Cooked Two Ways:
Ying Liu / C. Spencer Yeh
July 28 - September 2

Chen’s is pleased to present ​Cooked Two Ways​, a two-person exhibition featuring Ying Liu and C. Spencer Yeh.
The self is nothing without the Other​—​the one who looks at me. My permanent possibility of being seen. It

exists beyond the eyes looking at me now. The gaze is always out of sight. The eye is blind to it. The feel alone
makes me conscious: I am a picture looking back. A desire to escape. This exhibition presents the gaze cookedtwo ways.
Ying Liu’s hybrid performance and theater work ​HANG OUT​ (2017) is a three-act play situated in New York
Chinatown’s bustling Sara D. Roosevelt Park. The exhibition features a video edit of the “semi-inconspicuous”
play that highlights the project’s use of different visual technologies to capture micro-events and relationalities
amongst performers and parkgoers in the same space. Using accumulated footage culled from multiple body
cameras, smart phones, and live streaming VR equipment, H​ ANG OUT Episode 3​ encapsulates the convergenceof performance, choreography, and lived experience. An ensemble of performers with cameras spectate ongoingpark activities, assemble props (“follies”), and engage in scripted movement and dialogue​—​while actively sharing
the scene with passerby and regulars at the track field. The emphasis is on radically shifting perspectives
rendered across bodies, recording devices, IRL/screen spaces, and social dimensions. In the crossfire of POV’s in
the video, an actor playing a wrestler with VR goggles strapped to his chest grapples a participant andrepeatedly asks, “What do you see now?”

As an edited selection of travel footage captured in Thailand, Myanmar, Singapore, and Malaysia, Spencer Yeh’sShocking Asia​ (2017) draws on the scopic structure of “mondo” exploitation films popularized by German
director Rolf Olsen in the 1970s in which European crews go to Asia on pseudo-ethnographic quests tosensationalize cultural practices, social lives, and living conditions of the “Far East” as alien spectacle. Yeh
substitutes the Eurocentric eye for his own complexity — a diasporic asian — this time visiting Buddhist temples,tourist attractions, museums, resorts in South Asia. In sharp contrast to the field of scopic indeterminancy andpossibility, ​Shocking Asia u​ nderlines the inescapable reifying force of the eye through its long form duration andbrutal rearticulation of the exploitation genre.

Ying Liu i​ s a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn who fuses mediums theater, dance, video, and performance art,utilizing consumer technology such as VR, GoPro and GPS to create hybridized works. Since 2014, Liu haspresented frequently at the Emily Harvey Foundation, as well as venues such as Artists Space, Experimental
Intermedia, and the Jump Into the Light VR Festival. In summer 2017, she staged ​HANG OUT​, a site-specificguerrilla play in Manhattan Chinatown’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park. ​MAKE A FOUNTAIN​, an extensive, 302-pagecatalog accompanying and documenting these performances, was released in April 2018.
C. Spencer Yeh​ is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, improviser, andcomposer, as well his music project Burning Star Core. Recent exhibitions and presentations of work include"Shocking Asia" at Empty Gallery Hong Kong, "Two Workaround Works Around Calder" at the Whitney MuseumNYC, "Modern Mondays" at MoMA NYC, "Sound Horizon" at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis MN, "The WorldIs Sound" at the Rubin Museum NYC, "Mei-Jia & Ting-Ting & Chih-fu & Sin-Ji" at MOCA Cleveland Ohio andCentre A Vancouver BC, "Closer to the Edge" in Singapore and "Crossing Over" in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, theBerwick Film and Media Arts Festival, "Tony Conrad Tribute" at Atelier Nord/Ultima Festival in Oslo Norway, andLAMPO at the Renaissance Society in Chicago IL. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix andhe is a senior editor and media producer with Triple Canopy and a contributing editor for BOMB magazine. Yeh
also volunteers as a programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater, a microcinema in Brooklyn NY.

Chen’s would like to acknowledge and thank Bureau and Yi Chen for their assistance with this exhibition.