文字｜辛友仁 新加坡國家美術館總策展人、王品驊 資深策展人
整理｜王治國
把聲音轉小
辛友仁｜新加坡國家美術館總策展人
Turn down the volume（把聲音轉小） is an immersive installation by CHEN Yen–Chi that explores how animals, more specifically, crickets interact with humans that reveal the structures of power that order relations between species. Entering the room installation, one is immersed in an atmospheric room lit by a lonely lamp that draws us into the space like insects to light at night. Stepping on the Styrofoam-like material creates an embodied experience as the softness of the material contrasts with the hardness of the ground that we are familiar with, generating a sense of anxiety and uncertainty. The darken room is engulfed by the softness of the Styrofoam that resembles an asylum that imprisons and disciplines. These mixed feelings of trepidation is punctuated by a cacophony of sounds produced by the crickets and one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's most celebrated commedia per musica (opera buffa) titled, The Marriage of Figaro that tells the story of how two servants, Susanna and Figaro thwarted the plans of their employer, Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and ruin their marriage. The marriage of Susanna and Figaro reminds us of the cacophony of sounds as the endless chirping of the male crickets produced by rubbing their front wings together at times either compete for our attention or intermingle with Mozart's music. It is unfortunate that live crickets could not be included in this work due to the complexities involved in bringing live animals into a museum space, replaced by a video recording of the crickets that he rears. The spontaneity and live interaction of the crickets to Mozart's music is therefore compromised but the intention of the artist to provoke the audience to think about the relationship between animals and humans and the ordering of our day-to-day interactions remains as we now live in the age of the Anthropocene.