CHEN Guan-Jhang
Taiwan

Born 1983 in Taiwan, Chen,Guan-Jhang is a visual artist, independent educator, and cultural worker. Chen is an artist based in Taiwan. Part of what he is engaging in is alternative education. He takes the city he lives as a subject and approach it with his students. Now, he is trying to use ancient maps, historical literature and interviews as sources of my writing on the city. He is interested in local narratives, indigenous culture, folk religion, liberal arts, etc.
For the past seven years, he has been video-recording the life of an indigenous shaman in the hope of figuring out what the role of a shaman is and what it means to be a shaman in a contemporary social context. To answer the questions, he is intended to start from researching on and writing about the shaman’s family history and record his life and represented it in videos, texts and objects.
“Collaborative production” and “returning local knowledge to the local community” are his main concerns. To put it simply, he wants to subvert the common model in which the local is often deprived of knowledge and resources.