Sera Yu-Wen Chen’s solo exhibition, Entangled Land, explores a form of “cognitive archaeology” in a state of displacement. Through her video works, she unpacks how individual identity intertwines and wrestles with grand historical narratives when crossing national and cultural boundaries.
The core of the exhibition revolves around the concepts of “vegetation as colonial trace” and “institutionalized cultural production.” The artist further shifts her focus toward Western knowledge systems—botanical gardens, museums, and archives. While these spaces appear to neutrally preserve civilization, they actually filter the Eastern subject through mechanisms of the “gaze” and “categorization,” reducing it to a set of consumable replicas and stereotypes.
“Entanglement” carries a dual meaning here: it refers to the forced binding of plant roots to the soil during colonial expansion, as well as the contradictions and dislocations of personal memory when confronted with powerful visual media (such as the conventional vocabularies of photography and documentary film). We are constantly trying to piece together our own shadows using the languages of others.
This exhibition serves as a site of “De-place” and the “reconstruction of identity.” Through deliberately blurred visuals and overlapping multiple narratives, Sera Yu-Wen Chen invites viewers into a land entangled with power and memory, urging a re-examination of the invisible and complex power structures hidden behind everyday landscapes and epistemology.
