Ce Chen is a Cornwall-based artist whose practice primarily takes the form of drawing, authorial illustration, photography, and writing. His work examines how identity, sense of place, and narrative emerge and decline, and how they are repeatedly performed, animated and re-animated within captured spatial and temporal conditions. He focuses on framing ambivalent states that resist stable representation, such as somewhere and nowhere, insider and outsider, the dead and the dying.

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Chen is currently a PhD candidate at Camberwell, Chealse and Wimbeldon College of Arts, UAL. His doctoral research Carnival and Carnivalesque as ways of understand performed contemporary Cornishnessexamines contemporary Cornish identity through Bakhtinian carnival and chronotope; it is conducted through ethnographic investigation, reflective drawing and writing, as well as walking practice. The research questions how Cornish identity and a sense of Cornishness emerges from specific chronotopes and develop through polyphonic narratives; it approaches identity as a relational condition continually negotiated through performance, affirmed, contested, and altered through different configurations of the chronotopic setting. Grounded in his life in Cornwall, this framework is applied to his position of being a semi-insider that is situated inbetween outsiderness and an imagined, completed insiderness.

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As his research develops, Chen’s interest increasingly shifts towards the irreversibility of time and towards things that are vanishing, have vanished, or trapped in between. He understands drawing and writing as a form of “scribing” that they cannot preserve or resurrect what is being lost or has already been lost; instead, the material trace left by the work acknowledges vanishing through the inadequate resistance of documenting the immediate past. Yet the scribing continues as an absurd performance that attempts to animate the object. Such scribing becomes a way of generating traces across ruptures between things – such as places, memories, narratives – as they become inaccessible. The work therefore makes the tension, misalignment, and liminal suspension in-between ruptures visible. Currently, he is developing his practice to ask how a space-time sustains itself while already in decay, what continues to be narrated after becomes impossible to resurrect; what has lost the conditions to occur but is still uttered and imagined; what has been promised, evidenced through material traces but will never arrive. 

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Through his experience in Cornwall, Chen rejects a “dip-in” model of research in which communities are briefly entered and then converted into papers and other consumable forms. He understands his research as a reflective model that grounds his everyday practice and his position within the life of a community. In this sense, “being” has gradually extended the role once occupied by “walking” and transforming an art project into a more socially engaged practice. Participation in labour, negotiation and responsibility performs an identity embedded in the local community. This informs his deep involvement in the business sustainability, branding and design language of an independent local business, Dark Pony Coffee and its roastery. These activities are not considered outside his artistic and academic research, but form part of an extended enquiry into how identity is made and maintained through everyday practice.