Zhanyi Chen
2024 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts
More about the artist
Artificial Satellite Astrology
2023
Materials: paper, ink, artificial satellite positions, copper core in coaxial cables, tin
Artificial Satellite Astrology appropriates elements of astrology to imagine alternative relationships between the land and outer space for users of artificial satellites. It now includes astrological horoscopes that are constructed by artificial satellites instead of planets, antennas designed to receive divinatory signals from these spacecraft, and a fictional tutorial YouTube channel on satellite astrology.
Astrology is a beautiful way to connect us with distant things. Artificial Satellite Astrology explores how a sense of connection can evoke care and attunement, prompt reflection on whether the connection is physical, psychological, or a blend of both, and the tendency to construct our own narratives as a means to cope and counter.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Artificial Satellite Astrology. 2023. Paper, ink, artificial satellite positions. Documentation of the process of making divination antennae, utilizing a common method many radio amateurs employ. They gather copper cores in coaxial cables to listen to signals from meteorological satellites for leisure.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Artificial Satellite Astrology. 2023. Paper, ink, artificial satellite positions. Divination antennae.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Artificial Satellite Astrology. 2023. Paper, ink, artificial satellite positions. A horoscope of Hurricane Katrina, drawn using the positions of meteorological satellites instead of planets.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Artificial Satellite Astrology. 2023. Paper, ink, artificial satellite positions. Stills from video How to Create Your Satellite Birth Chart, 13’37”. A fictitious video tutorial on how to navigate a website dedicated to the practice of artificial satellite astrology.
Tele-Sky Unplugged
2023
Materials: sky, CRT TV casing, mirror, camera lens, diffuser
Tele-Sky Unplugged is a reinterpretation of Aldo Tambellini’s Tele-Sky (1981). The original piece showcased slow-scan transmissions of live sky images from three different countries, displayed on CRT TVs. In this recreation, the original telepresence art is presented in an unplugged form: a CRT TV is repurposed by replacing all its electronic components with a mirror and a lens. This allows its screen to reflect the immediate sky of the viewer’s environment, rather than electronically displaying distant skies via satellite transmissions, processed signals, and pixels.
The original Tele-Sky (1981) was a part of the Sky Art movement that peaked during the 1980s, centered at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT. The recreation extends the Sky Art artists’ exploration of the sky as a canvas to the sky itself as media—not just as a backdrop but as an integral part of our environmental and media landscape. It’s also a critique of the infrastructures silently integrating into our natural surroundings and the politics surrounding satellite technologies, as well as a dialogue between artists who lived under the Space Race and Cold War-era sky and the sky of today.
Tele-Sky, 1981, Photograph of CAVS Fellow Aldo Tambellini’s slow scan television and audio link between MIT and Australia for SKY ART ’81, September 25, 1981; with Communicationsphere Group, and performer Sarah Dickinson. Photograph: Paul Foley.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Tele-sky Unplugged. 2023. CRT TV casing, mirror, camera lens, diffuser. Installed outside of List Visual Art Center.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Tele-sky Unplugged. 2023. CRT TV casing, mirror, camera lens, diffuser. Sketch of Tele-Sky Unplugged drawn by Jacob Geiger during our conversation, a TV that does not need electricity transformed with a camera lens, a mirror, and a diffuser that acts as a screen.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Tele-sky Unplugged. 2023. CRT TV casing, mirror, camera lens, diffuser. Installed inside Distillery Gallery. When installed indoors, it almost becomes a parasite, dependent on the ceiling lights within the infrastructure.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Tele-sky Unplugged. 2023. CRT TV casing, mirror, camera lens, diffuser. Installed outside of List Visual Art Center.
Cloudbusting (Rain Poems)
2024
Materials: rain, water transfer printing paper (tattoo paper), paper, and ink
MIT Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) Gallery, Building E15-095
In Cloudbusting (Rain Poems), the writings of Peter Reich memorializing his deceased father and their shared memories of cloudbusting (making rain) in his childhood were printed on water transfer paper and left outside to be affected by raindrops. The words that remained visible—selected by the raindrops in their pressure and rhythms—are perceived as the rain’s poetry and a means to connect.
