BIOGRAPHY

Born to immigrants from Kaiping, China, Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, an ethnoburb of Los Angeles built on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, new media, and social practice. Her work has appeared at Transmediale (Berlin), Anthology Film Archives, Carnegie Museum of Art, Sheffield DocFest, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin),  Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and Färgfabriken (Stockholm), among other venues. 

Awarded Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award and Best Emerging Talent at B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, she has explored race, gender, labor, and sexuality often through the lens of her own experience as a mother, former sex worker, and survivor of revenge porn. As a social practice artist, she creates networks of care and platforms for self-representation through collective rituals and site-specific performances working with communities such as reproductive health workers and trauma survivors. She is a founding member of the artist collective, MATERNAL FANTASIES, and co-founder of JADED, a queer and women-led collective that is now the largest Asian American and Pacific Islander arts platform in Western Pennsylvania.

Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Performance Studies, she studies the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. A recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, she holds a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA from Harvard University.

Her work has appeared in Amerasia Journal, PUBLIC, Performance Research, and in the edited volumes Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022), Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century (NYU Press, 2024), and To Be Named: The Cultural Politics of Naming (Routledge, forthcoming). She has taught classes on feminist theory, Asian American performance art, and socially engaged art.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores race, gender, labor, and sexuality often through the lens of my own experience as a mother, former sex worker, and trauma survivor. My practice has engaged communities such as abortion providers, birth workers, sex workers, immigrants, and refugee youth. Past works have activated historical sites and urban spaces, including an aristocratic palace in Palermo, Italy; an urban farm in Cincinnati; a forest in the middle of London; a former soap factory in Berkeley; and Angel Island Immigration Center, where my own ancestors were once detained. These projects function as alternative networks of care, where art acts as a catalyst for processing painful memories, speaking about difficult emotions, and reimagining personal and collective histories.

I am fascinated by the fractured experience of womanhood: the state of being simultaneously revered and vilified, desired and rejected, empowered and objectified. As a 20-year-old college student, I became of the earliest documented survivors of revenge porn and cyber-stalking. Amid ongoing online harassment and post-traumatic stress, I moved to Germany, where I lived as my alter-ego and worked as a nude model (Elle Peril, 2012-2017) to reclaim agency over my narrative. From scrying in bowls of menstrual blood to breastfeeding members of the public, my performances immerse audiences in one-to-one rituals of intense yet fleeting intimacy. Subverting the power dynamics between the observer and the observed, I employ the historically subjugated Asian female body to challenge systems of social discipline and capitalist extraction. Locating the origins of gender and racial violence in state control of the body, I embody the emancipatory possibilities of erotic capital as both victim and accomplice to the contradictions of neoliberal feminism.

CONTACT

lena@lenachen.com