Shasha
Chen

At the core of Shasha Chen’s practice, which she describes as “conceptual (new) music theater,” is the human individual: body, breath, gestures, and actions are the creative materials which—informed by themes such as identity and migration, patriarchy and colonization, gender and violence—form a political body. The interaction between bodies and concepts articulates Chen’s understanding of musicality as an action and an attitude: “We can only compose the musicality of music,” she says, and “Musicality is humanity.” This profoundly human musicality is a vibrating and often fragmented structure in which sound is not the starting point but just one possible outcome: “Music happens in between an action and a situation.” 

This situation-based theater is a music-theatrical and experience-oriented variant of situated knowledge—a way of thinking that recognizes that perception and knowledge always emerge from specific social, cultural, and historical contexts, as well as from personal experiences, such as those which have shaped Chen’s own artistic approach. Growing up in China in the 1980s, under the state policy of “opening up” to the outside world, with the promise of globalization and digital acceleration, she experienced dual conditioning: between traditional Chinese culture and Western philosophy, between piano lessons and new media. This hybridity forms the basis of her artistic thinking; living permanently in an in-between state, with a feeling she calls the “home of homeless,” is both a burden and a valuable resource for this transcultural artist who blurs the boundaries between conceptual art, contemporary music, and performance art.  

For Chen, the body is a medium, an archive, a resonance chamber, and a site of history and violence: “a listening, sounding, and performative body.” This political body is also at the center of her most recent works—as “the ultimate battlefield” where power relations become visible, audible, and tangible: in fe-mute(male), the interior of a piano serves as a metaphor for the uterus: the female performer’s pulse rate, breath, hands, and legs interact as parts of an “organic piano.” This is not the only work in which Shasha Chen has used music to illuminate the political instrumentalization of the body; identity factory—a collaborative project by Chen and visual artist Qingyuan Wang—also revolves around the body as a technological and political construct: videos, 3D audio, animation, and live performance are combined here to create a virtual organism in which identity is reproduced, fragmented, and rematerialized. The digital realm itself becomes a body whose organs—performers, screens, sounds—interact. 

In future, Shasha Chen intends to focus increasingly on creating site-specific works. What particularly inspires her about Berlin are the city’s material and symbolic wounds, as well as the diverse connections within the urban body: the Berlin Wall as its permanent scar, the countless bridges that both divide and unite. Places where bodies, spaces, and history are brought close together. It is precisely at such points of contact that her art comes into play. Chen does not ask what music is, but rather what effect music has; she explores the consequences of actions, how situations occur, and how musical experience can become an interpersonal resonance chamber that directly involves the audience: “Musicality is humanity.” 

Text: Anna Schürmer 
Translation from German: Jacqueline Todd