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Teresa Chen, as a photographer, does not approach objects from the outside. She uses her camera to track things down, and she also prefers the close-up view. While scanning the surfaces, the artist deliberately avoids the prohibitions that determine the classical concept of beauty. In exciting compositions, she often combines beauty with something disgusting, harmonious, erotic, sexual zones or with situations that are disfigured, shameless, gruesome.
Teresa Chen’s work has previously been explicitly autobiographical. In many series she photographed herself and in other work groups she analysed her parents’ family pictures; they emigrated from China to the USA. In her self-portraits she narrows the traditional points of view in order to reveal the cultural coding of the body.
The artist is currently presenting a series of flower-pictures. Those who are familiar with the close-up pictures of her body will recognize also in those pictures the main features of Chen’s aesthetics.
A significant increase is due to the specific choice of the motif. With the penetration of the flowering area through blood-like fluid, Teresa Chen achieves a high level of tension: beauty appears under the spell of Eros and death.
Biography Teresa Chen