This work explores how mourning persists in the natural and constructed environments around us, and how to perceive physically distant things. The rain’s traces become a dual medium: one that mediates between us and the clouds, and another that connects us to the people we lost (medium as a spiritualist who can communicate with the dead.) These traces suggest the desire to reconnect with our loved ones and how we might experience this desire in the environment through transference, dissociation, or interpretation, making elements in the environment conduits for connection. The asemic quality of the “poems” serves only to show us that the attempt to connect is futile; they reflect the absurdity and melancholy one might experience in trying, and the beauty in still trying despite the futility—a failure of language, an absence of meanings, and a longing for miracles.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Cloudbusting (Rain Poems). 2024. rain, water transfer printing paper (tattoo paper), paper, and ink. Installation view of Cloudbusting (Rain Poems) in trio exhibition “The Whole Star is a Moving Skin” at MIT ACT Gallery.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Cloudbusting (Rain Poems). 2024. rain, water transfer printing paper (tattoo paper), paper, and ink.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Cloudbusting (Rain Poems). 2024. rain, water transfer printing paper (tattoo paper), paper, and ink.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Cloudbusting (Rain Poems). 2024. rain, water transfer printing paper (tattoo paper), paper, and ink.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, Cloudbusting (Rain Poems). 2024. rain, water transfer printing paper (tattoo paper), paper, and ink.
The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud
2024
Materials: lace curtains, wood, canvas, acrylic, easel
GSD Kirkland Gallery, Cambridge, MA
This series of window/canvas installations is developed based on a fictional story under the same title. In the story, a female painter falls into limerent love with the clouds and views a satellite as her love rival. However, one day, she disappears from her home studio. The windows and painting tools found in her home studio have been brought back to the gallery space. Perhaps she transformed into a cloud and fled the desolation of her life, but that remains a mystery. The “windows” are actually reversed canvas that painted with the blue color of sky. They resemble windows but lead to nowhere, which seems to speak about a futile desire to dissociate from the anxieties of adult womanhood from a certain generation, and attach feelings to distant things—in this case, the environment where technology and nature intertwine.
“The lonely inhabitant of her room, a home-studio, fell in a crazy, limerent love with clouds. The weather satellite TIROS, according to the thoughts of the painter, is her unbearable rival in love, threatening her union with the cloud. She became a cunning detective, meticulously gathering all information about her rival. Her heart burnt with fury at the control and torment the satellite’s gaze imposed on her beloved cloud, yet she simultaneously experienced a wild joy in discovering the deeper resemblance with her cloud, as she too is a victim of patriarchy control. She believed that they were soulmates, bound by their striking similarities, and she prepared to love with all her tenderness. She kept painting clouds, slowly and lovingly, in defiance of the relentless production of cloud images by satellites. Is it an effort of an object trying to escape her own objectification? Or does it reflect a desire to be loved and saved in the same way? Perhaps her true desire was to become that beautiful, pure, white cloud, who has never been touched by the earth below, and her obsession with the cloud was her dissociation from the desolation of her life.”
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud. 2024. lace curtains, wood, canvas, acrylic, easel. Installed in duo exhibition “Blame it on the Falling Sky, Blame it on the Satellite” at Harvard GSD Kirkland Gallery.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud. 2024. lace curtains, wood, canvas, acrylic, easel. Installed in duo exhibition “Blame it on the Falling Sky, Blame it on the Satellite” at Harvard GSD Kirkland Gallery.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud. 2024. lace curtains, wood, canvas, acrylic, easel. Close-up shot of the newspaper collage made by the female painter in the story.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud. 2024. lace curtains, wood, canvas, acrylic, easel.
2024 Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts recipient Zhanyi Chen, The Female Painter Who Fell in Love with Clouds Turned into a Cloud. 2024. lace curtains, wood, canvas, acrylic, easel. Close-up shot of the painting tools used by the female painter in the story.
About the Artist
Zhanyi Chen’s art practice runs parallel to her studies in media theory, probing how soft science fiction provides intervals to contemplate the tension between the relentless advancement of space technologies, their environmental and psychological repercussions, and the metaphors and culture in weather and environments. Her works reflect on the predicament of individuals caught in this situation, often presented in layers of absurdity and melancholy.
By utilizing weather satellite data, early Space Age archives, and fictional storytelling, Chen makes objects that suggest how celestial and other infrastructural technologies can be strategically and radically (mis)used to prioritize human subjectivity over technological functionality, putting the current dynamics between the self and planetary technologies at play. The technologies discussed range from the traditional, such as human language, to high-tech, like electronics. In those moments when technologies cease to function, they become conduits for emotion, devices of connections, speaking about our perpetual yearning for miraculous connections.
More at Zhanyi Chen’s website
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