Zhuoer Chen
Framework
35 mm Film | Fiber Print
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Something is occupied.
You think you are inside. You think you are outside.
The space is no longer a space but a framework. Everywhere you see, you perceive frames that move. Movements in frames. Every movement is rhythm; every rhythm in a frame is an echo that comes infinitely close to understanding what is here.
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You were never fast, nor were you slow.
you become a subject simply because you move. Or is it the framework that is moving? You wonder where you are, it folds towards you as you turn, building something out of you as you inhabit. No one expects a fixed orientation out of all things constructed. You stop once in a while.
Where is everyone else?
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Framework is a photography series printed on fiber papers, defined by a particular choreography of the enlarger during traditional darkroom printing. Through this process, Chen translated 35mm negatives of ordinary New York street views into abstractions—an intuitive experience where viewers navigate urban grids, illusory domesticities, and perceptions of objects stripped of their referents, arriving instead at the sentimental realities of alienation and disembodiment—repeating, layering, dissolving, as in a rhythm without end. Image as sound. Stillness as movements.
The series first appeared in an unlit basement where viewers entered with flashlights, accompanied by the music of Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, and other IDM artists.
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2024, New York, U.S.
