Life is Elsewhere, 2020

That, perhaps, life is now happening elsewhere, virtually, there. 

Life is Elsewhere is a two part installation grown from thoughts stewing under pandemic isolation in the summer of 2020. In the first room, a visitor places flowers in a vase for people they missed during the pandemic. A camera live-streams the flower arrangement into the second room, where a still-life drawing is made as flowers are added to, or removed from, the vase over the course of the day. Life is Elsewhere 24 and 25 corresponds to the days the works were made in October 2020. 

Passing through the passageways of STPI’s building, a viewer encounters a screen displaying a zoom meeting. On the left, the screen displays a view of the vase with flowers, a view as one turns one’s head on the pillow and gazes up lazily at a bouquet of frenzied arrangements on the bed-side table; on the right, the isolated artist is drawing a floral still-life, complete in a hazmat suit, gloves, and mask. How far is one detached from the scene of action? The inability to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, to feel, to be present to the subject of art-making echoes the alienation of witnessing the world through one’s screen during a quarantine. One hears the hum of air-conditioning, one smells one’s breath circulating, and one imagines that there must be a world out there beyond the confines of the four white walls. Someone is making something out there, caring for someone elsewhere. Yet, here one remains.  

This performance-installation experiment in extended detachment from her floral subject stems from Yanyun Chen’s long-term ruminations of an ‘artist as witness to death’. What place does an artist have in the times of a pandemic, where loved ones are beyond reach, where the tensions of life, death and struggle are seen from zoom calls and digital news, where human contact is seemingly unavailable? What can one make during this time of crisis? Life is Elsewhere can only hope to offer these questions in and through the spirit of creation, in the form of marks made by a burnt plant, on a pulped plant, of a digital plant arranged by someone else, somewhere else.  

Life is Elsewhere was first presented at the Biome STPI Annual Friends Fundraiser 2020 (October 24th and 25th), using the artist residences and the art studio as sites of intervention. Photographs courtesy of STPI.