmology, stands in the center, anchoring this symbolic universe.

As an integral part of the ongoing Sonic Driving project, Chen and Lin assemble local and global participants to workshops initiating shamanic journeys to these other worlds. Past shamanic assemblies have sought oracles seeking answers to questions such as: How will global warming affect the Earth?  How will artificial intelligence affect humans in the future? What will our world look like 100 years from now? Video text documents of past workshops are projected onto the ceiling, along the margins of the “middle world.” An oracle recorded in one document, from 2018, portends a near future that became our present.  "Why the shamanic way?" the artists ask, "Because it works."

By breaking away from habits of clinging to the visible, tangible, and logical, the artists invite visitors to purge rigid dichotomies between science and mysticism, as well as mind and body, and to obtain revelations of esoteric knowledge otherwise inaccessible to reason. Exhibition visitors and workshop participants alike must lay their bodies down and close their eyes to see in the dark; to produce new knowledges through other ways of knowing.

Excerpt from documents of shamanic assembly oracle workshop (Taipei, 2018). Yin-Ju Chen & Li-Chun Lin (Marina), Sonic Driving, 2018–ongoing. Mixed media installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists.

Yin-Ju Chen has a long-standing interest in spirituality and (pseudo)science; she interprets social power and history through cosmological systems and explores the material effects of spiritual/shamanic practices and the metaphysical potentialities of consciousness.

Li-Chun Lin (Marina) is a learner, practitioner, healer, and teacher in shamanism and magic cultures. She creates art with shamanism and magic and uses the bodily senses as an extension of consciousness to help other people connect to their inner selves and our outer worlds.

The exhibition Close Your Eyes and You Will Know and related events are presented as the second season of the ICA’s second biennial artist research program, Another Knowledge Is Possible (2021-23) exploring neglected and repressed ways of knowing and the complex politics of knowledge decolonization.

Another Knowledge Is Possible also continues with the ongoing publication and annual residency, COMPOST, by inaugural editor-in-residence Zian Chen (2021-22) with forthcoming contributions by HUANG Ching-Ing, Cheng Mun Chang, and Apyang Imiq. 

Finally, this will be the last exhibition in the current ICA gallery on Century Avenue. The ICA at NYU Shanghai will move with the university to the new Qiantan campus in summer 2022.

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

by Yin-Ju Chen

        Chinese 

        (simultaneous interpretation in English)

Shamanic Assembly Oracle Workshop: a journey with missions to other worlds 

led by Li-Chun Lin (Marina) with Yin-Ju Chen

        Chinese

        (compulsory pre-workshop lecture)

        English

 (simultaneous interpretation in English)

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.

Every two years, together with artists and our surrounding communities, the ICA pursues thematic inquiries through public exhibitions, events, and publications that experiment with ways of knowing, being, and relating to ourselves and the world.

During the ICA's first biennial artistic research program, The (Invisible) Garden (2019-21), we inquired into the garden as a method that shapes our understanding of Nature and asked how might we denature Nature? Through this process, we understood that confronting an ecological emergency required us to contest how we bring the "natural” into view, and yet we further surmised that beneath this lies a deeper crisis of epistemology—of what we know and how we know.

Therefore, from Fall 2021 through Spring 2023, as the ICA’s second biennial artistic research program, Another Knowledge Is Possible, we will explore other knowledges that have been neglected or repressed and ask if it is possible for a deep decolonization of thought to reclaim these ways of knowing?  In Fall 2021, with grassroots Indigenous media group Karrabing Film Collective, the ICA presented Do Rocks Listen?, a microcinema and the first comprehensive survey of their films in Asia.  As Indigenous worldviews are increasingly welcomed into academic and culture industries, we searched for ways to evade epistemological capture and theft through disorientation and misunderstanding.  Forthcomings seasons of Another Knowledge Is Possible will feature Yin-Ju Chen and Li-Chun Lin (Marina) (Close Your Eyes and You Will Know, Spring 2022), Yu Ji (Fall 2022), and Christian Nyampeta (Spring 2023).

In Fall 2021, with the initiation of Another Knowledge Is Possible, the ICA also launched the bilingual publishing platform and annual residency COMPOST 《堆肥》. Each year, together with the ICA's biennial artistic research programs, COMPOST  invites an editor-in-residence to inhabit the platform as a "living publication." The editor invites contributions of texts, images, sound, and video, and cultivates their engagement by other artists, thinkers, and practitioners. The inaugural 2021-22 COMPOST editor-in-residence is Zian Chen. To read, watch, and listen, scan the QR code below or visit https://duifei-means-compost.com.

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.